AP's Lederman Bemoans 'Sense of Despair' Among Obama's Aides
As I noted yesterday in covering its pathetic hit piece on President-Elect Donald Trump's announced appointments, the Associated Press is high on the list of media outlets most simultaneously outraged and grief-stricken over the presidential election result two weeks ago.
While the AP's Errin Haines Whack betrayed intense anger with Trump's selections thus far, the wire service's Josh Lederman,…
Matt Taibbi: America Will Recognize Obama’s ‘Humanity and Greatness’
Rolling Stone’s Taibbi has started what amounts to a premature “Miss Me Yet?” meme for President Obama, and he recommends that question be answered “yes.” In a Friday piece, Taibbi opined, “Donald Trump may have won the White House, but he will never be a man like his predecessor, whose personal example will now only shine more brightly with the passage of time. At a time when a lot of Americans…
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New Yorker Editor: Obama Worried About Trump’s ‘Misogyny and Racism’
New Yorker editor David Remnick appeared on CBS This Morning to brag about his scoop on Barack Obama’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump. Asked by Charlie Rose what “worries” Obama about the President-elect, Remnick marveled, “Where to on begin? Certainly appointments like Sessions or Flynn, whom he fired, or Steve Bannon. That is for starters worries him. He worries that someone who had a…
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Obama Joins Media in Blaming ‘Fake News’ for Trump Win
On the heels of network coverage hyping liberal fears that fake news stories shared on Facebook and across social media fueled Donald Trump’s election victory, on Friday, NBC’s Today and CBS This Morning touted President Obama pushing the issue during a Thursday press conference overseas.
After AP Sets Ceiling, Economic Growth Forecasts Get Bumped Up
The Associated Press's coverage of the U.S. economy is undergoing its own presidential transition. One might expect a bit of chaos as the AP moves from frequently and inordinately praising and defending the historically awful economy we've seen during the past eight years under a Democratic administration to eventually downplaying and bashing it at every opportunity once a Republican takes over.…
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Transition Team 'Chaos'? No Appointments in First 5-6 Weeks Is Norm
The latest media meme on President-Elect Donald Trump is that his presidential transition effort is in "chaos," "total disarray," etc. Establishment press outlets from the supposedly chastened (but not really) New York Times, to the Associated Press, to the fever swamps at the Huffington Post, are relentlessly playing that tune. As Bret Baier at Fox News noted on Special Report Wednesday night,…
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Journalists Fail to Correct Obama Howler on Economy
At a press conference in Greece on Tuesday, President Barack Obama claimed that when he came into office, "the economy was contracting faster than it did during the Great Depression, but we were able to intervene, apply lessons learned and stabilize and then begin growth again." Naturally, Elena Becatoros and Josh Lederman at the Associated Press and Gardiner Harris at the New York Times, all of…
WashPost's Eugene Robinson Echoes Rush: I Hope Trump Fails
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote a piece for Tuesday's paper headlined "I wish the president-elect failure on his cruel initiatives." It seemed like an eerie echo of Rush Limbaugh in 2009 saying he wanted Obama to fail (in passing his agenda), which sent liberals into a fury. Naturally, Limbaugh addressed the contrasting opinions on his show on Tuesday.
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Matthews Says Trump’s Anti-War Talk 'Was Tickling My Erogenous Zone’
Not that head-scratching moments on MSNBC’s Hardball aren’t rare or anything, but Tuesday’s installment featured another cringe-inducing split-second by host Chris Matthews as he admitted to The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin and Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman that President-elect Donald Trump’s anti-war stances in the primary had been “tickling my erogenous zones.”
Slate Writer: ‘Current Supreme Court Vacancy Is Not Trump’s to Fill’
Dahlia Lithwick knows her highly focused resistance movement will fail, but she proposed it anyway. In a Monday piece, the Slate legal analyst exhorted Democrats to “obstruct the nomination and seating” of anyone Donald Trump chooses to succeed Antonin Scalia, because “the current Supreme Court vacancy is not Trump’s to fill. This was President Obama’s vacancy and President Obama’s nomination.…
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ABC Badgers Obama: What Still Worries You About Trump?
Despite a news conference that lasted over an hour, not a single reporter on Monday bothered to ask Barack Obama if, as the leader of the Democratic Party, he deserves any blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. Instead, the journalists badgered Obama to trash Trump.
NY Times Captures Only a Portion of Ohio's Dramatic 2016 Shift
Considering that it's coming from the New York Times, reporter Sabrina Tavernise's account of what happened in Ohio to swing it from a close Obama win in 2012 to a near-blowout for Donald Trump in 2016 was reasonably well-done, but still had glaring flaws. Her story's human interest elements were strong, but the accompanying statistics provided were sparse, and really needed to be there to tell…
AP Pity Party: 'Obama Must Find a Way to Explain Trump' to the World
The Associated Press and reporter Josh Lederman are feeling sorry for outgoing President Barack Obama. Shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, in advance of Obama's last foreign tour, the AP's headline at Lederman's dispatch read: "On last foreign tour, Obama must find a way to explain Trump."
Lederman wrote that our poor, put-upon president "must pivot and reassure the U.S. and other…
