NewsBusters Archive

NBC anchor Brian Williams on Wednesday night ridiculed Mitt Romney’s quest to reduce the unemployment rate to six percent by 2016, a level enjoyed fewer than four years ago.

“Back when Newt Gingrich pledged $2.50 a gallon gasoline, if elected President, he was called out at the time for an unrealistic number. Today,” Williams charged without naming any source, “some of the same thing happened to Mitt Romney when he made a pledge on unemployment as part of his overall defense of his work at Bain Capital.”

Why not just call Romney a racist and be done with it? In the most tortured twist of logic this blogger has seen so far during this campaign, Al Sharpton somehow managed to equate Mitt Romney's refusal to roll over and accept Barack Obama's attacks on Bain Capital with, yes, birtherism.

I know what you're thinking: what the . . . heck?  Don't ask me to explain how or why Sharpton came to his nonsensical suggestion.  Just sit back and watch the Reverend Al at work.  It was too much even for liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank.  View the video after the jump.

The Big Three networks' evening newscasts have all but punted so far on the 12 lawsuits filed on Monday against the Obama administration, challenging the abortifacient/birth control mandate which is part of ObamaCare. However, CBS actually followed up on their exclusive interview of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan on the regulation on Tuesday's CBS This Morning.

Correspondent Norah O'Donnell confronted Press Secretary Jay Carney during the Tuesday White House press briefing over Dolan's sharp critique of the mandate on the morning newscast: "He [Dolan] said that it's a 'strait-jacketing' and 'handcuffing exemption.'...Is that what the President is doing...strait-jacketing and hand-cuffing religious institutions?" O'Donnell's question didn't make it on the air on Tuesday's CBS Evening News or Wednesday's CBS This Morning, even after Carney evaded directly answering her question.

CNN contributor Maria Cardona may have forgotten some history as she tried to spin away President Obama's troubles in the Arkansas and Kentucky Democratic primaries. Cardona, speaking during the 10 a.m. hour of Wednesday's Newsroom, argued that "Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party."

President Obama only picked up 58 percent of the vote in the Kentucky Democratic primary, and 60 percent in Arkansas. "Look, Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party. There's no real infrastructure there. There's no organization by the Obama campaign there," Cardona insisted. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Imagine that in one 2004 Republican primary, an opponent running to George Bush's left got 40% of the vote, and in another primary, more than 4-in-10 Republicans voted for "uncommitted" rather than support the incumbent president.  Now imagine the doom the MSM would have found that to portend for Bush.

But when a candidate running to the right of Barack Obama garners 40% of the vote in the Arkansas Dem primary, and "uncommitted" amasses an astounding 42% in Kentucky . . . crickets.  On Morning Joe today, Politico's Patrick Gavin proclaimed that PBO's embarrassing performance "doesn't matter."  View the video after the jump.

"You know what, you've been a great journalist for 44 years," The View host Barbara Walters gushed to Dan Rather at the close of a softball interview on May 23 about his new memoir, "Rather Outspoken."

"No matter what CBS says!" an excited co-host Joy Behar interjected. Yes, "no matter what CBS says," Walters agreed of the former anchor/managing editor of the CBS Evening News, who was fired from the Tiffany network for running stories on a discredited phony memo that alleged President George W. Bush was often AWOL when he should have showed up for training exercises when serving in the Air National Guard.

MSNBC journalist Andrea Mitchell berated Rush Limbaugh in an interview with More magazine, deriding the conservative star as a "bully with a megaphone." Mitchell is often billed as one of the network's serious journalists, but sounded more like Rachel Maddow in the article.

Discussing Sandra Fluke in the June issue, the reporter sympathized that the college student became "part of a national debate where her reputation was being sullied by a bully with a megaphone." "That just really touched me," she added. On the issue of the so-called war on women, Mitchell lectured, "The women who live in the suburbs and work every day inside and outside the home don’t want to be told what to do with their bodies."

42 percent of Democratic primary voters in Kentucky on Tuesday chose "uncommited" over Barack Obama. In Arkansas, a Tennessee attorney finished with 41 percent of the vote. ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's Today and CBS This Morning all skipped the embarrassing story, despite the fact that CBS and NBC covered the far less interesting Republican primary.

During the month of May, Obama suffered through a series of humiliating protest votes in Democratic primaries. On May 8th, the incumbent President nearly lost the West Virginia primary to a convicted felon. Yet, except for a single mention at 4am on May 9th, the networks have buried Obama's bad news.

As NewsBusters previously reported, three time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman got his butt kicked by CNN's Anderson Cooper on Jeopardy! last Friday.

Cooper told NBC's Jimmy Fallon Tuesday regarding Friedman's performance, "He's smart, but he's not Jeopardy! smart!" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):