NewsBusters Archive

Egotistical musicians often exaggerate their political influence, none moreso than the nattering, narcissistic rapper Kanye West. He has compared himself in global stature to Apple founder Steve Jobs, and has titled his latest album “Yeesus.”

Rolling Stone magazine has posted part of a West song titled “I Am a God,” where West raps that Jesus is the “Most High,” but he’s a “close high.”

NPR’s rising young celebrity-like star Ari Shapiro, White House Correspondent, appears to be able to follow his own set of rules at NPR. As detailed in Newsbusters Wednesday, Shapiro will soon join vicious bomb-throwing activist and lefty partisan Democrat Dan Savage to promote Savage’s new book. Last May, when covering Romney, Shapiro slammed him as a bully on Twitter and Instagram with a carefully juxtaposed photo.

Now, as reported June 13 in The Washington Post by Paul Farhi (but relegated to the Style section), Shapiro’s spouse Michael Gottlieb has been working in the Obama White House Counsel’s office since April. Despite this, NPR has kept Shapiro in the same position as White House Correspondent and has never disclosed on-air or on its website this significant conflict of interest.

Don't you love it when a liberal blames George W. Bush for whatever is annoying that liberal at any given moment, followed by said liberal undercutting his argument minutes later?

If you are cursed to watch MSNBC on a regular basis you're probably familiar with one of its frequent guests, attorney Mike Papantonio, co-host of the weekend radio show "Ring of Fire" along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Sam Seder. (Audio after the page break)

On Thursday afternoon, FBI director Robert Mueller was called before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the bureau's association with the recent scandals that have rocked the president's second term. He testified about the FBI investigation into the IRS targeting scandal as well as about the security at Benghazi and their delay in responding to the attack. Mueller stumbled through the interview, as he did not give many straight or definitive answers. In fact, he seemed to be remarkably uninformed about key elements regarding the scandals given the fact that he was supposed to be in charge of the entire operation.

Curiously, with such a significant development in these scandals, particularly the one pertaining to the IRS targeting, all of the broadcast networks’ evening newscasts neglected the story. NBC Nightly News along with CBS Evening News and ABC World News did not deem this progression in the scandal newsworthy as it was given collective total of no air time. The only network that gave this new development any time at all was the Fox News Channel. In fact one of the channel’s staple primetime shows, Hannity, featured the story as its leading piece and had a number of guests on the show to comment about the scandal and its lack of media coverage, including the founder of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell.

Cole Sear from The Sixth Sense sees dead people, and Joe Scarborough, like pretty much everyone else at MSNBC, sees racism. That’s just the way it is. On Friday, the Morning Joe crew was chatting about a recent NRA attack ad against Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) when Scarborough took issue with the image of President Obama shown briefly in the ad:

"[P]eople called me up and said, what do you think of, do you think that they may have shaded that ad to make Barack Obama look more ominous and black?"
 

On Thursday's The Last Word show on MSNBC, host Lawrence O'Donnell and MSNBC contributor Joy Reid asserted that Republicans who oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants are "haters of" and "don't like" Hispanics as the panel discussed the concerns expressed by Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh about  increasing the number of immigrants in the U.S. by tens of millions.

After coining the term "Limbaugh cohort" to refer to those who oppose amnesty, Reid asserted:

Amid the debate over immigration reform and media predictions that the Republican Party will never again win a national election due to demographic shifts in the country, correspondent Tom Costello appeared on Friday's NBC Today to eagerly promote a new study: "You know, by 2043, just three decades from now, the Census Bureau says whites will be a minority....a changing complexion that will have huge, social, political and economic implications for the entire country."

Costello remarked: "Far from the 50s, a new kaleidoscope of color....For the year ending July 2012, the Asian population expanded by 530,000 people, African Americans added 560,000, and the Hispanic population grew by the most, 1.1 million people. Non-Hispanic whites, long the dominant demographic group in the country, added only 175,000 people to their ranks, and for the first time, deaths, by a slim margin, out-paced births for whites..."

While government spying on citizens has been a hot topic of conversation lately, it’s worth noting that such snooping can also happen in the private sector. The Bloomberg wire service, founded by anti-gun nut New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, has admitted that its reporters have been spying on customers of its business data service for years and using that information to generate news stories.

Through an established company policy, reporters for the news service were given exclusive access to private customer records for anyone they wanted to look up. Once they pulled up a user’s records, they had the ability to see that person’s last login date, his contact information, view her requests for technical support, and even see what types of data that the customer was calling up within the vast Bloomberg financial database.

Jonathan Karl interviewed RNC chairman Reince Priebus last week for the ABC News online series Politics Confidential, and the veteran reporter tried his very best to create a juicy headline for his video and accompanying article. It took a little stretching and some selective editing, but Karl managed to do it.

The headline for the entry, posted to ABC News’ Power Players blog, reads “Priebus: GOP Hurt by Dumb Comments; Needs to Work Harder to be Competitive in 2016.” The second paragraph of the article contained this Priebus quote regarding recent comments made by Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Gov. Phil Bryant (R-Miss.): “I don’t think any party has a monopoly on dumb things that are said, so I’m not going to sit here and defend those comments.” But here’s the interesting thing: that quote did not appear in the video accompanying the article. All of the other quotes in the article also showed up in the video. If Priebus spoke that line, why did Karl not show him saying it? [Read the article and watch the video here.]