Congress was in recess this past week and, FNC’s Bret Baier suggested Tuesday night, some officials and politicians “might want to use this time to catch up on their sleep.” Viewers were then treated to an amusing collection, put together by ABC’s, of sleeping politicians “caught on tape.”
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By Brent Baker | May 31, 2015 | 12:27 AM EDT
By Tom Blumer | May 30, 2015 | 11:35 PM EDT
On Friday, Jessica Gresko at the Associated Press reported on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority board of directors' Thursday vote to "suspend issue-oriented advertisements until the end of the year." Though they wouldn't admit it, the board's move was obviously a reaction to Pamela Geller's request to post an ad from her American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) which included a cartoon depiction of Muhammad. Gresko actually used the T-word — terrorists — to describe the two men who were killed when they attempted to attack Geller's Muhammad Art Exhibit & Contest in Garland, Texas on May 3. But she ruined with her preceding modifier: "would-be."
While it's an improvement over the repeated use of "militants" and "gunmen" to describe people who are in fact terrorists, it's still far from sufficient, and still horribly inaccurate.
By Tom Blumer | May 30, 2015 | 9:32 PM EDT
Facts are such inconvenient things. Especially financial facts and figures.
On Tuesday, Rebecca Shabad at the Hill composed a 34-paragraph report entitled "Washington is ready to spend." Really? When have Congress or the White House not been ready to spend? Oh, I get it. She really means that they're getting ready to spend more. How much more? Readers will search in vain for anything beyond a one-paragraph discussion of a "$51.4 billion House bill funding justice" discussing two tiny items amounting to less than $100 million. That bill represents a whopping 1-1/2 percent of the roughly $3.5 trillion in annual federal spending. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine):
By Tim Graham | May 30, 2015 | 8:53 PM EDT
Bill Scher of the leftist Campaign for America's Future expressed delight in a Politico article that "Fox News Eats Its Own."
"The first Republican presidential debate will air on Fox News and will be moderated by Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace—who happen to be the same three anchors that have provoked three Republican candidates into embarrassing gaffes this month. Turns out Fox News’ anchors can make Republican candidates look just as bad as MSNBC’s." And yet it's a GOP talking-point network?
By Tim Graham | May 30, 2015 | 7:45 PM EDT
On Friday, The New York Times celebrated forthcoming film festivals: "June must be movie month in New York," wrote Mekado Murphy. They were especially happy with left-wing films about "social justice."
They highlighted the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, sponsored by the left-wing lobby of the same name, and the "best bet" was a documentary on The Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution.
By Brent Baker | May 30, 2015 | 2:44 PM EDT
“If a Republican, any Republican candidate wrote an essay like this,” Bloomberg’s John Heilemann predicted on Friday’s With All Due Respect, “whether they were 16 years old and high on dope or whether it was weeks ago, it would be a huge scandal.” Calling for some media consistency in covering the revelation that socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, now a Democratic presidential candidate, once wrote that women fantasize about rape, Heilemann urged: “So I think we need to hold Bernie Sanders to the same standard.”
By Jeffrey Lord | May 30, 2015 | 1:59 PM EDT
One can only imagine the result of that kind of play had been produced. Not to mention if an already verboten image of The Prophet were plunged into a jar of urine and the resulting photo was prominently displayed on the CNN website. Safe to say one can expect the Broadway theater would need the National Guard to protect it and so too would CNN.
Somehow, Chris Cuomo is quiet as a church mouse on all of this. There is no Cuomo campaign to get his own network to remove the Piss Christ image. Nor is he furious that CNN has a favorable review of the Book of Mormon on the site. And, it is important to add, as insulting as both may be free speech is - free speech. Yet there is Cuomo badgering Pamela Geller about being “offensive to a group of people” - meaning Muslims.
The utter CNN hypocrisy is no surprise. This has long become a standard in the country’s way-too-long course in Liberalism 101. But the question in this case - with the answer obvious - is: why? Why do Chris Cuomo and his network never blink when it comes to offending Christians and, in this specific case, Mormons?
By Kyle Drennen | May 30, 2015 | 1:15 PM EDT
On Friday, even the hosts of NBC’s Today had enough of Michelle Obama’s effort to micro-manage people’s food choices as they mocked the First Lady’s attempt to create a healthy version of s’mores.
By Tom Johnson | May 30, 2015 | 11:55 AM EDT
A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans self-identify as social liberals, and that an equal percentage call themselves social conservatives -- the first time since Gallup began conducting such surveys in 1999 that conservatives haven’t outnumbered liberals. On Tuesday, pundit Michael Tomasky seized on this development as an indication that Republicans no longer will be able to use so-called wedge issues to gain Democratic crossover votes, but that maybe now Dems can win away GOPers who aren’t thrilled with their party’s stands on matters like gay marriage.
Tomasky added that any Democratic wedge issues would have a different “psychic ingredient” than those that Republicans have pressed, given that the GOP has relied on “fear-mongering…Conservatives are much better at this than liberals are, and in any case, if liberals tried this it just wouldn’t make sense or work. Everybody knows that the anti-same-sex-marriage side is losing fast.”
By Katie Yoder | May 30, 2015 | 11:00 AM EDT
Watching PBS? Might want to ask the kindergartners to leave the room.
In a May 27 piece for tax-funded PBS, NewsHour producer Saskia de Melker argued “The case for starting sex education in kindergarten.” In her piece, she held up the Netherlands as an example for the United States in “sexuality education” – for those as young as 4-years-old to learn “honest conversations about love and relationships.”
By Tom Blumer | May 30, 2015 | 10:52 AM EDT
This shouldn't be a trick question, but to the nation's establishment press business reporters it apparently is: What is the current length of the U.S. economy's expansion?
The answer, after yesterday's reported 0.7 percent annualized contraction in U.S. Gross Domestic Product, is obviously zero. But that's not what Bloomberg News and reporter Sho Chandra, who has used her full first name of Shobhana in previous reports, would say. Despite three separate quarterly contractions since the recession officially ended in the second quarter of 2009, they, like the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger two months ago, want us to believe a fairy tale, namely that we're still closing in on six straight years of expansion.
By Brent Bozell and Tim Graham | May 30, 2015 | 8:17 AM EDT
Ann Coulter has another best-selling book coming out, provocatively titled Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. One major target of Coulter barbs is our “objective” media.
Lord knows Coulter understands they deserve the hectoring. News reports are slavishly sensitive to the Latino Left’s political correctness. Start with the terminology. The factual term “illegal immigrants” is somehow an extremely mean-spirited description, even though that’s 100 percent accurate.. They claim to prefer less loaded lingo. Like “Dreamers.”
By Melissa Mullins | May 30, 2015 | 7:26 AM EDT
Amy Zimmerman recently wrote an article for the Daily Beast on the “Right-Wing War on Lena Dunham.” Somehow this article landed in the Politics section of the liberal news website. If anything, it should be an opinion piece since Zimmerman chooses to brush off undisputed facts over an alleged rape as well as written passages in Dunham’s book Not that Kind of Girl where she basically describes the molestation of her little sister.
Zimmerman claims that “right wingers obsessively document and chastise her every move.” I beg to differ. Those of us who write about Ms. Dunham aren’t obsessed with her, rather, we do what the mainstream media does not – we write about her hypocrisy and lies.
By Bryan Ballas | May 30, 2015 | 6:36 AM EDT
In light of the media’s blitz of Iraq War “gotcha questions” on Republican candidates in general and Jeb Bush in particular, Salon’s Heather Cox Richardson decided to reveal the true origins the Iraq War: conspiratorial Cold War-obsessed rich white men. She spun the tale of "the biggest blunder in American history — and the right wing’s obsessive need to cover it up."
By Matthew Balan | May 29, 2015 | 8:56 PM EDT
On Friday's World News Tonight, ABC's David Muir avoided mentioning the critics as he reported on the Obama administration removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Instead, Muir spotlighted how "President Obama [told] us back in December his plans to restore diplomatic ties with the Cuban government," and that during a January 2015 visit to the island country, "the children of Cuba [told] us they want to visit America."
