Retiring Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer sat down with Fox News’ Howard Kurtz on Sunday’s MediaBuzz and did his best to excuse the media’s soft treatment of President Obama since he first ran for president.
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By Jeffrey Meyer | May 31, 2015 | 2:26 PM EDT
By Jeffrey Meyer | May 31, 2015 | 1:53 PM EDT
On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that disgraced NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams may not be done with the network and instead may have a “new role” following the completion of his six month suspension.
By Tom Johnson | May 31, 2015 | 1:04 PM EDT
When did Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president of the United States end? Officially, on January 20, 1989, but Washington Monthly blogger D. R. Tucker posits that in a sense Reagan stayed in office well after that. In a Saturday post, Tucker asserted that in 1988, some right-wing “ideologues” sought to “artificially extend the Reagan administration past its constitutionally limited time by propping up a man who would defend and attack the same ideas and politicians Reagan defended.” That man-prop was Rush Limbaugh.
“Reaganism shifted wealth upwards…and the folks behind the Limbaugh project didn’t want the gravy train to end,” wrote Tucker. “What better way to keep the good times going than by hiring Limbaugh to promote Reaganism into the 1990s and beyond, while rhetorically butchering anyone who disagreed with the 40th president’s wayward economic policies? Limbaugh was simply the vagrant recruited to distract the cops while the thieves looted the bank.”
By Jeffrey Meyer | May 31, 2015 | 12:49 PM EDT
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews appeared as a panelist on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and acted as an unofficial campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
By Jeffrey Meyer | May 31, 2015 | 11:22 AM EDT
On Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Michael Eric Dyson, regular fill-in host on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, took a swipe at Republican Presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul when he accused him of sounding like “George Wallace in one beat and like Noam Chomsky on the other.”
By Tom Blumer | May 31, 2015 | 10:47 AM EDT
Friday morning, Kyle Drennen at NewsBusters covered retiring Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer's appearance on CBS This Morning. Schieffer went into the same predictable whines seemingly every retiring establishment press reporter does as they're about to leave: there's too much money in politics, we can't control the news like we used to, congressional gridlock has never been worse, blah-blah-blah.
One other peculiar item, gleaned from David Bauder's Associated Press report on his own interview with Schieffer, needs to be noted before the CBS reporter rides into the sunset (possibly interrupted from time to time, as Bauder noted, by "some elder statesman role").
By Tim Graham | May 31, 2015 | 9:05 AM EDT
It’s a little shocking to see the back cover of this week’s People magazine (June 8). It’s an ad for “The Third Coming” (third season) of the women-in-prison drama Orange Is The New Black on Netflix. Fifteen female characters (and the one played by Charles “Laverne” Cox) are portrayed on Catholic devotional candles...despite the show’s less-than-religious tone.
By Brent Baker | May 31, 2015 | 12:27 AM EDT
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.”
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.
