Tamron Hall

The South Carolina primary may be over, but MSNBC anchors are not letting up on their portrayal of Republican primary voters are bigots whose support is being courted by the use of "code words." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

During a promo for her 2 p.m. Eastern show NewsNation, MSNBC anchor Hall falsely accused Gingrich of using incendiary rhetoric on minorities, and claims such words are part of an overall racially charged “attack strategy” in his bid for the White House. About two hours later, fellow MSNBC host Martin Bashir read from a 17-year old New York Times editorial that similarly blasted Gingrich.

At the top of the 8 a.m. ET hour of NBC's Today on Monday, fill-in news anchor Tamron Hall promoted a fake campaign attack ad created by comedian Stephen Colbert which argues that if Mitt Romney believes corporations are people, "Then Mitt Romney is a serial killer. He's Mitt the Ripper." The ad follows with a woman screaming. [Audio available here]

Hall explained to viewers: "Colbert is using his fake bid for the White House to call attention to unlimited spending by anonymous super-PACs." After the news brief, fill-in co-host Natalie Morales declared: "I love Colbert. What he gets away with." Weatherman Al Roker joked: "He's a great American." Co-host Savannah Guthrie argued: "...it's only slightly more over the top than some of the ads we've seen." [View video after the jump]

If anyone's going to destroy Newt Gingrich's presidential aspirations, Hardball's Chris Matthews would rather it be him, or at least someone else in the liberal media. Appearing on colleague Tamron Hall's NewsNation program in today's 2 p.m. Eastern hour, Matthews whined about anti-Gingrich "bombing campaign" of TV ads placed by political action committees that have helped to drive down the former Speaker's poll numbers in the run up to tonight's caucuses.

"My sympathy is not for Newt, it's for democracy," Matthews pontificated, having argued that Romney's "wealthy friends have destroyed" Gingrich with a "Dresden"-style "bombing campaign." [video follows page break; MP3 audio available here]

MSNBC daytime host Tamron Hall failed to use the J-word -- jobs -- in alerting MSNBC viewers today of President Obama's decision to delay his decision on authorizing the proposed Keystone oil pipeline.

Noting the story on the 2 p.m. Eastern NewsNation program, Hall described the "massive oil pipeline" project as "controversial" because it would run through "an environmentally-sensitive area in Nebraska." As such, Hall added, President Obama wants to explore "other possible routes." Meanwhile "digging is on hold, likely until after the presidential election."

Four hours earlier on Chris Jansing Reports, substitute host Richard Lui very briefly noted that "critics claim the delay will cost the U.S. some 20,000 new jobs." There was no reference to the fact that many of those critics are Democrat-friendly labor unions.

At the top of the 8 a.m. ET hour of Wednesday's NBC "Today," fill-in news anchor Tamron Hall proclaimed: "Today could be the biggest day yet for the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests in lower Manhattan." Correspondent Mara Schiavocampo followed by gushing: "Three weeks in, and no signs of slowing. The 'Occupy Wall Street' protest growing in size and scope."

Schiavocampo touted how the "coalition is growing quickly, as several labor unions have now vowed to join demonstrators in their protests against corporate interests....demonstrations spreading to more than 50 cities, from Boston to Los Angeles." The headline on screen throughout the report cheered: "Gaining Ground; 'Occupy Wall Street' Protests Spreading."

Both ABC and NBC on Wednesday used a new Pew Research Center poll of military veterans to claim that, as ABC news reader Josh Elliot put it, “one-third of those who’ve served in Afghanistan and Iraq now say the wars were not worth fighting,” while NBC’s Tamron Hall told viewers “one-third of U.S. veterans believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting.”

But that’s not really what the poll found. Pew surveyed 1,853 veterans, including 712 whose service took place after September 11, 2001. They found 50% of the post 9/11 veterans thought the war in Afghanistan was worth it, and 44% who supported the war in Iraq — percentages significantly higher than both the general public and veterans who served in earlier conflicts or pre-9/11.

While the media have been keen on pushing anti-bullying campaigns, there is a flip side to the coin: students can become the victims of over-sensitive school administrators who confuse legitimate free speech with bullying.

A prime example comes to our attention out of Fort Worth, Texas, as Dakota Ary recently served a suspension from school for telling a classmate in a classroom discussion that he believes homosexuality is sinful.

From CBSDFW.com:

On Tuesday, The Washington Post's Felicia Sonmez noted how MSNBC's Tamron Hall moderated the recent Congressional Black Caucus town hall where Rep. Andre Carson smeared the Tea Party by accusing them of wanting to bring back Jim Crow laws and endorsing the lynching of blacks. Former Obama aide turned NBC employee Joy-Ann Reid also attended the CBC event, but omitted Rep. Carson's attack from her report.

During the August 22 town hall in Miami, Carson, a leader within the liberal Congressional Black Caucus from Indiana, actually apologized to Hall in the midst of his inflammatory remarks against the Tea Party:

Want to watch an MSM version of Stand By Your Man?   Check out the video here after the jump.  Tamron Hall, theoretically an MSNBC show "host" and not a pundit, gets visibly upset with Michael Singh, a former foreign policy adviser to President George W. Bush.  Singh's sin?  Apparently being insufficiently enthusiastic in his praise of President Obama's handling of the Libyan situation.

The irony is that Singh is anything but an isolationist.  Singh supported the Libyan intervention and hardly came across as a hard partisan.  But apparently anything short of fully prostrated praise for the prez is enough to bring down the Wrath Of Hall.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams announced on Wednesday's show that "the number of Americans relying on food stamps has hit another all-time record" with "Nearly 46 million of your fellow citizens are receiving food stamp assistance." Yet curiously he did not tie Barack Obama's fiscal policies to this economic tragedy, something the liberal media was prone to do when it came to blaming Ronald Reagan in the '80s for homelessness or George W. Bush for high gas prices.

In fact, in the face of this growing plight for an increasing number of Americans no anchor or reporter at the Big Three networks (NBC, CBS and ABC) has come even close to blaming the Obama administration in their food stamp stories.

Halfway through the July 21 edition of "NewsNation," MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall brought on Time magazine assistant managing editor Rana Foroohar to diss a Boy Scout cited by John Thune (R-S.D.) on the Senate floor.

After Hall aired a clip of Thune reading the Boy Scout's letter admonishing senators to spend only what the government can afford, she and Foroohar set about to dismiss his concern as quaint but ill-informed:

MSNBC "NewsNation" anchor and Texas native Tamron Hall was delighted to find that four Lone Star cities made it to Forbes.com's list of "The Next Big Boom Towns in the U.S."

"Forbes [magazine] says many of the cities on the list have some of the best job creation records in the nation," Hall noted as she introduced contributor Joel Kotkin, who authored the July 6 piece.

Kotkin identified the nation's new 10 boom towns, five of which are in states without a personal income tax (Florida and Texas) and one, Nashville, Tenn., where the state levies person taxes only on dividend and interest, but not salary or wage, income.

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On June 9, unarmed Gaston County, North Carolina man James Verone held up a bank demanding the sum of $1. After getting the cash from a teller, he patiently waited in the bank for cops to arrive.

Twelve days later, MSNBC has picked up on the story as an example of the desperate straits that unemployed, uninsured persons will go for health care.

Yet neither anchor Chris Jansing in the 10 a.m. Eastern hour nor Tamron Hall in the 2:00 p.m. hour mentioned that there are low-or-no-charge health clinics in Verone's backyard.

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Tamron Hall was so taken aback by Chris Christie's "none of your business" response to a voter's question about why he puts his kids in private school that she blurted the New Jersey Republican Governor reminded her of HBO's fictionalized mobster Tony Soprano. Right after playing a brief clip of Christie's "gruff" answer to the voter, Hall stooped to take a stereotypical cheap shot at New Jersey and its governor as she exclaimed: "I thought that was Tony Soprano!"

(video after the jump)

Less than 24 hours after a devastating tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri – killing at least 116 people – an MSNBC anchor was busy putting a political spin on the tragedy.

Tamron Hall wondered aloud on "News Nation" today whether climate change was to blame for the rash of hurricanes and tornadoes that ravaged several states, including Missouri, over the last few months.

For the second day in a row, MSNBC worked up a biased segment with Rock the Vote president Heather Smith about a "war on voting" -- see screen capture below page break-- by Republican legislators in numerous states where the GOP controls both state legislative chambers, such as New Hampshire.

Today "NewsNation" host Tamron Hall picked up the torch from colleague Thomas Roberts, who conducted a softball interview with Smith on March 8.

Hall even parroted some of his script from the day before:

In its daytime programming today, MSNBC has been hyping today's 100th anniversary of  International Women's Day.

On her 1 p.m. Eastern program, anchor Andrea Mitchell noted how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled the International Women of Courage Awards to "ten women rights leaders from around the world."

While Mitchell then noted the lack of progress that Afghanistan's government was making in terms of women's rights, she failed to report how the Obama administration has backtracked on efforts aimed at promoting advances towards equal rights and greater access to education for Afghan women.

As Rajiv Chandrasekaran noted in his Sunday  Washington Post article -- "In Afghanistan, U.S. shifts strategy on women's rights as it eyes wider priorities" -- the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has backed down from earlier ambitious, concrete goals for female property ownership and education in Afghanistan, quite possibly in accord with the desire of top-level Obama administration officials to wind down a U.S. presence there (emphasis mine):

Halfway through her 2 p.m. "NewsNation" program today, MSNBC's Tamron Hall interviewed liberal ObamaCare supporter Ron Pollack about yesterday's court ruling in State of Florida v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, that struck down the 2010 health care overhaul to be unconstitutional in its entirety.

Hall failed to bring on a representative from the other side of the dispute, even though there are 26 state attorneys general to choose from for that purpose, not to mention any number of conservative legal scholars who could defend the conservative position on the matter.

What's more, Hall failed to challenge any of the complaints Pollack raised, such as his lament that although Judge Roger Vinson dwelt mostly on the "individual mandate" provision that forces Americans to buy health insurance under penalty of law, he ruled the entirety of the 906-page "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" unconstitutional.

Tamron Hall was joined by her MSNBC colleague Dylan Ratigan on Wednesday's edition of "News Nation" in condemning some members of corporate America for the way they have "demonized" the Obama administration. That slight of American businesses came during a dicussion of President Hu Jintao's U.S visit, in which Ratigan remarked that President Obama's greatest challenge will not be dealing with China, but American businesses who have invested heavily in China.

Previewing President Obama's upcoming speech in Indonesia during Tuesday's 2PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Tamron Hall wondered if the troop surge in Afghanistan had hurt the President's image in the Muslim world: "How much of the skepticism comes from the fact that he's added more troops on the ground in Afghanistan?"

Hall asked that question of Time magazine's deputy international editor Bobby Ghosh, who agreed and even went further: "There's certainly a lot of that, the troops on the ground, the drone campaign in Pakistan, which, unfortunately, from time to time kills innocent people. That certainly gets a lot of play around the world."

On Friday's CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith got into the Halloween spirit by dressing up as Sue Sylvester, the cheerleading coach from the show 'Glee,' and on NBC's Today, correspondent Tamron Hall showed up as President Obama. For Smith, it was the second consecutive Halloween he chose a female persona, going as celebrity chef Julia Child in 2009.

[Video below]

NBC's Tamron Hall blared, "It's being called 'corruption on steroids'" while George Lewis added, "It's been an angry summer in Bell, California, once people learned that city officials awarded themselves huge six figure salaries at taxpayer's expense." However neither of them mentioned, in two different stories on Wednesday's Today show, that those corrupt officials belonged to the Democratic Party. Lewis, strangely, couldn't even bother to identify the party of Jerry Brown -- who has a soundbite in the piece going after the officials -- as he just called him "The California attorney general running for governor."

Incidentally, the Today show wasn't the only news outlet to conveniently drop the "D" label next to those officials accused of bilking California taxpayers. As Newsbusters' Lachlan Markay pointed out on Tuesday, "ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported on the arrests today without mentioning party affiliations."

Why does Ed Schultz think Wall Street and "big business" are sitting on $1 trillion in assets?

Depends on what week you ask him.

Here's what Schultz said about that during a contentious discussion on July 26 with publisher Mort Zuckerman on MSNBC's "The Ed Show," as rebroadcast the following day on Schultz's radio show (click here for audio) --

Is MSNBC concerned about charges of a lack of racial diversity among its on-air staff? Perhaps the cable network is realizing that its glass house is increasingly at risk of shattering from all the stones it keeps hurling at the allegedly-racist Tea Party movement.

The folks at Inside Cable News noticed a slight change in the header at the MSNBC TV homepage. See if you can spot it in the picture at right. It shouldn't be that hard; the folks at the cable network put Tamron Hall front and center in a bright pink shirt (click here for a larger image of the new header).

Did MSNBC add Hall in an effort to satiate critics who have pointed out the lack of racial diversity on the cable network? Though ICN notes the comical video produced by the Dallas Tea Party, the Congressional Black Caucus has also chided MSNBC for its lily-white staff.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Monday said, "Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge of North Carolina was ambushed by a group of unknown activists."

The "Hardball" host began his report concerning the Congressman's unprovoked attack on two students, "Next: ginning up a skirmish."

This came just a few hours after Matthews' colleague Tamron Hall made similar on air allegations concerning the incident.

Obviously, the folks at MSNBC have decided to present Etheridge as the innocent victim and the students he attacked as the guilty parties.

Matthews ended the brief report, "By the way, no word yet on who those self-proclaimed students working on a project are" (video follows with transcript and commentary, h/t Freedom's Lighthouse): 

In the 2PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Tamron Hall did a news brief on Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge assaulting two students attempting to ask him a question last week, proclaiming: "...there are some Democrats that are blasting the people allegedly behind this video....some would catagorize that as an ambush interview..." [Audio available here]

Hall played a clip of the video showing the assault and afterwards quoted an written apology from Etheridge. She described how the video "first appeared on Andrew Breitbart's conservative blog BigGovernment.org," remarking that he "was partly responsible for that notorious ACORN video featuring conservative James O'Keefe." Hall made sure to also mention that "O'Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for entering Senator Mary Landrieu's office under false pretenses." Hall then suspiciously noted about the Etheridge video: "One of these so-called camera men at one point reportedly identified himself as a student, so there's discrepancy over who these individuals really are."

In the 3PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Chris Jansing spoke with NBC correspondent Luke Russert about the altercation and explained to viewers: "...in spite of the fact of what we see on camera and his apology, there are Democrats, right Luke, who frankly say they think that we need to look beyond what might seem obvious." Russert replied: "...nobody knows who these, quote, 'students' are" and cited Democratic Party spokesman Brad Woodhouse claiming they were actually Republican Party operatives. He concluded: "So a lot of Democrats are saying wait, hold on, this was a set up. This guy was intentionally put out to do this by the Republican Party."

During the 11AM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Contessa Brewer discussed open mic comments made by senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina with Huffington Post writer Ryan Grim and remarked that the California Republican has "the 'Mean Girls' mentality" and "comes off like that Lindsay Lohan movie 'Mean Girls.'"

Hall was referring to Fiorina making fun of Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer's hairstyle on air before a television interview on Wednesday. Grim completely agreed with Hall's assessment: "Oh yeah, absolutely. It makes her look terrible. It doesn't put her in a very good light." Though he added: "But it's not something so extreme that it's going to annihilate her."

Earlier, Grim actually observed that Fiorina "really did dodge a bullet here." He explained: "...what she said isn't going to disqualify her from election. It makes her look a little bit silly, a little bit petty, but it's not going to be something that destroys her candidacy or her career like you had with somebody like Helen Thomas a week or so ago."

MSNBC on Friday didn't let lack of proof stand in the way of interviewing a man claiming he had an affair with a conservative favorite, South Carolina gubernatorial hopeful Nikki Haley. Tamron Hall talked to lobbyist Larry Marchant and announced, "Her campaign is, again, denying a second allegation that Haley, a married mother of two, cheated on her husband."

Hall did conduct a tough interview with Marchant, demanding, "What proof do you have? What proof do you have that you had an affair? She says it didn't happen." The News Live host repeatedly pressed the lobbyist, who was just let go from a position with a competing Republican candidate.

After Marchant offered nothing more than his own word, Hall derided, "Larry, I gotta stop you here because of a couple things. You say you went to dinner and all these other things. That is that's not proof had you a sexual encounter with her." Yet, if the News Live host and the producers at MSNBC found his story to be so lacking, why have him on the network at all?

On Thursday's 11AM EST hour on MSNBC, anchor Tamron Hall asked Ryan Grim of the left-wing Huffington Post about recent scandals involving the Obama White House tampering with Democratic primaries: "Darrell Issa of California...he wants the FBI involved in this....Any legs here, or is this, again, a situation that may be politicized by the other side?" [Audio available here]

Grim dismissed the idea that there was any need for an investigation: "I mean, this isn't criminal activity. This really is politics as usual." He then lamented: "...the problem for the administration is that, you know, they ran against politics as usual....they were going to move beyond all of this."

Later, Grim described the real "crime" in the Obama administration pressuring candidates like Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Andrew Romanoff in Colorado to end their respective primary challenges to incumbent Democratic senators: "...the real problem is that the administration didn't – wasn't willing to allow the Democratic base to choose the candidates....having these primary candidates actually pushes the senator in a more progressive direction....if there's any crime here, it's a political one, in that the administration was holding back a progressive agenda by not allowing these primaries to go forward."