NB Podcast

With Executive Editor Tim Graham off celebrating his birthday, Deputy Managing Editor Nick Fondacaro and I returned to hold down the fort and, even leaving aside the State of the Union, the world was our oyster with content. Of course, The View was a major topic with their cockamamie and erroneous claims that conservatives such as Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) want to ban the teaching…

Network anchors claimed President Biden's State of the Union speech was an appeal to unity, which may have been true in small snippets. But as a whole, Biden was a trash-talking partisan, uncorking lies about Republicans phasing out Social Security and so on. Curtis Houck joins the show to explore just how boosterish the networks stars were in the speech's aftermath.

As the House Republicans prepare for their first oversight hearing on Joe Biden and his dissolute lobbyist son Hunter, MRC's Geoff Dickens reports that ABC, CBS, and NBC are still energetically avoiding scandalous new developments in the Joe-and-Hunter story.

As the House voted to remove far-left Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bluest media (like 'Morning Joe') said they would stand proudly with Omar and against GOP "hypocrisy." Benjamin Weingarten wrote a book on Omar and explains the whole scene.

The media are not trusted. They're not popular. Now, they're not very profitable. The anti-Trump business model is failing, and CNN's ratings are cratering. Last week, they had the worst ratings in nine years, drawing under 450,000 viewers in prime time, while Fox News had over 2 million. 

Tom Jones, a liberal analyst at the Poynter Institute, praised CBS's Margaret Brennan and NBC's Chuck Todd for aggressively taking on (respectively) Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Jim Jordan. But McCarthy and Jordan gave as good as they got, exposing the Sunday hosts as the Democrats that they are.

After two mass shootings in California, ABC's The View crew is back in gun-hating mode, and Joy Behar said America needs to "grow up" about guns. “There’s like a mental illness going on in the country that has to be stopped immediately.”

Conservative Twitter buzzed about Speaker McCarthy letting a PBS reporter have it about Adam Schiff, and the "independent fact checkers" like Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post and CNN's Daniel Dale are demonstrating again that they tilt their targeting at Republicans.

Friday's annual March for Life drew some assorted news stories (not from ABC). MRCTV's Tierin-Rose Mandelburg joins the show to discuss her video from the protest scene, and how pro-abortion people struggled with her questions. Also: NBC's Chuck Todd mangles facts in his memory of the Monica Lewinsky affair 25 years ago.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has angrily ranted against Donald Trump the "fascist," so why is he now saying he's the Muhammad Ali of GOP contenders? And why did CNN's Don Lemon attempt to wear a hoodie with a suit jacket on morning TV? Mark Finkelstein joins the show to discuss his take based on his years of experience on the AM news-busting beat. 

Brian Stelter sighting! The former CNN host resurfaced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to moderate a panel on crushing "disinformation." He made it sound like a European version of his old show Reliable Sources, asking his fellow leftists how they manage a world in which Donald Trump is still proving that "lying works."

It's truly puzzling. Why does Meet the Press host Chuck Todd keep inviting on Senator Ron Johnson, attacking him, and then getting angry Johnson bites back about bias? It's funny. But why would he think anyone would believe him when he says "I'm a journalist, I have to deal in facts!"

The ratings of Tuesday's Golden Globe Awards telecast on NBC fell again from its last airing in 2021. Awards shows now feature a lot of woke lecturing and reward obscure movies and TV shows many people haven't seen.

CBS broke the news on Monday that Biden's lawyers disclosed they have discovered classified documents in an office at the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center in the nation's capital. The "roughly 10" documents are from President Biden's vice-presidential office at the center, which opened in 2018.