This Week in Media Bias History

Then-Today co-host Katie Couric was SO excited about the opportunity to bash Ronald Reagan that she mangled a statement by biographer Edmund Morris. Couric opened the September 27, 1999 Today with this: “Good Morning. The Gipper was an airhead!” Two days later, Morris shot this down: “Oh, good God no! He was a very bright man.” 

CNN founder Ted Turner doesn’t think much of conservatives, but he’s got a blind spot to the atrocities in North Korea. On September 19, 2005, Turner appeared on CNN’s Situation Room and talked about his visit to the despotic country. He seemed to excuse the regime, saying, “I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin and they were riding bicycles instead of cars, but... I didn’t see any…

Rosie O’Donnell is a radical leftist and 9/11 truther conspiracy nut. But for some reason, ABC TWICE made her a co-host of The View. We just observed the 17th anniversary of 9/11 and it’s important to remember this quote from O’Donnell on September 12, 2006: “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” On September 10, 2006, the late Andy Rooney, then…

Which type of person are you? A liberal... or a racist? That’s the no-win scenario liberal journalist Bryant Gumbel created for conservatives on the September 5, 1989 edition of the Today show.  Speaking of classic liberal bias, remember the late Peter Jennings? The World News Tonight anchor, who was raised in Canada, talked about how own distaste for America: “My mother... was pretty anti-…

The level to which some members of the media would go in order to excuse or explain away the reprehensible conduct of Ted Kennedy never ceased to amaze. On August 27, 2009, journalist Melissa Lafsky, who at one time worked for the New York Times’s Freakonomics blog, wrote this about Mary Jo Kopechne, a woman Kennedy left to drown: 

Given what we now know about Matt Lauer and his creepy office with an automatic door lock, this August 21, 2000 Today interview with Al Gore looks weirder in retrospect. Lauer repeatedly obsessed over “the kiss” between the then-Vice President and his then-wife Tipper Gore at the 2000 Democratic National Convention: “This is the ‘The Kiss.’... You really planted one on Mrs. Gore.” Lauer was …

Sometimes the journalistic fawning over Barack Obama crossed a line from sycophantic to just plain weird. Such was the case for the August 2011 issue of Esquire, featuring a headline wondering “How can we not love Obama?” Writer Stephan Marche described the Democrat as an “astounding, ecstatic human achievement” and a “world-historical soul.” Okay...

Before he became the disgraced Brian Williams known for making stuff up, the NBC journalist was best known for some outrageous examples of media bias. On August 5, 2005, the then-Nightly News anchor interrogated Enola Gay navigator Dutch Van Kirk about dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: “Do you have remorse for what happened? How do you deal with that in your mind?” 

The “poet” Obama vs. the “zombie” conservatives? From 2008 through 2016, the contrast between how journalists fawned over Barack Obama and trashed conservatives was pretty clear. On July 28, 2016, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni rhapsodized over Obama: “He’s been more than our president. Time and again, he’s been our national poet.” 

It seems as though Chris Matthews never lost the “thrill” up his leg. Seven and a half years after that infamous comment, the Hardball host reflected on Barack Obama’s presidency. On July 22, 2015, Matthews gushed: over the “immaculate,” “perfect” Democrat: “He's been immaculate in the presidency. Nobody has accused him of any corruption. His kids are perfect. His wife is perfect.” 

Some quotes need no introduction because they are just so shocking. On July 20, 1998, Time contributor Nina Burleigh  said this of Bill Clinton: “I would be happy to give him a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude." 

Some liberal journalists don’t just love Democratic politicians, they dream about them. On July 10, 2001, ABC’s Diane Sawyer gushed: “After pepperoni pizza and a banana milkshakes once, I dreamed about Bill Clinton.” Liberal journalists have proven, again and again, that there is nothing too horrible to be said about a prominent conservative. On July 7, 1991, then-Washington Post columnist Carl…

If any cable network knows how to ruin a great American holiday, it’s MSNBC. On July 1, 2012, then-host Melissa Harris-Perry celebrated the Fourth of July by reminding everyone of the “imperialism, the genocide, the slavery.” Speaking of Independence Day, well-known fabricator Brian Williams in 2005 compared the hostage-takers in Iran to the Founding Fathers: “The first several U.S. Presidents…

Chris Matthews has said some insane things before, but on June 25, 2013, he fretted about global warming told viewers that Maimi is “only five feet in the air.... It’s not a joke.” According to Newsweek in 1996, Republicans have been “truly despicable on race” and supported a “relapse into segregation.” Hmm, hard to imagine why Newsweek has disintegrated into a dinosaur publication that hardly…