Bias by Omission

The Media Research Center’s Rich Noyes appeared on Fox Business Network’s Risk and Reward on Tuesday and called the media out for playing games with terrorist attacks. “So they have to stop trying to play games with this and definitional games and deal with this,” he explained to host Liz MacDonald, “You know, put all 78 together, and you got yourself a major terrorist threat that has been going…

A recent item at The Onion, the online humor site which is now rarely genuinely funny, claimed that "Fearful Americans (Are) Stockpiling Facts Before (the) Federal Government Comes To Take Them Away." Naturally, it was occurring because Americans are "alarmed at the prospect of unconstitutional overreach by the Trump administration." Ha-ha-ha — as if "constitutional overreach" didn't occur at a…

As Curtis Houck demonstrated at NewsBusters on Wednesday, the historic step of including four outside-the-DC Beltway journalists at White House press conferences via Skype is not sitting well "with many establishment media types." The aggrieved folks at CNN are particularly upset.

UPDATE, Feb. 7: On Feb. 5, Jake Tapper tweeted that "if you're concerned about things being 'incomplete' maybe consider adding into your post Manchin on same show response to rule." I attempted to find that video, and could not. If it was so important, and in the interest of balance, one would hope it would be part of the CNN video at the web link cited below — and it's not. As Nicholas…

On Wednesday, an early Associated Press report following the confirmations of two of Donald Trump's cabinet nominees employed extraordinarily strident and bitter language, portraying Republican Senate Committee which approved those nominations as de facto bullies who were "unilaterally" imposing their will. An evening revision updating that afternoon report expanded that portrayal to include…

NBC went all-out against President Donald Trump’s foreign policy during Thursday’s edition of Nightly News. They knocked Trump for getting tough with Iran, pretended he didn’t get tough with Russia, left out key parts of favorable quotes, and repeated dubiously sourced ones. “In these early days of his administration, President Trump is signaling a willingness to take the tough approach over…

The broadcast networks morning and evening newscasts, along with the cable news networks, have largely ignored the Tuesday report from Axios's Mike Allen that Hillary Clinton's campaign team blames President Obama for her loss in the 2016 election. Charlie Rose mentioned the revelation in passing on Thursday's CBS This Morning: "You have reports, for example, that the Hillary campaign thought it…

Kicking off NBC Nightly News on Wednesday, the network seemed to bizarrely come out against the Donald Trump administration for “officially putting Iran on notice” following an unsanctioned ballistic missile test on Sunday that violated UN resolutions. “National Security Adviser Michael Flynn accusing the Iranians of defying the UN. Did they do it?,” questioned anchor Lester Holt in the opening…

Thanks to the press's obsession with cooperating with and promoting those who object to President Donald Trump's opening week actions, Live Action's exposure of Planned Parenthood as hardly more than a collection of grisly abortion chambers has gone relatively unnoticed. This heroic work deserves much wider exposure, and much more press attention. A week ago, covered by Tim Graham at NewsBusters…

The radical rhetoric targeting President Donald Trump got extremely out of hand during Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, with accusations that America’s number one enemy for 10 years, Osama bin Laden, desired Trump’s travel ban. “Osama bin Laden’s whole theory of a war of the west on Islam now gains great credence thanks to what Donald Trump just did,” declared the Huffington Post’s Howard…

With the debate over the legality of President Donald Trump’s immigration and travel ban still raging Monday evening, NBC broadcasted their Nightly News program “from the shadow of the Statue of Liberty” accompanied by a lecture from anchor Lester Holt. “Behind me the Statue of Liberty, which for nearly 130 years, has symbolized the welcome arms of a country of immigrants,” he opined at the start…

You would think that the establishment press and the rest of the opposition to Donald Trump's administration might be able to capitalize substantively (shrieking fundraising letters don't count as "substance") on Kellyanne Conway's shaky reference to "alternative facts" about a week ago. (She should have said, "I have different, more defensible estimates than you do," because she did.) So far…

It tends to be good advice to avoid automatically assigning negative or malicious intent, such as a desire to play "gotcha," when someone's actions, inaction, or statements might have simply arisen from breathtaking ignorance. But what if it appears to a combination of both traits? That seems to be the case with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman's Saturday morning tweet. Haberman, whose…

Some serious bias by omission about President Trump’s executive order Friday on immigration, especially in the New York Times, none of whose reporters appeared to have actually read it. Trump’s executive order has its roots in previous legislation, The Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act signed into law by...President Obama in 2015. But that was ignored by…