Bias by Omission

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…

The liberal media was abuzz Sunday morning after massive protests erupted at major airports across the country in opposition to President Trump’s Muslim ban. To help drive the point home on Good Morning America, ABC’s David Wright asked Khzir Khan to share his wrath regarding Trump. “We sought out Khizr Khan, the gold star father who spoke at the Democratic National Convention,” Wright said while…

A January 24 item in the East Bay Times, which serves the San Francisco East Bay area, wondered: "What’s behind the spate of recent restaurant closures?" While it didn't ignore the problem, the article made only glancing references to current and planned increases in state and city minimum wages. Preliminary year-end statistics at the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Bay…

Hysterical liberals are rushing to buy dystopian novels like 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, regarding them as playbooks for the new Trump administration, and the New York Times is eagerly validating their fears: "...in recent months, [Handmaid's Tale author Margaret] Atwood has been hearing from anxious readers who see eerie parallels between the novel’s oppressive society and the current…

All that "non-partisan" posturing, and they couldn't even get CNN to buy it. On Friday, CNN presented a segment on the 44th annual March for Life before it began. The press usually ignores the march's existence until after it has taken place, typically barely recognizes it afterwards, and almost invariably insists on describing crowd sizes which have often been in the hundreds of thousands as…

What a difference an election makes: The annual pro-life March for Life, long ignored by the New York Times, led the paper’s National section on Saturday, driven by a little political star power in the form of Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway and Vice President Mike Pence. Jeremy Peters and Yamiche Alcindor’s account was teased with a photo from the rally on the front page: “Thousands March…

Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas is pleased that “several media operations have decided to join reality [by] calling the Trump regime’s lies what they are -- lies.” Still stuck in unreality, according to Kos, is NPR, which, he alleged on Wednesday, “remains steadfastly committed to enabling the ruling regime’s propaganda efforts.” Kos fumed that “conservatives rally around…

One of the more revealing side effects of the 2016 presidential campaign, and especially the November election, is how old-line liberal publications which once had at least a veneer of respectability have completely gone off the deep end. Readers have come to expect completely unhinged, error-ridden material to routinely appear at places like Salon.com. But at the Atlantic? Beyond occasional…

When it comes to protests, the national mainstream media plays a deceptive numbers game. For instance, the press gave huge coverage to last weekend’s March for Women, which drew a reported 200,000 people protesting the Trump Administration and allegedly proclaimed solidarity with women. 

In a late Wednesday afternoon NewsBusters post, I commented on the extraordinary hostility reporters at the Associated Press exhibited towards Donald Trump and his administration during their first two full business days in power. In that post, I wondered if they might be carrying a childish grudge over not being able to ask the first question at Press Secretary Sean Spicer's briefings, as they…

Wednesday night was a major first for Donald Trump as ABC aired his very first interview as President of the United States. The interview questions ranged from immigration policy to what carpet he chose for the Oval Office (Ronald Reagan’s), but things got awkward for interviewer David Muir when he tried to stick Trump with questions about the Women’s March on Saturday, “Let me just ask you while…