Bias by Omission

On Thursday, Newsweek's Lucy Westcott forwarded possible excuses for Yasmin Seweid's fake account about anti-Muslim men attacking her on New York City's subway. Westcott spotlighted an activist who played up that young Muslim women, like Seweid, are "children of either immigrant parents or U.S.-born Muslims, and parents have high expectations of them, putting [them under] tremendous pressure."…

Late Thursday afternoon, freelance journalist and editor Sebastian Jones dropped a friendly reminder for Twitter users how the media’s neglecting to recount the disturbing past of Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald and instead praising him ad nauseam for his investigative reporting looking into President-elect Donald Trump’s finances and connections to foreign governments. 

Top of the news: Our architecture critic weeps over Aleppo? Indeed, the front of Thursday’s New York Times featured critic a “Critics Notebook” from Michael Kimmelman, “Aleppo’s Faces Beckon to Us, To Little Avail.” Staggeringly, Kimmelman managed to lament the tragedy in Aleppo on the front page of a major newspaper, without a single mention of President Barack Obama, the sitting president for…

A Thursday op-ed on CNN.com outlined a proposal to "not only...end a Trump administration, but also to eradicate democracy's ugliest anachronism -- the Electoral College." Scott Piro hoped against hope that a group of Trump electors would switch their vote to Hillary Clinton, in order to gain "the bipartisan support needed to legislate it [the Electoral College] out of existence." Piro contended…

Tuesday on CNBC, Microsoft co-founder and multibillionaire Bill Gates recounted a conversation he had with Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago. He had fairly nice things to say about both the conversation and the potential of the incoming Trump administration. Naturally, neither the Associated Press nor the New York Times found these elements of the CNBC interview to be newsworthy.

CNN's Dana Bash paid tribute to retiring Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski on Wednesday's New Day, touting that "it's the end of the Obama and the Mikulski eras; and the trail-blazing senator walked out the door — dropping important pearls of wisdom." Bash played up how the longtime Maryland politician is "retiring disappointed. Her old Senate colleague [Hillary Clinton] failed to become the…

On Tuesday, NBC’s Today featured a nearly two-minute long report on former Republican Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock being arraigned on corruption charges in federal court. However, the morning show completely ignored the 10-year prison sentence handed down against former Democratic Pennsylvania Congressman Chaka Fattah for racketeering.

It appeared that NBC sharpened its claws in preparation for NBC Nightly News on Tuesday, as the network sent Richard Engel to Russia. The reporter was there to find dirt on President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. “I'm Richard Engel in Moscow, where the Kremlin couldn't be happier with the way Trump's cabinet is shaping up, especially with Rex…

Though the press apparently wants everyone to forget about it, the fact is that barely two weeks ago, over Thanksgiving weekend, the Obama administration told the world, apparently only through the New York Times, its designated mouthpiece, that "we stand behind our (nation's) election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people." The statement was "issued" to the Times on…

On Monday, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News saw no reason to keep their viewers abreast of two embarrassing failures in Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s recount efforts to alter the presidential election results as the recount ended in Wisconsin while a judge blocked it in Pennsylvania.  With ABC and NBC missing in action, the CBS Evening News covered the recount news…

As of Monday morning, NBC's Today and CNN's New Day have yet to cover the deadly terrorist attack on a Coptic Christian church in Cairo, Egypt on Sunday. The NBC morning newscast's omission is particularly conspicuous, as Sunday's NBC Nightly News devoted a full report to the bombing. CBS's Sunday Morning gave the attack a one-sentence mention on December 11, 2016. However, CBS This Morning didn'…

Well, that didn't take long. The morning after the Washington Post's Friday evening story that a "Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House," a "deeply disturbed" Bob Baer, appearing on CNN Newsroom, when questioned as to whether "we should have another election," said that if it's true, "I don’t see any other way than to vote again."

Now that President Obama has officially joined the crowd which wants America to believe that it's Russia's fault that Donald Trump won the presidential election, it's quite timely to revisit an item published in the Boston Globe during the week before Thanksgiving.

CBS Evening News was the sole Big Three evening newscast on Friday to cover the bomb theat on a Trump construction project in the South American country of Uruguay. Scott Pelley devoted ten seconds to the threat, which forced the evacuation of the planned high rise. ABC's World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News didn't cover the evacuation on their Friday broadcasts. However, both programs devoted…