Bias by Omission

On Tuesday, none of the major English or Spanish-language networks devoted any news coverage during their evening newscasts to the decision by the Obama administration to not follow through with a proposed ban on ammunition that is often used in AR-15s. The move by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) comes after an overwhelming response from gun owners, gun rights…

Following in the footsteps of Tuesday’s CBS This Morning, the CBS Evening News worked to paint the 47 Republican Senators who signed a letter to Iranian leaders in a negative light and portraying their actions as meddling in the Obama administration’s negotiations while making no mention of the moves that Democrats made to thumb their noses at Republican administrations.

The Obama administration’s end-around attempt at gun control, through a ban on bullets used by owners of the popular AR-15 rifle, was beaten back today when the ATF announced it will hold off on a proposed ammo ban. The question is will ABC, CBS and NBC report this stinging defeat for Barack Obama and anti-gun rights advocates? 

Imagine if a Republican congressperson called Illinois' senior senator Dick Durbin "Dick Turban" in not one tweet, but two (Durbin has been given the nickname by several center-right pundits and commentators; but as far as I can tell, no national Republican politician has used it). Does anyone think it would take the establishment press over 15 hours (and counting) to report it? Late Monday…

A review of the "Big Story" archive at the Associated Press's national site on Jesse Jackson's name returns quite a few instances where the wire service has treated the "Reverend's" self-injection into stories considered nationally important as noteworthy. In addition to the predictable plethora of stories relating to Ferguson, Missouri and "police-communities tension," Jackson's name has…

The Indianapolis Star reported on Monday that it had obtained emails from an employee at the Indianapolis VA hospital who mocked returning combat veterans who were facing mental health issues and committed suicide. On Monday night, both the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley and NBC Nightly News failed to cover this story.

It has been eleven months since the firestorm over Mozilla co-founder and just-promoted CEO Brendan Eich ended in his resignation. Eich's "offense" had nothing to do with how he planned to run the business. What led to his departure shortly after he was named CEO was that six years earlier he had given $1,000 to those who supported the California Proposition 8 ballot measure prohibiting same-sex…

Stocks took a beating yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 279 points. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ each declined by over one percent. The subject line of a USA Today email I received shortly after the closing bell crystallized the establishment press "wisdom": "Dow plunges nearly 280 points as strong jobs data raises Fed rate hike fears." The problem is that even though the…

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry infamously stated, in connection with an Iraq War spending resolution, that "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Democratic Congresswoman Corrine Brown of Florida has done her own John Kerry imitation. She was against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress earlier this week, and…

CBS News contributor and Republican pollster Frank Luntz convened a focus group on Hillary Clinton that aired on Friday’s CBS This Morning and while many expressed their frustration with the possible 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Luntz failed to mention both Clinton’s email scandal and questions surrounding the Clinton Foundation. As opposed to asking about these important stories,…

On Thursday night, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News neglected to mention video that had surfaced earlier in the day of Hillary Clinton attacking the Bush administration in 2007 over their supposed email practices. Instead of mentioning this latest example of hypocrisy by a Clinton, CBS touted a Democratic Congressman who lamented that this story is merely “in the realm of presidential…

Today House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz issued more subpeonas for documents and hardware in the IRS scandal probe. Just last week, the IRS watchdog charged with investigating Lois Lerner’s missing emails said he is looking into the possibility of “potential criminal activity.” It was also reported that Lerner raked in “$129,300 in bonuses between 2010 and 2013,” and there are at…

The major broadcast networks all ignored on their Monday night newscasts reports that a federal judge ruled earlier in the day that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had lied to Landmark Legal Foundation in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and warned the agency to cease discriminating against other conservatives. In a 25-page opinion, Washington D.C.-based Judge Royce C.…

On Friday morning at Jezebel, a Gawker-affiliated web site, Natasha Vargas-Cooper thought she had Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by the — well, you know. In a post tellingly tagged "Conservative Werewolves," Vargas-Cooper was absolutely sure — so certain that she apparently felt no need to check any further — that Walker's proposed budget would allow its colleges to "to stop reporting sexual…