Bias by Omission

The New York Times ran a lead editorial Thursday in support of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine in Paris where twelve people were massacred, evidently by radical Muslims angry at its satirical images of the Prophet Muhammad. But the Times' defense of free expression looks like hypocrisy, given the paper's pathetic past in condemning previous cartoonists for drawing Muhammad:

At around 6 p.m. Wednesday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was still wondering: "Is Islam to Blame for the Shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris?" ("Shooting?" Singular?) Maybe he still is. This was many hours after it was known that the perpetrators shouted "We avenged the Prophet Muhammad!" and "Allah Akbar!" after completing the Charlie Hebdo massacre of 12 in Paris, and after ISIS…

On Wednesday night, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored the contradicting statements made by President Obama in condemning the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris as an attack on free speech, but stating in a 2012 speech at the United Nations that “the future does not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” When it came to discussing the terrorist attack…

Correction: This post originally referred to Variety as the publication involved. It was Vanity Fair, and the text below has been corrected to reflect that. At the Daily Beast on Tuesday, Vicky Ward, who profiled Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair Magazine in early 2003, revealed that she and Graydon Carter, the publication's editor, were aware of and had specific details about the convicted…

Let's imagine a white Congressman saying that when he served in Vietnam, he was never moved at the sight of a dead U.S. soldier unless he was white. His career would be over, and deservedly so, within about five minutes of his statement. If he was a conservative or a Republican, even if he resigned instantly and was roundly and unanimously condemned by his colleagues, the press would remind us of…

In the final three paragraphs of a "Year in Review" item at the Los Angeles Times on December 31 (HT Patterico), reporter Matt Pearce joined the long list of journalists who have failed to properly characterize the evidence in Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri in August. You had to know that distortions were coming based on the rest of the article content which preceded it. The most…

In the interest of getting all supposedly relevant information out there for the public to see, the New York Times amassed an extraordinary array of journalistic resources — three reporters, three who "contributed reporting," and two others who "contributed research" — to what they must have thought was an important, underappreciated element of the saga which ended with the brutal ambush murders…

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who died on Thursday, is predictably being lionized today by USA Today's Aamer Madhani "as (a) giant in political rhetoric," and by others elsewhere in similarly glowing terms. Madhani goes on to characterize the three-term Empire State chief executive's 1984 Democratic Convention speech in San Francisco as "what is widely considered one of the finest pieces…

Call the Ripley's Believe It or Not people. Have smelling salts available. What follows will surely be one of the more unusual things you've seen or heard this year. In the midst of his otherwise odious Silicon Valley race-hustling shakedown effort, Jesse Jackson said something that made sense — so much sense that the rest of the press, which usually hangs on every word of his nonsensical…

Chris Megerian at the Los Angeles Times, in a report first published online on Tuesday, had a difficult time trying to downplay the fact that Democrat and leftist mega-donors outspent their Republican and conservative couterparts by an overwhelming margin during the past election cycle. But Megerian made the best of it, giving readers the impression that David Koch, of the supposedly evil Koch…

Let's say that a Republican or conservative governor or big-city mayor (yes, there actually are quite a few) was in a heated dispute with his state's or city's police union. Let's further say that this official decided that his or her best method for whipping up support was to order the staff to (ahem) "ask" GOP legislators or council members to issue public statements of support while bashing…

Each of the network morning shows devoted some time on Wednesday to looking back at the biggest news stories of year and, while they certainly could not have included every story in the allotted time, they all failed to spend even a few seconds on topics such as Jonathan Gruber, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, President Obama’s unpopularity, and the Hobby Lobby case to name a few. In…

Earlier this evening, Clay Waters at NewsBusters noted the New York Times Editorial Board's blistering attack on Gotham's finest. The Times editorial insisted that the NYPD has "squandered" its presumptive respect in its treatment of Mayor Bill de Blasio since a bi-racial grand jury's December 3 decision not to indict officers on the scene in July when Eric Garner died on Staten Island. This is…

The Associated Press is obsessed with global warming. It currently has seven items at its national site containing that term. Two of them relate to how the U.S. is allegedly exporting more pollution, and therefore more global warming, to other countries even as it supposedly is cleaning up its act. These are the kinds of stories which the rest of the press would eagerly jump on if a Republican…