Bias by Omission

Friday's CBS Evening News featured a previously unaired portion of Scott Pelley's softball interview of President Obama on his recent meeting with Pope Francis. The Vatican noted on Thursday that "there was a discussion on questions of particular relevance for the Church...such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection" – a reference to the Catholic…

It's no secret that the folks who run the New York Times are big fans of gun control. It turns out that they also favor controlling the use of the word "gun" in headlines about Democrats. Over at National Review's Campaign Spot yesterday, regarding the news of Democratic California Senator Leland Yee's arrest, Jim Geraghty noted: "The New York Times greeted that news with a one paragraph…

As I noted on Saturday, the idea that a state with about $6 billion in overdue unpaid bills would choose to raise taxes and apply the money to new spending is appalling. But when it comes to describing a state's finances, "appalling" and "Illinois" have belonged in the same sentence for so long, it's hard to remember when that wasn't the case. Part of the reason that such proposals gain…

Friday's CBS Evening News picked up where the Big Three morning shows left off earlier in the day and trumpeted how "visitors have been surging to [HealthCare.gov] – about one-and-half million a day." Scott Pelley did give a bit of slightly bad news during his 16-second news brief, noting that "today, the ObamaCare website was taken down for about 20 minutes, to fix a problem that affected log-…

On Wednesday Fox News reported that House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa threatened to hold the IRS commissioner in contempt of Congress if he didn’t hand over emails from Lois Lerner and other IRS officials. So far none of the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network evening or morning shows have mentioned the latest development in the ongoing investigation of the…

Call it low-information voter outreach. An email yesterday from CNNMoney touted how fantastic it was that Obamacare enrollment has reached the six million threshold, even describing it as a "symbolic victory." Though the underlying article by Tami Luhby at least noted the problems with that 6 million figure, those problems should have been enough to negate that characterization. Instead,…

Imagine it's March 2006, some eight months before the midterm elections in an unpopular President Bush's second term, and the Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has this nasty habit of running afoul of the Federal Election Commission over pricey gifts for campaign donors. The media would most certainly have a field day with the revelations. But alas, it's March 2014 and it's Sen.…

This post builds on Geoffrey Dickens' post late this morning ("American Horror Story: Tales of ObamaCare Victims Untold by the Big Three Networks") about the virtual lack of any kind of coverage of the real people affected by Obamacare. Perhaps some readers believe that little coverage is occurring because there are few if any local situations worthy enough to rise to the level of national…

If a government program signed into law by former President George W. Bush was causing cancer patients to go broke, brain tumor victims to pay more for their insurance, and was leaving HIV/AIDS patients in the lurch - you can bet the Big Three news networks would’ve packed their shows with these tragic tales. But these horrific stories and more, all caused by ObamaCare, have yet to be given…

One of the odd things about the weekend pot-stirring by Matt Drudge over his stated inclusion of one-quarter of his estimated 2014 "Obamacare penalty" tax for not carrying health insurance coverage this year — calling it a "liberty tax" — is that few if any of those who criticized him seem to have bothered to consult with a tax practitioner for an expert take on the matter before what we now…

"More time for health sign-up" cheered the Washington Post front-page headline for Amy Goldstein's March 26 story on the administration's latest ObamaCare delay, this time for the individual mandate which requires Americans to be insured so as to avoid paying a "tax" penalty. In an amazing dereliction of her journalistic duty, Goldstein utterly failed to mention that just two weeks earlier HHS…

On Monday, The UK's Daily Telegraph spotlighted the scoop of another British media outlet, Channel 4, which discovered the beyond abhorrent practice of 10 NHS hospitals incinerating over 15,000 bodies of unborn babies from miscarriages and abortions. The investigation by the Channel 4 program Dispatches found that some of the infants' remains were even used to heat the medical facilities.…

Here's an example of a gaffe which the left-loving press can't ignore — at least online. Democratic Congressman and U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Braley of Iowa spoke of the mortal dangers the nation faces if Republicans win back the Senate in November at a trial lawyers' fundraiser in Texas in January. Among those dangers is the near certainty that "a farmer from Iowa who never went to law…

A search on the name of James Risen (not in quotes) returns nothing relevant at the Associated Press. All that comes back at the Politico is a link to a post yesterday at Dylan Byers' On Media Blog containing one pertinent sentence: "James Risen slams the Obama administration." Whoopee. Risen is the Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist for The New York Times who has been in the Obama…