Bias by Omission

At the Associated Press this afternoon, reporter Ben Nuckols opened his report on the completion of Occupy Wall Street's "Occupy the HIghway" march thusly: "Drenched, blistered and weary, a few dozen Occupy Wall Street protesters arrived Tuesday in the nation's capital after a two-week, 240-mile march from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan." Anyone reading Nuckols's opening statement would…

Give John Nolte a gold star. In a Friday post at BigJournalism.com entitled "Panicked AP Attempts to Memory-Hole Democrats’ #Occupy Endorsements," Nolte latched onto the beginnings of the establishment press's desperate attempt to distance President Obama and the Democratic Party from the rapidly devolving Occupy movement. The disingenously headlined item Nolte caught, apparently from an…

The dictionary definition of "stimulate" relevant to a nation's economy is "to rouse to action or effort." We still have journalists who gullibly relay the notion that extending unemployment benefits and increasing entitlement programs will "rouse" the economy "to action of effort," despite almost three years of evidence that such is not the case. One of them is Andrew Taylor, a writer for…

In their deeply deceptive Friday morning story ("Deep spending cuts pose a new threat to US economy") about how the bicameral bipartisan supercommittee is supposedly going to hurt the economy with whatever results from its handiwork, Christopher Rugaber and Daniel Wagner of the Associated Press, aka The Administration's Press, "somehow" forgot to include one "little" detail, and deferred…

You can't make this up: The ever-careful Essential Global News Network known as the Associated Press actually believed that a guy who has been on a DC sports show for several football seasons impersonating Christopher Walken was actually Christopher Walken. After excerpting several paragraphs from AP's unbylined (naturally) mea culpa (saved here at host for future reference, fair use and…

On Friday, CBS's Early Show was the only Big Three morning show to cover Energy Secretary Steven Chu's testimony before a congressional hearing on the $528 million loan to the bankrupt solar panel company Solyndra. NBC previewed the hearing on Thursday's Today show, but avoided it the following morning. ABC's GMA completely ignored it both days. Fill-in news anchor Betty Nguyen gave a 44-…

Bill Randall is a candidate for Congress, running in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.  Mr. Randall also happens to be an African-American.  In early October, Randall had a campaign billboard vandalized with a spray-painted, vulgar phallic symbol, accompanied by the letters "KKK”. It was the kind of message that would normally launch the media into full-blown racial apoplexy.  One…

A day after Times Watch noted that the New York Times virtually ignored Obama’s supposedly “famous”  “57 states” gaffe during the 2008 campaign, reporter Michael Shear rectified that omission, albeit in a story on gaffe-prone GOP candidates, "Flubs Rubbing Some Republicans the Wrong Way," in Wednesday's paper.

This one's utterly predictable, but still needs to be noted. As Edwin Mora at CNS News reported on Wednesday, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, after a Congressional Progressive Caucus-sponsored event at the Capitol, “when asked to comment ... about the deaths and crimes that have occurred around Occupy protests being held across the country, … said 'that’s life and it happens.'" What's…

Time's Tim Padgett regurgitated just about every liberal talking point on abortion in an online column on Thursday which tried to claim that the Catholic Church's pro-life efforts in the U.S. were pointless and out of step with the laity: "Aren't they just wasting our time as well as their own?" Padgett cherry-picked from Church documents and quoted from the infamous pro-abortion front group…

CBS's Chris Wragge spotlighted a millionaire's bid to raise taxes on the rich on Thursday's Early Show, all the while omitting that his guest is a big money donor to liberal candidates like Al Franken and to Moveon.org. Wragge didn't bring on any opponents of higher taxes, nor did he play sound bites from them. Instead, he played three clips from proponents, including former Clinton aide Robert…

Updated : More analysis added. As reports started coming out on Wednesday on the search for White House shooting suspect Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, one common detail was mentioned, including in The New York Times: "Late on Friday, the police searched the Occupy DC protest camp...after reports that the suspect might have spent time there." NBC, ABC, and CBS left that fact out of their…

The Washington Post, no conservative paper it, gave front-page coverage today to the latest development in the Solyndra scandal: E-mail records show that the Obama White House urged the solar energy company to postpone layoffs until after the 2010 midterm elections. "The announcement could have been politically damaging because President Obama and others in the administration had held up…

Give Ben Hirschler and Kate Kelland at Reuters credit for a fair presentation this morning of the relative progress made in adult stem cell research compared to that achieved thus far in the embryonic arena. Maybe it was because they were reporting from London, where the constraints of insufferable political advocacy in journalism seem (sad to say) less present than they are in the U.S.…