Bias by Omission

On December 8 of last year, at some point before hitting the "print" button, someone at the New York Times decided that a story about what has since become known as the Ground Zero Mosque needed to be reworked. Earlier that day, the Times published an online powder-puff piece by reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Sharaf Mowjood about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's GZM plans. The pair's story was revised…

CNN's Jessica Yellin, a one-time "prominent feminist activist," helped forward the talking points of the pro-abortion lobby by devoting part of a segment on Tuesday's Rick's List to EMILY List's new anti-Sarah Palin ad. Yellin aired their left-wing accusations against the Republican and her endorsed candidates without providing the other side and/or fact-checking them [audio clips available here…

Here's yet another example illustrating why one must treat the editorials at the Wall Street Journal as a primary source of hard news during Democratic presidential administrations. On Monday, President Obama visited ZBB Energy Corp, a maker of high-tech batteries in Menominee, Wisconsin. Helene Cooper at the New York Times, where a larger version of the picture at the right appeared, reported…

Memo to Alan Fram and Trevor Tompson of the Associated Press and two other writers who contributed to this report ("AP-GfK polls show Obama losing independents"): You should have taken the weekend off.When I saw a shorter, earlier version of the referenced AP report this morning, it didn't mention when AP's polling arm AP-GfK Roper had done their work. When I went to the polling home page and…

Don't they usually wait until after Labor Day to do this? Ten days ago, I asserted that that the administration's cynical use of Andy Griffith for a patently political promo on behalf of Medicare ("This year, as always, we’ll have our guaranteed benefits, and with the new healthcare law, more good things are coming: free check-ups, lower prescription costs") was "the foundation for the biennial…

File the news in this report filed late yesterday afternoon by Michael Calderone and John Cook at Yahoo's Upshot Blog under "D" for Double Standards: White House reporters mum on Obama lunch, even as papers back transparency White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who've advocated in the past for the…

Wednesday evening, Brent Baker at NewsBusters noted that two of the Big Three television networks failed to tag Dan Rostenkowsi, the former long-time congressman from Chicago who was ousted from his seat in 1994 over corruption charges and ended doing prison time, as a Democrat. Rostenkowski (RIP), who was 82, died yesterday. At the five major wire services whose reports I reviewed -- The…

There are quite a few shaky assertions in Alan Zibel's Associated Press report yesterday about Freddie Mac's latest quarterly loss ($6 billion), its latest bailout installment request to the U.S. Treasury ($1.8 billion), and the cumulative taxpayer bailout amounts that have been paid out to Freddie Mac and big sister Fannie Mae thus far ($148.2 billion) -- too many to cover in a blog post. So I'…

The past week has brought forth a couple of items from the Associated Press's -- and for the most part the establishment press's -- special corner of journalistic unreality. It is an area where human-caused global warming is still a given, and where that the nastiness known as ClimateGate that exposed the entire global warming enterprise as entirely unsupported by verifiable scientific data doesn…

While filming a segment for her new TLC program in Homer, Alaska, former governor Sarah Palin was recently accosted by one Kathleen Gustafson, a local bearing a large handwritten banner reading "Worst Governor Ever."Several news agencies and networks have picked up on the story, uncritically relaying that Gustafson is simply a local teacher. But that's not accurate, as MacRanger of the Mac's Mind…

On August 3 ("U.S. To Train 3,000 Offshore IT Workers"), InformationWeek.com's Paul McDougall reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development is operating at cross purposes with the Obama administration's stated goal to keep high-tech jobs in the U.S. USAID has since attempted to do some backing and filling about the assistance it is providing in Sri Lanka, but its arguments may ring…

What follows was eminently predictable, but noting it is nonetheless necessary. Shirley Sherrod, and to a lesser extent her husband Charles, were media celebrities for a while in late July. Readers might have noticed their near absence from establishment media news reports during the past seven days. It would be easy to think that this has occurred because the story played itself out, with…

In what I believe is the first direct acknowledgment by the wire service of what so many have known for so long, the Associated Press's Tom Krisher wrote the following in an August 5 story about plans for an initial public offering by government-controlled General Motors (bolds are mine throughout this post): Ever since the Obama administration gave the automaker a $50 billion dollar survival…