Bias by Omission

As pro-Palestinian media members blame Israel for the recent hostilities in that part of the world, there's an incontrovertible truth being shamefully ignored: rocket and mortar attacks coming from Gaza into Israel have dramatically increased since Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006.Such was reported by the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center Thursday in an analysis…

Failing to Grace the WaPo Front PageThe Washington Post has certainly taken a timeworn media tack in it's coverage of the latest instance of Israel stubbornly insisting on continuing to exist.  That being: keep nearly all mentions of the prolonged and incessant attacks of Israel by the Palestinians off the front page and to an absolute minimum, then deliver maximum coverage of the Israelis'…

"Garbage piles up, even after snow has melted," reads a December 29 Seattle Post-Intelligencer story posted to the Web site Sunday evening. Yet nowhere in the story by staffers Brad Wong or Eric Nalder was any blame for the garbage glut laid at the doorstep of the city's Democratic chief executive. Mayor Greg Nickels may be partly to blame for the trash backlog because of his stubborn refusal to…

Here are the key numbers (in red) in Uncle Sam's November Personal Income and Outlays report (the July : Common sense says that the chart's results after adjusting for inflation are more important (identified as "Chained [2000] dollars") than those in current dollars. Consmers' disposable income went up 1.0% in real (after-inflation) terms in November after a 0.7% increase in October. It took a…

I held this item for a couple of days after I found it because I didn't want to spoil Christmas. Readers can fairly criticize me for waiting. It is truly astonishing how little attention this two week-old story has received (Warning: Very disturbing content; the underlying news at caritas.org is here; bolds are mine) Out of food, Zimbabweans eating cow dung Harare, Dec 10, 2008 / 08:01 pm --…

You would think from reading yesterday afternoon's report by the Associated Press's Tom Murphy that companies like Toyota, Nissan, and Honda are not that far from finding themselves in the situations US taxpayer bailout recipients General Motors and Chrysler are in. Murphy tries mightily to make the foreign-owned companies' situations look serious, at one point even putting out the howler that…

Each year, with the onset of Christmas, we are treated to another gauzy, fluff piece about how great Kwanzaa is by yet another PC spewing newspaper columnist. This year, among many others, we find aggrandizement such as the Progressive's "Kwanzaa is more relevant than ever in recession," the Chattanooga Times Free Press with their titled, "Common ground," or the one from the Providence Journal…

It's almost as if the Associated Press's Ian James and the wire service's headline writers think that Hugo Chavez's latest announcement that he plans to expropriate a huge, city block-sized, nearly complete shopping mall is sort of cute and quirky. James even gave it a "clever" name: drive-by socialism. My post at NewsBusters yesterday noted that James's initial report Sunday evening was short on…

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's three-year lurch to the left, with the enthusiastic assistance of Democratic majorities in the state's legislature, has sent the state's fiscal situation once again into Gray Davisland -- and this time, unlike in November 2003 when he took office, the Governator doesn't have a growing economy to make getting out of the mess easier. The state's…

Two situations over the weekend illustrate that the Associated Press's habitual failure to identify the political party of Democrats in trouble is more than likely a conscious decision. This is despite the AP Stylebook's guidance (as of 2000, the latest free edition I can find; a PDF is here) that a reporter should "include party affiliation if readers need it for understanding or are likely to…

In its year-ending double issue Newsweek couldn't resist injecting liberal media bias into its mini obituaries entitled "Remember Them Well."Yet the newsmagazine seemed to forget, perhaps intentionally, the left-of-center politics of prominent liberals profiled while using terms like "far-right" to describe the politics of deceased conservatives such as Paul Weyrich. But wait, there's more,…

Journalists, consider yourselves warned. Columbia Journalism Review worries government-run health care might not come to pass; indeed, ideas for consumer-driven health care could "seep" into media coverage. CJR's Trudy Lieberman announced it was "ominous news" that a government health insurance plan might be delayed: "Ezra Klein over at The American Prospect’s blog was right on point last week…

Hugo Chavez has announced that he plans to expropriate a huge and nearly complete shopping mall in Caracas. The Spanish language web page of Constructora Sambil that describes the project (pictured at the right) says that it's 21,600 square meters. Chavez appears to have no idea what he will do with it. The Associated Press's Ian James apparently had no idea what to do with that shocking bit of…

Associated Press writer Glen Johnson's story on the indictment of a close friend of Salvatore DiMasi, Massachusetts's Democratic Speaker of the House, is the latest in a long line of fairly long stories about Democratic politicians in trouble that fails to identify their party affiliation.The story names a half-dozen politicians, all of whom are Democrats, without identifying the party of any of…