Bias by Omission

Many of you will remember New Jersey Governor James McGreevey who ended up having to admit he gave his gay lover an undeserved State job -- even as the gay lover claimed sexual harassment -- and that he was cheating on his wife and family with that very gay lover. Many will also remember that disgraced Governor James McGreevey was a Democrat. "Many" apparently doesn't include the Associated Press…

The Big Three networks continued to ignore the party affiliation of the now-incarcerated Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick on Friday morning, just as they had done in their evening news programs the previous night. The Early Show on CBS chose to ignore the story of Kilpatrick’s arrest on a bail violation entirely, while ABC’s Good Morning America devoted one 16-second news brief to the story near…

Previous NewsBusters posts by Brent Baker and Rusty Weiss have noted the "strange" and nearly complete memory loss exhibited by the TV networks (with the expected exception of fair and balanced Fox News) and the Associated Press concerning the political party affiliation of just-jailed Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. The New York Times's record during the past seven months has been almost equally…

To paraphrase a line from my good friend B. Spears, ‘Oops, the AP did it again!' What journalistic crime has been committed this time? How about, selective memory when it comes to a Democrat running afoul of the law. Picture this if you will. The Mayor of a major U.S. city has been ordered to jail for violating bond. The MSM reports on the situation, but fails to mention the Mayor's…

If you believe that there's a 50-50 chance that your take-home pay will be cut by almost one-fifth beginning in as little as five months from now, would that belief affect your current spending habits? Of course it would. But that idea apparently never occurred to the Associated Press's Mark Jewell. In the course of a 950-word article Monday about how the rich are getting more stingy, he focused…

Former Chicago Alderwoman Arenda Troutman pleaded guilty yesterday (8/6/08) to felony counts of mail fraud and tax fraud. She faces up to 5 years in prison. The Chicago Tribune reported the story, and the Los Angeles Times published an edited version of the Trib's report.Can you guess the one word that you won't find in either story? "Democrat." According to Wikipedia, "In 2006, Troutman was…

E-mailer and frequent NB commenter Gary Hall sent me a link to a July 30 LA Times article about how worldwide AIDS deaths are down 10%. In discussing the improvement, it's hysterical in one sense, but very sad in another, to watch how reporter Thomas H. Maugh II studiously avoided using the word "abstinence" (the A-word), which does not appear even once in his entire piece. Just to be sure no…

An Associated Press article printed in the Denver Post covers a recent concern of increased prostitution at political conventions from predominantly one angle - the Republican angle. The travesty of media justice starts with the screaming headline: Groups Predict Prostitution Spike at RNC Odd that the Denver Post would print such an article, without noting that the source…

Is reporter Michael Powell at the New York Times auditioning for Comic Relief? At next year's event, Powell's headline at his August 2 story (HT Weapons of Mass Discussion) about Obama's repeated hypocritical invocations and charges relating to race (of course, that's not how he sees it), along with his report's first 10 words, would bring the house down: With Genie Out of Bottle, Obama Is…

Talk about a puff piece, this Associated Press short is a story with absolutely no substance. Not only that but after seeing the headline and then reading the story, one is hard pressed to believe they belong together. This Amy Forliti puffery is incongruously headlined "Protesters expected to transform the streets outside GOP convention into marketplace of ideas," yet there isn't any discussion…

The Associated Press has done it again, even beyond what Ken Shepherd of NewsBusters noted in a related post on June 4. In that post, Ken cited an AP report that did not identify the political party of Democratic Massachusetts State Senator and alleged serial sexual assaulter James Marzilli until the eleventh and final paragraph. AP Writer Denise Lavoie went one step further in her 300-word July…

The Washington Post's Deborah Howell has a howeller in the Aug. 3 edition of the paper revealing how shocked and amazed she was that her own paper had a lopsided tally of Obama photographs compared to how many McCain photos appear in its pages. Of course, the amusing thing isn't that the Post had far more Obama photos than McCain pics but that, regardless of the raw numbers staring her in the…