Britain

Managing to squeeze politics into the opening ceremony of the Olympics on Friday, NBC hosts Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira cheered a tribute to Britain's government-run National Health Service, with Lauer declaring: "Back in the states...we're locked in this kind of partisan debate over the future of health care in our own country. Here, they feel so strongly about their health care system,…

"Someone should have told Mitt Romney that they still speak English in England," snarked Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza as he awarded Romney the "Worst Week In Washington" on Sunday for calmly laying out security concerns to NBC before the London Olympics -- concerns the networks themselves reported beforehand. That matches the attitude that political reporter Philip Rucker…

Not only is the Associated Press aptly currently described as the Administration's Press -- as least as long as the White House's current occupant remains there -- it also seems to be serving as the Administration's Protection. In a story about the "Lie-bor" scandal, wherein British banks have admitted to colluding to set the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) -- arguably the world’s most…

As part of NBC's wall-to-wall Today show coverage of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II celebrating her Diamond Jubilee on Tuesday, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell listed ways in which the United States has supposedly slighted the monarch over the years: "...she's put up with a lot from her former subjects. The indignity of going to where the revolution started, to celebrate the…

There ought to be a law against newscasters blatantly lying to the public. On Monday, MSNBC's Martin Bashir falsely claimed the economic plans put forth by Great Britain and Spain are "the Romney-Ryan budget in action...almost exactly, word for word" without informing his viewers that those countries raised taxes to fight their deficits (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In an interview with British Prime Minister David Cameron aired on Wednesday's NBC Rock Center, Nightly News anchor Brian Williams cautioned Cameron about one of his predecessors: "You'll concede, Prime Minister Blair may never recover from that label that was attached to him. Someone used the word 'poodle' to describe his relationship with President Bush as the march to war [in Iraq] continued…

Novelist (and Socialist Workers Party member) China Mieville wrote the main essay for the London issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, "'Oh London, You Drama Queen.'" According to him, London is a mess of racism and youth alienation, and only free public housing and celebration of loud music on the tube will save it. He also excused last summer's burning and rioting, motivated by a "deep…

London-based New York Times reporter Alan Cowell sympathized with the British off-shoot of Occupy Wall Street on Wednesday: "British Authorities Demolish Protest Camp at St. Paul's Cathedral." Moving after midnight, bailiffs supported by police officers dismantled a tent encampment outside St. Paul's Cathedral here early Tuesday, ending a four-month protest that caused tension within the…

In “For London Youth, Down and Out Is Way of Life,” New York Times reporter Landon Thomas Jr. came up with a sparkling new solution to the looters and rioters who stole sneakers and cell phones in last summer's nationwide rampage: Taxpayer-funded job training! Thomas last got Times Watch’s attention last December with his bizarre hypothetical of what might happen if Europe abandoned it’s…

British Prime Minister David Cameron was embraced by conservatives and euro-skeptics after rejecting a European Union agreement aimed at stabilizing the troubled economic union. Yet the tone of the New York Times news coverage is that he blundered, “isolating” Britain by failing to accept the accord’s requirements, including that members submit their budgets to the EU for approval even before…

The Washington Post on Saturday offered a chiding, negative response to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to veto a new European Union treaty that would have more closely bound the country and meant the possibility of new taxes. Staff writer Anthony Faiola scolded on the front page, “At the same time, Cameron made life harder for a region desperately trying to unite behind a…

Following the contemptible storming of the British Embassy in Iran by violent protestors, President Obama rightly condemned the Iranian government for not controlling the protestors and protecting a diplomatic outpost. In doing so, however, he made yet another embarrassing foreign policy gaffe: referring to the embassy as "English" instead of "British." How do you think the media would have…

If you don't hear much about the Iranian mob which stormed the British embassy earlier today in future news reports, you can probably at least partially blame the Associated Press, which considers the event so unimportant that it's not even part of its main U.S. site's top ten world stories as of 10:25 p.m. (saved here at host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes). For those…

New York Times correspondent Alan Cowell issued a moralistic “Memo from London” on Monday on the humble joys of post-World War II austerity compared to today, where the "have-nots" are tempted by things they cannot have: “As the riots in London and elsewhere in August seemed to show, the profound gulf between haves and have-nots has been magnified by the inequalities and envies of a society…