Budget

At the top of Saturday's CBS Early Show, co-host Russ Mitchell cheered unions protests across the country: "Workers uniting. 50 rallies are planned in 50 states today, as organizers show solidarity with Wisconsin state workers, fighting to preserve their right to collectively bargain for benefits and work conditions." Introducing the segment later, fellow co-host Rebecca Jarvis noted how the…

CNN's Gloria Borger ripped the 87 new Republicans in the House of Representatives in a Thursday commentary on CNN.com for their "arrogance of absolute conviction" in wanting to cut the budget. Borger first labeled this attachment to principle "dangerous," and continued that the "problem" with the freshmen representatives and their allies at the state level was "their conviction that compromise…

 On Sunday’s NBC Nightly News, a report filed by correspondent Kevin Tibbles mislabeled the Democratic Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, Angel Taveras, as a Republican during the piece which recounted that the city’s school board had fired all its teachers with the intent to hire back some of them to help solve the city’s budget problems. Anchor Lester Holt briefly referred to protesters in…

Thursday, an odd warning emanated from the halls of the supposedly esteemed investment firm known as Goldman Sachs: If Uncle Sam spends $61 billion less during the second half of the current fiscal year, and ends the year with "only" $3.758 trillion in spending instead of the administration's anticipated $3.819 trillion, economic growth will be seriously harmed. Yesterday, similar nonsense…

Matt Bai’s upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine cover profile of Chris Christie, New Jersey's attention-getting Republican governor, has its questionable moments, but the overall tone was far more temperate than a teaser the Times used to promote it, featured on the front page of nytimes.com Thursday evening. The segment of Bai's long story the Times chose to highlight is one that just…

Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Malia Rulon seems to have misplaced her objectivity when she prepared a February 21 front-page report on legislation passed by the House that would reduce projected spending during the current fiscal year by $61 billion. Later in this post, I will present evidence showing that Ms. Rulon's objectivity has likely been missing in action for many years. This amount…

On Thursday's Newsroom, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux announced that Ian Murphy, the blogger who prank-called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by pretending to be billionaire David Koch, was her network's "Most Intriguing Person of the Day." Murphy is the latest liberal hero to receive this designation from CNN. Malveaux devoted a half-minute segment 21 minutes into the 11 am Eastern hour to the…

On Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, correspondent Michael Isikoff claimed a prank phone call on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker "provided his critics with evidence that his real motivation is what they've been saying all along, to crush public unions." On Thursday's CBS Early Show, co-host Erica Hill declared the "embarrassing" call revealed Walker's "plan for putting pressure on the big unions…

New York Times reporter David Halbfinger filed from Trenton, N.J., Wednesday on Gov. Chris Christie’s recently unveiled budget proposal (“Christie Declares ‘New Normal’ in Proposing Tight Budget”) and again displayed a pro-Democrat double standard. Only last week Halbfinger penned a favorable profile of Connecticut’s Democrat Gov. Dannel Malloy, who devoted half the interview to running down…

For roughly a week, a battle has been raging in Madison, Wis. Evening news programs on the three broadcast networks framed these as "citizen uprisings" over pay cuts and "eliminating unions' collective bargaining powers to negotiate wages and benefits." Reporters also portrayed this as a national union issue, but mostly failed to point out the national problem of pension underfunding…

"Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski and regular guest John Heilemann both pulled the class warfare card and pressured Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) Tuesday on why he did not raise taxes on the wealthy to cover the state's budget shortfall, rather than pushing to require union members pay into their pensions. "You're receiving a lot of criticism for only asking the other side to give,…

On CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, host Bob Schieffer interviewed Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and compared union protests in that state to the democracy movements spreading across the Middle East: "There are also reports that this could spread to at least nine other states....Is Madison, Wisconsin, Congressman, the Tunisia of American politics now?" At the top of the…

Joy Behar ripped the House of Representatives on her program on Monday for their recent defunding of Planned Parenthood. Behar, focusing on the organization's birth control services, criticized the move as "illogical...because if you are not going to help people with birth control, you're going to have more abortions. So, besides being evil and immoral and unethical, they're also stupid" (audio…

"Let's be clear: The high-stakes standoff in Wisconsin has nothing to do with balancing the state's budget." So began Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson's not surprisingly one-sided piece Tuesday: