Congress

In a news brief on Thursday, NBC Nightly News reported that one of Californi’s two Democratic Senators, Barbara Boxer, would not seek reelection in 2016 and instead retire following “a decade in the House” and her first election to the Senate in 1992. When it came to labeling where she stood politically, however, NBC shied away from labeling her a liberal or progressive.  Instead, anchor Brian…

The Esquire pundit urged Democrats to “screw with [the Republicans] every way you can… Monkeywrench the whole business and explain in simple terms to the country why you're doing it. This has to start in the White House. The rest of the country needs to be protected from the hazardous material for which a third of it voted.”

"Obama agenda, meet the wrecking ball," the Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy groused as she opened her January 7 piece, "The Republican War on Kale." Murphy took issue with Senate Republicans setting their sights on a wildly unpopular element of the Obama agenda: the federal overhaul of school-lunch programs all over the country.

Appearing on Wednesday's NBC Today to promote his new film Birdman, actor Michael Keaton oddly started the interview by taking a jab at the new Republican Senate Majority Leader: "...let me just read something. This is just too good. Mitch McConnell – this is from our boy, Mitch...Here's what he says, 'We all know that one of the things the Senate is best at doing is not doing much,' he said. '…

ABC's Good Morning America has endured an increasing amount of criticism for ignoring real news in favor of vacuous, irrelevant stories. That trend continued on Wednesday as the two-hour-long program offered no time to the convening of the new Republican Senate and House or of the GOP agenda. Instead, GMA reporters featured a full report on the "new way to fight frizzy hair." 

On Tuesday night, each of the major broadcast networks devoted time to covering the swearing in of the 114th Congress and the race for House Speaker that saw John Boehner retain his post, but not without 25 conservatives voting in dissent against the incumbent Republican. Overall, the networks lamented how the group presented “a thorny obstacle to Boehner's leadership” and, in turn, will force…

Let's imagine a white Congressman saying that when he served in Vietnam, he was never moved at the sight of a dead U.S. soldier unless he was white. His career would be over, and deservedly so, within about five minutes of his statement. If he was a conservative or a Republican, even if he resigned instantly and was roundly and unanimously condemned by his colleagues, the press would remind us of…

Longtime journalist Tim Russert, who among many other things hosted NBC's Meet the Press for over 17 years, passed away suddenly in June 2008. His son Luke now works for NBC, and among other things is a Meet the Press panelist. Based on some of his more recent output, Luke is perhaps better described not a journalist, but as the network's desginated childish, mean-spirited namecaller. After…

As Republicans take control of both the House and Senate, the New York Times is preparing the political ground for GOP failure. Exhibit A: Monday's front-page story by Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse, who quickly got to the "sour note" of John Boehner's struggle for re-election as House Speaker. Exhibit B: Michael Shear's front-page story Sunday on the GOP turning to the courts for what…

The Washington Post is positioning the Senate conservatives as “scary” in Monday’s editions. Online, the headline was “New Senate majority leader’s main goal for GOP: Don’t be scary.” Liberal congressional reporter Paul Kane relayed that Democrats think that appeasing “far-right conservatives” will lead to Republican defeats in 2016:

On Sunday, freshman Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace and slammed the liberal media in the wake of the controversy surrounding Steve Scalise (R-La.) and his alleged speech at a white supremacist conference in 2002. Speaking to Wallace, Zeldin called out the “mainstream media who look for any opportunity to try to tear down Republicans to help back up…

Reporters Carl Hulse and Robert Pear teamed up in the New York Times to lament the decline of cooperation in Congress -- a hypocritical stretch in particular for Hulse, whose reporting invariably has a partisan Democratic tone. The slant was clear in this survey of wisdom from four retiring congressmen, two Democrats and two Republicans. While dubious talk of compromise emanated from the mouths…

Chris Megerian at the Los Angeles Times, in a report first published online on Tuesday, had a difficult time trying to downplay the fact that Democrat and leftist mega-donors outspent their Republican and conservative couterparts by an overwhelming margin during the past election cycle. But Megerian made the best of it, giving readers the impression that David Koch, of the supposedly evil Koch…

Each of the network morning shows devoted some time on Wednesday to looking back at the biggest news stories of year and, while they certainly could not have included every story in the allotted time, they all failed to spend even a few seconds on topics such as Jonathan Gruber, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, President Obama’s unpopularity, and the Hobby Lobby case to name a few. In…