Conspiracy Theories

The ridiculous media narrative continues, in spite of the mounting evidence that has proven otherwise. A movie clip posted on YouTube months ago is still being blamed for the unspeakable acts of violence that occurred over two weeks ago. The media has effectively demonized an amateur filmmaker for allegedly inciting more rage and violence in the Middle East. It's almost as if they are equating…

You'd think an image of a man violently covering a frightened woman's mouth, accompanied with the words, "He’s decided to become a father…right-wing Republicans want to make sure he does", would be considered mildly extreme, right? Not extreme enough for Huffington Post contributor and pro-Obama blogger, Erin Kotecki Vest, who posted the image to her Facebook page.

An e-mail from Daily Kos Campaign Manager, Chris Bowers announces 'big news' regarding voter ID laws in Pennsylvania.  Bowers explains: A huge coalition of 100+ labor and civil rights groups has come together to do the door knocking, phone banking and voter education necessary to make sure everyone in this must-win swing state can still cast a ballot. At Daily Kos, we're helping out by…

Matthew Yglesias has been posting at Slate.com, supposedly a paragon of online establishment press journalism, as a business and economics correspondent since November of last year. His background is unmistakably leftist: ThinkProgress, the Atlantic, TPM Media, and the American Prospect. On Saturday, a Yglesias found a blog post which was apparently too good to check at The Richmonder, a…

Politifact has set Harry Reid's pants on fire with the lie that Romney hasn't paid taxes in ten years.  Even the Washington Post called out Reid's paranoid rants about Romney, labeling his statements as baseless drivel. However, the L.A. Times seems to think this whole sordid episode is scoring points for Obama. In an obnoxious piece by James Rainey published today, the columnist wrote that "…

Jeff Schweitzer wants to help us “rediscover our inherent good, and act accordingly, individually and collectively,” according to a summary of his book, “A New Moral Code.” Unfortunately, that’s going to be difficult in this “new age of McCarthyism” in which the “Fox hydra” is “tearing apart the fabric of our society with vitriol and venom, lies and half-truths.” Yes, a news network that…

There's a clear Rupert Murdoch obsession within the headquarters of the New York Times. In anticipation of a report from the British government, the Times in the last week has gone into overdrive with front-page stories attacking the international media mogul and chief executive of News Corporation, which oversees conservative-leaning media organs and is a direct Times competitor in New York…

After reading Derek Kravitz's final report of the day at 4:45 p.m. on the housing market at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, I just had to check the other wires to see if they were sipping from the same housing-market-in-recovery koolaid. The answer is no. At Reuters, Jason Lange's 3:22 p.m. dispatch reported that "Output at U.S. factories slipped in March and builders…

Van Jones, "Lefty Dreamboat"? The New York Times assures us that yes, he is. Jones was the Obama administration's Advisor for Green Jobs until he was booted in September 2009 when his name showed up on a list of people who had signed a 9-11 Truther petition, suggesting he thought there was a Bush administration coverup of what really happened on September 11. In his new book "Rebuild the Dream…

Imagine if it were discovered that free-market think tanks were caught vetting scripts of Fox News programs, intervening to prevent free-market sceptics from receiving air time, and consulted with the network about how it should alter its programing in a free-market direction. The howls of outrage would be loud, long and unrelenting from other news networks, the wire services, and leading U.S.…

Now that Democratic mayors have turned on the Occupy Wall Street crowd, several media outlets have adopted a more critical tone, highlighting crime and squalor at such protests. A front-page Washington Post story on Wednesday wondered, "Is this an occupation or an infestation?" (Although the paper didn't get to the public defecation and rapes until A4.) On Tuesday's World News, reporter Dan…

Well, I guess it's getting serious now in the melodrama known as the Minnesota state government shutdown. If the Gopher State shutdown goes on much longer, hundreds of bars and restaurants will lose their ability to serve alcohol because they can't renew their liquor licenses. Worse, as reported by Eric Roper at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, MillerCoors, whose "brand license" somehow expired…

Via USA Today comes word of the splashy comics company Image putting out a 9/11 Truther comicbook titled "The Big Lie" (h/t to Four Color Media Monitor): In The Big Lie, the heroine is a woman named Sandra, who lost her husband, Carl, during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, she figures out a practical…

Bill Keller, the soon-to-be-former executive editor for the New York Times, writes a front-of-the-magazine column for the Times Sunday magazine. This week he had a relatively balanced take on conspiracy theories left and right, including a whopper from leftist feminist Naomi Wolf, in "Let Me Take Off My Tinfoil Hat For a Moment...to discuss why otherwise-smart people fall for crackpot…