Double Standards

Can you imagine if in 2008 a prominent conservative media member had said that Barack Obama looked like a "little boy" compared to John McCain?  The echoes of liberal outrage would still be resounding today. But there was Mika Brzezinski on today's Morning Joe saying of Marco Rubio "that's a little boy." Mika made the invidious comparison to Hillary's service as senator, First Lady and Secretary…

New York Times veteran foreign reporter John Burns has retired after 40 years with the paper, closing a career of covering hotspots like Afghanistan, China, and Iraq, where Saddam Hussein threatened his life for his brave reporting from Baghdad for the Times and CBS News. A friend gave him the title to this essay of recollections of some of the worst places on Earth: "It's not how far you’ve…

Minutes after Republican Senator Marco Rubio (Fla.) declared his candidacy for president, the major broadcast networks went to work in their Monday evening newscasts attacking Rubio over his age, policy positions, and touting the “experience,” “fame,” and “fortune” possessed by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and possible Republican candidate Jeb Bush. NBC's Kelly O’Donnell shouted to Rubio…

Well, this is awkward. Undermining most of what the business press has done to try to portray the post-recession U.S. economy as performing adequately under President Barack Obama, Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff, told CNBC today that Hillary Clinton "can’t run as the third term of Barack Obama economically," because the recovery has been "uneven" and has only benefited "a small slice…

With months (really years) to prepare, the allegedly well-oiled Hillary Clinton for President machine still managed to produce a howler of a mistake in her campaign bio's debut. Since corrected, it originally stated that "she's fought children and families all her career." This and other obvious gaffes are likely destined to go unreported by the Hillary-worshipping establishment press, while the…

In the first network newscasts since Hillary Clinton officially announced her presidential campaign, on Sunday night ABC and NBC cheered Clinton’s announcement and gushed over her campaign video as well as the traffic it received on Twitter. In addition, the networks refused to label her a liberal. “The campaign kicked off with this video sent out on social media. Twitter lighting up the…

Imagine if a Republican or conservative U.S. president told an audience — on foreign soil, no less — that he didn't properly warn Americans about how long it would take for the economy to recover from a recession. "So-and-so Admits He Lied About the Economy" would be headlined everywhere. At the University of the West Indies in Jamaica on Thursday, President Barack Obama essentially admitted…

Sean Hannity tore into the latest liberal media double standard on the Thursday edition of his Fox News Channel show as the liberal media has sought to play up Republican presidential candidate and Senator Rand Paul’s temper but remain silent on Hillary Clinton’s well-known anger issues of her own. Using numerous examples and quotes from officials in the Bill Clinton administration, Hannity and…

Libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has announced for president, and the media is locked and loaded, with Jeremy Peters reporting that "Paul Gets the TV Spotlight and Turns It on Interviewers in Testy Encounters." Peters, who recently used the vaccine issue to smear conservatives as opposed to "modern science" on the Times' front page, made it clear that going after his…

It took the Associated Press barely 2-1/2 hours to bury the bad news in the Census Bureau's 10 a.m. release on February wholesale sales and inventories. As of 12:32 Eastern Time, Martin Crutsinger's 10:21 a.m. time-stamped story was not present at the AP's Top 10 Business stories page (saved at my host for future reference), making it quite likely that the news won't get much prominence at the…

When it comes to false media narratives, the typical right-winger should be more concerned with the plank in his own eye than with the speck in the eye of a liberal. That, minus the allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, was the essential argument from Heather Digby Parton in a Wednesday column. Parton sees Rolling Stone’s debunked, retracted University of Virginia rape story as one component of…

After NBC’s Today touted the latest hire for Hillary Clinton’s expected presidential campaign, Monday’s NBC Nightly News also gushed over the move while blasting Republican Jeb Bush for creating an “embarrassing situation” by identifying as a Hispanic on a voter registration form. Peter Alexander reported Clinton has hired “a former aide to First Lady Michelle Obama” in Kristina Schake, who, he…

On the front page of the New York Times sat "Religion Laws Quickly Fall Into Retreat," a label-heavy (14 "conservative" labels) 1,500-word story on Indiana's controversial religious freedom law. The Times' coverage has also been consistently slanted with both that labeling bias and scare quotes surrounding the term "religious freedom."

NBC became the first network to move on from the scandal involving Democratic Senator Robert Menendez (N.J.) on Thursday as NBC Nightly News made zero mention of the story and that entered a plea of not guilty in a Newark, New Jersey federal courtroom. As fellow networks ABC and CBS, ABC’s World News Tonight aired a one-minute-and-25-second segment on Menendez while the CBS Evening News devoted a…