Double Standards

Celebrity chef Paula Deen has been aggressively attacked over the past week for a racial slur that she uttered 30 years ago. Countless media outlets have condemned her, and corporate sponsors have dropped her like a crate of anvils – to the tune of $12.5 million. As her empire has crumbled around her, Deen has apologized multiple times, but that’s still not enough for everyone in the media.…

The three major networks devoted four times as much coverage to obsessing over Paula Deen's use of a racial epithet 30 years ago than they did of outspoken liberal Alec Baldwin's anti-gay rant on Twitter. Over the first three days of the revelation that Deen used the N-word in 1983, ABC, CBS and NBC featured the story for 32 minutes and 41 seconds. Over the three days since Baldwin's tirade,…

At the Associated Press's Big Story page as of 10:25 a.m. ET (saved here for future reference), conditions relative to stories on Egypt are the same as I observed in the wee hours this morning: "That story (about Sunday's mass protest involving "millions" per several other news outlets) is no longer even present at all at the AP’s 'Big Story' home page." You have to click on "View More" at…

On Wednesday and Thursday, as seen in this search result at its national site, the Associated Press devoted six stories and a morning "10 Things" tease to the death-penalty execution of Kimberly McCarthy. Make that seven, as an unbylined AP story which appeared at USA Today the morning after McCarthy died appears to have been replaced at the wire service's national site by another during…

As of 9:15 p.m. (saved here for future reference), the home page at Politico had no story on developments in Egypt, even though story teases on unrelated matters from Thursday and Friday were still present. A browser search on "Egypt" within the home page came back empty. As millions protest in Egypt, some claiming in banners that "Obama Supports Terrorism, the most important story this evening…

As I noted on Friday, the final sentence in an AP report earlier that day (saved here at host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) on protests in Egypt read: "One banner depicted President Barack Obama and said, 'Obama supports terrorism.'" I predicted with little risk of being wrong that the existence of this banner would not "survive future AP reports" -- and it hasn't,…

Latest dispatch from the Department of Pot-Meet-Kettle. On today's Face the Nation, Texas state senator Wendy Davis, who overnight went from being a national unknown to a rising star who today appeared on count-em three Sunday talk shows, has accused politicians of using the abortion issue "to boost their own political aspirations."   Davis also accused Texas Governor Rick Perry and Lt.…

In Part 1 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I covered how the Bill Barrow at the Associated Press covered the religion-based aspects of former President Jimmy Carter's speech at Carter's Mobilizing Faith for Women conference yesterday in Atlanta. Carter characterized certain religions' failure to allow women to be priests as examples of "oppression," and seemed to consider them as worthy of…

On Sunday, in a report which I contend would surely have been published on a weekday -- and more importantly, published with far greater clarity -- if a Republican or conservative were in the White House, the Associated Press's Paul Wiseman essentially explored the following question: "Why aren't people spending more if they're so much richer?" The answer he found, which should surprise no…

Since Wednesday, ABC, CBS, and NBC's morning and evening newscasts have all played up the social media frenzy over Texas State Senator Wendy Davis' multi-hour filibuster on Tuesday against a pro-life bill. On Friday's Today, NBC's Tamron Hall claimed that the Davis story is "another example of how social media can turn a story into a whole other stratosphere. I think without Twitter and…

Before the government released its first estimate of first-quarter economic growth in late April, the establishment press, particularly Bloomberg News and the Associated Press, salivated at the chance to report the then-predicted "robust" annualized growth of 3 percent and to describe how the economy had "accelerated" from the previous quarter's pathetic 0.4 percent. When that first estimate…

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer has posted what he says is the substance of his entire email exchange with James Brooks of the Associated Press in the wire service's coverage of the UK Home Office's decision to ban Spencer and fellow Stop the Islamization of America leader Pamela Geller, so we can compare what actually transpired to what was published. Brooks apparently did not contact…

  On Morning Joe today, Jonathan Capehart hailed the loud protest in the Texas Capitol gallery by pro-abortion rights advocates—which prevented the state senate from voting on a pro-life bill—as an example of "democracy in action." Joe Scarborough countered that if pro-life protesters had done the same, people on MSNBC and elsewhere would be calling them an "angry, unruly mob." …

Pamela Geller announced at her Atlas Shrugs blog Wednesday morning that "the British government has banned us (herself and fellow Stop Islamization of America activist Robert Spencer) from entering the country ... In not allowing us into the country solely because of our true and accurate statements about Islam, the British government is behaving like a de facto Islamic state. The nation that…