Double Standards

Here’s more proof that the media cynically use the environment as a hammer to whack Republicans: the non-existent response of ABC and muted comment by The New York Times about Obama’s refusal to attend a major environmental conference, contrasted with their fury 10 years earlier over a similar decision by President George W. Bush. President Obama is not attending the United Nations…

CBS This Morning on Friday spun Mitt Romney's upcoming meeting in Utah with prominent Republicans and top fundraisers as a "secret summit." Just a week earlier, the morning newscast didn't even devote a full report to President Obama's fundraising jaunt to New York City, merely playing three soundbites on the Democrat's $40,000 per plate dinner at the home of liberal actress Sarah Jessica…

A June 16-18 YouGov.com poll (at Page 25) reported that 47% of Americans in a sample of 1,000 U.S. citizens 18 and over had heard or heard about President Barack Obama's June 8 claim that "the private sector is doing fine." The reaction of John Sides, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University, as picked up by Byron Tau at the Politico, is…

On June 13, the CBS Evening News devoted a story by David Martin to the Afghanistan death count reaching 2,000, as Martin interviewed a mother of a fallen Marine. CBS was alone. There was no story last week on the Afghanistan death “milestone” on ABC, NBC, the PBS NewsHour – or even on the MSNBC programs found in Nexis, including Rachel “Our Military’s In a Perilous Drift” Maddow. But the…

The Tweet watchers at Michelle Malkin's Twitchy.com caught an Associated Press reporter seeking out (perhaps the term should be "solicitweeting," with "solicitweetion" as the related noun) negative comments about Mitch Daniels on Twitter earlier today from Purdue alumni and students about the appointment announced today of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to become that school's next president…

The Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber was in mischaracterization mode again today in his coverage of the Business Roundtable's quarterly economic outlook release. After duly noting that the percentage of big company CEOs planning to add workers and purchase additional capital equipment over the next six months had declined (from 42% to 36% and from 48% to 43%, respectively), Rugaber…

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule any day now on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s presidency thus far. How the media cover such a decision remains to be seen, but between 2004 and 2008 the Court issued multiple rulings tossing out key elements of George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, the policy centerpiece of that administration. The MRC studied how the…

On CNN Newsroom this morning, anchor Carol Costello reported on "Nuns on the Bus:" "Normally, you see nuns working in their closely knit communities and religious orders. But a group of nuns in the United States, they are hitting the road," she reported. "They are taking a bus on nine-state tour.  They are protesting the Ryan budget cuts they say will hurt the poor the most. The nuns are in…

Back in 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said we were "a nation of cowards" on matters of race. Permit me to be brave and run a few assertions by you just to see whether we're on the same page. There should be two standards for civilized conduct: one for whites, which is higher, and another for blacks, which is lower. In other words, in the name of justice and fair play, blacks should…

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter got huffy in a Friday  blog post on behalf of his fellow liberal journalists, who took to Twitter en masse, aghast at the audacity of a reporter from a conservative news site interrupting President Obama's Rose Garden speech outlining his controversial new immigration policy (a version of Stelter's story also made it into print on Saturday). The…

At the rate things are going, it may be that the list of leading West Virginia Democrats attending the party's convention in Charlotte is going to be shorter than the list of those who aren't. The Associated Press reported the following in an unbylined item this evening in a terse three-paragraph squib with some pretty amusing attempts at impact-minimizing verbiage (bolds and numbered tags…

The next time a liberal friend of yours -- with a straight face -- tells you that MSNBC is concerned with substantive campaign reporting, you can throw this back at them. The Right Scoop blog has an excellent post today -- be sure to also check out Soopermexican's original post -- about how the network's latest fixation: Mitt Romney mistakenly calling the Wawa convenience store chain "Wawa's…

Matt Bai, chief political correspondent for the New York Times Sunday magazine, met up in Omaha with former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a moderate Democrat who ran for president in 1992 and is running again for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska. In his last magazine appearance, Bai typically took the Democrats's side of the debt showdown debate of summer 2011. In Sunday's profile, Bai fawned over Kerrey as "a…

So here's how it appears to me and I suspect many other news readers, never mind the real motivations. At the Associated Press, when you're covering situations like suicide bomber attacks on Christian churches in Nigeria yesterday, you hold out as long as you can in speculating about who is responsible, even though Islamist Boko Haram terrorists (and only Boko Haram terrorists) have claimed…