Double Standards

The New York Times apparently wants us to believe that it has done its journalistic duty by issuing a "correction," the text of which will follow the jump, to an especially odious May 12 op-ed ("Fables of Wealth") written by William Deresiewicz. The author, who describes himself as "An essayist, critic and the author of 'A Jane Austen Education,'" originally claimed, as quoted at the Media…

"In 2008, in the primaries, there were 1,365 stories on Barack Obama" and of those, "not one single story" was devoted to President Barack Obama's admitted youthful use of illicit drugs. By contrast, President Bush's refusal to admit either way on youthful drug use in the 2000 campaign was met with non-stop media scrutiny, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on Friday's edition of Hannity…

Rush Limbaugh is probably not shaking in his boots about the latest National Organization for Women “Enough Rush” campaign. MRC-TV correspondent Dan Joseph found seven women outside WMAL radio begging “Get him off the air!” Joseph made trouble with the tiny group by asking if they’re protesting Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a “slut,” will they also be calling for an end to the Ed Schultz…

New York Times legal reporter Charlie Savage showed his usual labeling blindness in Friday's piece on strange political bedfellows that oppose indefinite detention: "House to Consider Proposal to Bar Indefinite Detention After Arrests on U.S. Soil." Savage again showed himself unwilling to label far-left figures like Noam Chomsky as far-left, but has no problem calling the Tea Party "…

On Thursday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams decried a pitch to use President Obama's former radical left-wing pastor Jeremiah Wright in a campaign ad: "...there was an explosive headline this morning. The New York Times reporting that a Republican super-PAC was considering an expensive anti-Obama ad campaign that would have put the issue of race front and center in the campaign…

A quick comparable: If George W. Bush had arranged to insert "Did You Know?" promos of his administration's accomplishments and positions into other presidents' biographies on the White House's web site, does anyone think that the press would have ignored it? Not only would they have not ignored it, they and every left-leaning entertainer would (quite justifiably) have ridiculed and criticized…

On Tuesday morning at 8:30 a.m. ET, the Commerce Department reported that seasonally adjusted U.S. retail sales in April rose by 0.1%. In an 11:12 a.m. report via the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, carried at the Detroit News ("U.S. consumers hold back retail sales, even as gas prices fall"), Martin Crutsinger was appropriately not impressed: "Lower gas prices in April weren'…

As an ever-shrinking number of newspaper readers can attest, most major U.S. papers skew liberal. But its not every day the head of a union representing journalists lays out a list of goals that might have been written by MoveOn.org, and displays a contempt for democracy more at home on the editorial pages of state-run organs in third-world dictatorships. But there was Larry Cohen, AFL-CIO…

In which the NY Times reveals itself, yet again, to be a simple, partisan rag... In 2005, the Republicans in the United States Senate were frustrated by the Democrats' use of the filibuster to thwart Presidential nominations to the Federal judiciary, and were particularly concerned with the threat of a filibuster on Supreme Court nominees, which had never previously happened. Because of this…

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal reports that Newsweek's Paul Begala, the perennially trash-talking Clinton political operative, "has a tiresome paean to Dick Lugar, the defeated GOP senator who felt his opponent wouldn’t do enough to reach across the aisle." If this man didn't have double standards, he would have no standards at all. This is the same Begala that wrote in January 2010…

Here we go again. The State of California's budget is again in crisis, facing a budget deficit of $16 billion, which is $6.8 billion higher than projected mere months ago. Governor Jerry Brown is browbeating residents to pass tax initiatives in November which include "a quarter-cent increase in the state sales tax for four years and a seven-year hike on incomes of $250,000 or more that will…

Searches on "Government Accountability Office" (not in quotes), "shale," and "mittal" at the Associated Press's national site return nothing relevant to the energy-related story which will follow. A Google News search on "Anu Mittal," the person from the GAO who on Thursday testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology`s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, appears…

The headline at the Associated Press's Sunday morning story primarily about GOP presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney's commencement address at Liberty University ("Romney urges grads to honor family commitments") was at least acceptable. It went downhill from there, betraying what appear to be deeply-held biases held by writers Kasie Hunt and Rachel Zoll against Republicans,…

Let's grant that Associated Press reporter Mitch Weiss, in his dispatch Saturday on the headache Democratic National Convention host state North Carolina has become for the left, acknowledged by quoting someone else that "Nobody can sugarcoat the fact that we got problems here." That said, the AP reporter applied quite a bit of sweetener with generous pinches of distortion in several instances…