Double Standards

So a guy whose contract was terminated by NPR on a phony pretext for not toeing the liberal line enough, including writing a book ("Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It") which indicted the modern civil-rights movement for, well, undermining Black America, now appears to want eliminate "Constitution…

Bill Clinton has done hundreds of TV interviews since leaving office in 2001, and journalists have very rarely found it appropriate to revisit his sex scandals. But for CNN, Republicans merit an entirely different standard of coverage. On Monday's Early Start, co-host Ashleigh Banfield insisted to Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that "I got to" bring up his 2007 prostitution scandal, so she could…

Well, let's see. During the early days of the Clinton administration, we had the sad spectacle of Treasury aide Josh Steiner telling Senators investigating the Whitewater real estate deals and the Resolution Trust Corporation that that he written untrue things in his diary, i.e., that "essentially .... he had lied to his diary." During the Paula Jones trial, the jury was entertained (members…

Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s 2,400-word front-page Friday New York Times profile of Republican candidate Newt Gingrich, “Gingrich Stuck to Caustic Path in Ethics Battles,” rehashed the standard liberal storyline about the former House Speaker’s aggressive stance against Democratic corruption, which eventually won Republicans the House of Representatives. (Plus a severely unflattering photo on the jump…

Would someone please buy the Washington Post's Josh White a clue? He can't seem to get a handle on the "motive" for the actions of Yonathan Melaku (actually, I think White is pretending). Melaku has just pleaded guilty and will be sentenced to 25 years in jail. Authorities say he vandalized military grave markers, shot at the Pentagon and military museums, and was working on an improvised…

Today's report by Derek Kravitz at the Associated Press (also known to yours truly as the Administration's Press) covering the Census Bureau's December and full-year 2011 new-home sales release put a smiley-face on the "worst ever" year (the AP headline's term) in the category. I like the adjective used at Sweetness & Light's related blog post to describe Kravitz's crud: "unfazed." The AP…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Yogi Bear lived in squalor in an urban park picking fights with the cops, urinating in public, and vexing local coffee shop owners and patrons. But Washington Post Metro columnist Robert McCartney today romanticized the average Occupy DC squatter as reminiscent of "one of [his] childhood heroes," Yogi Bear.

I guess what follows shouldn't be a total surprise, given that the Obama administration was perfectly comfortable ruining hundreds of thousands of perfectly good cars during the Cash For Clunkers program in 2009. The video which follows from CBS News in San Francisco last Thursday (full transcript here) tells viewers what is happening to valuable parts at the main manufacturing plant of the…

American Public Media (formerly American Public Radio) says that its "Marketplace" program "focuses on the latest business news both nationally and internationally, the global economy, and wider events linked to the financial markets." Okay. One would expect, given the track record of leftist and communist movements and causes in ruining economies and creating unspeakable human misery, that…

New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane followed up in Sunday's edition on his controversial January 12 blog post, “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?,” in which he asked readers if the paper should be more direct in challenging the statements of politicians in its straight news reporting. As Times Watch reported, the paper already does this, albeit almost solely to Republicans. At…

"Virginia Republicans push slew of conservative bills," shrieks the WashingtonPost.com headline for staff writer Laura Vozzella's January 23 article. Print edition editors opted for the decidedly more neutral-toned headline, "Virginia GOP pushes ambitious agenda," for the January 23 Metro section front-page article. Vozzella kicked off her article by painting the GOP state legislators are…

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou has been charged today with "repeatedly leaking classified information to journalists as well as violating the federal law that forbids disclosing the identity of covert intelligence officers," NBC News's Michael Isikoff reported earlier today. Isikoff noted in the second paragraph of his report that Kiriakou "between 2009 and last year worked as an investigator…

Two examples of poor press handling of what initially appeared to be fairly good news about initial unemployment claims last Thursday got lost in the pre-South Carolina primary hubbub. The first and most obvious was in the writeup presented by the Associated Press's Chris Rugaber. In his fourth paragraph, he raised the threshold below which a consistent level of weekly claims might be…

Former New York Times reporter Neil Lewis last week defended the paper’s history of Israel coverage in a 6,500-word article posted at The Columbia Journalism Review (with a longer one to follow in a Harvard publication next month): “The Times and the Jews --A vocal segment of American Jewry has long believed that the paper has been unfair to Israel. Here’s why – and why they’re wrong.” Lewis…