Double Standards

I can hardly believe that the President of the United States, whose team is apparently deeply concerned about their guy's declining popularity and news stories which kept Republicans in the headlines this weekend, is going on a "Me Too" bus tour of Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois this week. The only plausible reason for this is to attempt to blunt the generally positive GOP vibe coming out of…

Sunday, Alexa Olesen at the Associated Press wrote an item headlined "One-child policy a surprising boon for China girls." My immediate comeback: "43-60 million Chinese girls aborted because they were of the 'wrong' gender or would have violated the one-child policy were not available for comment." While nowhere near as odious as Nick Kristof's "Mao Tse-tung wasn't all that bad; look what he…

Tina Brown got in hot water this week for an unflattering Newsweek cover photo of Tea Party Republican Michele Bachmann but those who've followed the current Daily Beast and Newsweek editor's career, ever since she brought her version of tabloid journalism over from England to Vanity Fair in 1984, can tell you this is just par for the course. In fact that wasn't the first time the former…

About the only "good" thing you can say about the Associated Press's coverage of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella is that they have been consistent. That is, the wire service, led by reporter Michael Rubinkam, up to and including today, has consistently and disgracefully failed to tag the infamous "Kids for Cash" jurist and his judicial colleague in crime Michael Conahan as a…

While Newsweek mocks Michele Bachmann as a crazy "Queen of  Rage" on this week’s cover, and Lois Romano in the cover story suggests she’s too submissive a wife, there’s also an article in the very same issue that champions 77-year-old radical feminist Gloria Steinem. She's apparently the Queen of Cool. Writer Nancy Hass insists that Bachmann and Sarah Palin “wouldn't be riling up the Tea…

Wednesday evening, the Associated Press's Sam Hananel, with predictable help from Scott Bauer, tried to do a Bing Crosby imitation ("Unions look for silver lining in Wisconsin recalls") in an attempt to "Accentuate the Positive" in reporting on the results of yesterday's attempts to defeat six Republican Badger State Senators in recall elections. Democrats, leftists, and public-sector unions…

Five years ago Post fashion writer Robin Givhan scoffed at the notion of modest swimwear in a July 14, 2006 column "Ultimate Coverup." Fast forward to today and the Post's Alison Lake gave Style section readers a gushy look at how "Muslim women shop for ways to bare little." "Web sites offer modest fashions suitable for summer and pool wear," noted the subheader to Lake's story.

Today CNN's Politics Web site carries the story "Republicans name fiscal conservatives to debt committee," written by Deirdre Walsh and Tom Cohen.  The piece begins: "Republican leaders on Wednesday named fiscal conservatives for their six picks for a new congressional "super" committee charged with crafting a plan to cut the country's deficit." OK, the GOP's selections would be seen by…

NOTE: This post replicates one which originally appeared on August 10 but was inadvertently deleted due to system complications two days later. For some reason, Associated Press reporters Eric Tucker and Thomas Watkins, in a story about the wave of flash mob crime in the U.S. this summer, felt compelled to find an "expert" who would express some sympathy for its participants. Well, they…

Newsweek's embarrassing cover photo of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) garnered attention not only from conservative blogs, but also from the major networks and cable news. CNN ran Bachmann's wide-eyed picture on the latest Newsweek cover multiple times Tuesday morning, asking if the picture and harsh headline were examples of media maltreatment of conservative women presidential candidates…

Communist Cuba's Castro brothers may be asking themselves why they need to engage in any propaganda on their own when they have Associated Press's Images Division promoting photos of Dear Leader Fidel Castro as "iconic" and the brutal Ché Guevera as a "revolutionary hero." What follows is the text of an email NewsBusters and BizzyBlog commenter/correspondent Gary received from AP Images on…

In an otherwise typically dismal column about President Barack Obama which is one part pity party and another part an attempt at building him a he-man reputation (not kidding), New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd describes an upcoming movie featuring the exploits of Navy SEAL Team 6 in the operation which killed Osama Bin Laden on May 1. Dowd celebrates the fact that the movie's currently…

On August 2 on the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that the economy under George W. Bush lost eight million jobs. PolitiFact, which occasionally seems to engage in verbal gymnastics to give Democrats and leftists the benefit of the doubt, was more than a little annoyed with Reid's claim, giving it a rating of "Pants on Fire." As will be demonstrated later, virtually no…

It seems that every time I see something possibly redeeming put forth by the Associated Press, they figure out a way to ruin it. Take Larry Margasak's report this afternoon on John Boehner's attempts at persuading House Republican members to support his various attempts at debt-ceiling legislation during the few two weeks. (I've made my general unhappiness with the ultimate result pretty…