Double Standards

The Associated Press is blatantly proving it’s going to make Campaign 2012 a long, biased slog for Republicans. Just take their news coverage of jokes. On Thursday, Democratic objections to Mitt Romney were front and center in an article titled "Democrats criticize Romney for ‘unemployed’ joke." But on Tuesday, President Obama’s lame joke about no "shovel-ready" jobs was relegated to paragraph…

CBS hounded four Republicans from the left during a town hall on the economy which aired on Tuesday's Early Show. Bob Schieffer, Erica Hill, and Rebecca Jarvis pressed Reps. Paul Ryan and Allen West, Senator Tom Coburn, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to consider tax hikes to deal with the deficit. Schieffer also specifically accused the three members of Congress of "doing nothing" to…

Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart has had his share of tussles with the media. He’s certainly known for that among liberal journalists who, in the words of the New York Times “hold their noses at the mere mention of his name.” That mistrust has been borne out in the media’s general lack of interest in the stories pushed out by such Breitbart franchises as Big Government or Big Hollywood…

Many people, including yours truly, believe that one of the primary reasons for the Politico's existence is to carry negative stories about Democrats and leftists which the rest of the establishment press then mostly chooses to ignore ("Why should we cover that? It's at the Politico already"). President Obama's more than half-empty campaign fundraising stop in Miami Monday is a case in point…

Not with a bang but with a whimper. Reporting from Juneau, Alaska, New York Times reporters Jim Rutenberg and William Yardley wrapped up Sunday the less-than-earthshaking findings from the media’s bizarre full-court press to see three-year-old emails from Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska governor -- “Palin’s E-Mails Undercut Simplistic Views of Her, Both Positive and Negative.” In the three years…

If the big media in 2008 had dedicated the resources they are now squandering on Sarah Palin's emails from when she was governor of Alaska and probed Barack Obama's background and associations, she might now be vice president of the United States and Obama might still be a junior Illinois senator. Regardless of what you think of Palin, the vultures attacking her 24,000 pages of emails may…

MRC Director of Media Analysis and NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham appeared on the June 10 edition of FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor to document the broadcast networks’ double-standard on congressional sleaze stories. When the story first broke, ABC, CBS and NBC refused to cover the Weiner “sexting” scandal, and their overall weekday evening news coverage had amounted to less than a dozen…

Michael Shear, chief writer for the New York Times’s “Caucus” blog, sounded sarcastic and bitter, almost angry, at the opening of the paper’s last “Caucus” podcast on Thursday about having to talk about the Anthony Weiner sex scandal. Host Sam Roberts: “But you pointed out that this is a particularly inopportune time for this latest sex scandal to break in Washington. Why is that?” Michael…

Yesterday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted a reluctance on the part of Associated Press reporters to describe the farm involved in "the world's deadliest known outbreak of E. coli" as "organic." The wire service issued two additional reports this morning, both of which failed to use the "O-word." The case for the use of the word in these reports is as strong, if not stronger, than it…

On Wednesday evening in Europe (12:31 p.m. Eastern Time), in what it was already describing as "the world's deadliest known outbreak of E. coli," the Associated Press reported that "No cause for the outbreak has yet been found," while farmers on the continent were petitioning the EU for hundreds of million of dollars in compensation. By midday European time (6:27 a.m. ET) on Friday, June 10,…

"I've never seen the news media do this, and it is beyond reproachful for them to have done this," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell complained on the June 10 "Fox & Friends" regarding the New York Times and Washington Post calling for readers to volunteer to help them comb through the archive of Sarah Palin's official gubernatorial e-mail correspondence. For the full segment, click the…

Another day, another New York Times story by Katharine Seelye story on liberal Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards that completely leaves out the words "liberal" and "Democrat" -- an admiring profile of Edwards’s loyal daughter, "For Edwards’s Adult Daughter, A Recurring Role: Family Glue," which led Thursday's National section. Seelye’s initial online story on Edwards’s…

There must be something in Chicagoland's drinking water which causes either acute memory loss or a persistent inability to pay attention. First, we had presidential candidate Barack Obama, who sat in Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ for nearly two decades, but who supposedly had no idea Pastor Wright was so hostile towards America ("US KKK of A"), its history (we deserved the…

Good news, we’re doomed, says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in Wednesday’s "The Earth Is Full." (Has the globe-trotting Friedman never been to Texas?) But we can still save ourselves eventually, as long as we realize that "the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less." But does…