Double Standards

Tuesday's evening news broadcasts and Wednesday's morning shows allowed a scant four and a half minutes of coverage to the conviction of powerful Democrat Charlie Rangel over ethics charges. In comparison, these same programs devoted 121 minutes to exhaustively examining every aspect of the announcement that Prince William is getting married, a disparity of 30 to one. NBC's Today featured the…

The media seems to take an exceptional interest in Senator Lisa Murkowski when she’s uttering liberal talking points on ‘compromise’ or when she’s blasting Sarah Palin as being ‘not worldly enough’ for the office of the Presidency.  Case in point, as NewsBuster Brad Wilmouth pointed out, CBS recently highlighted Murkowski’s claim that she believes Palin lacks the ‘intellectual curiosity’ to…

CNN, whose new ad claims that they "keep them all honest, without playing favorites," actually played favorites on Monday's Parker-Spitzer. Hosts Kathleen Parker and Eliot Spitzer failed to give ideological labels to their liberal guests, while clearly identifying Tim Phillips as being president of "Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing group" and labeling Bjorn Lomborg a "controversial author…

New York Times reporter James McKinley Jr., who last garnered the Times Watch spotlight for cheering on the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, returns on Monday with a dismissive story on a ballot measure in Oklahoma, a pre-emptive ban on implementation of Muslim shariah law in the state: “Oklahoma Surprise: Islam as an Election Issue -- Ballot Measure on Shariah Law Fueled a Political…

NBC's Matt Lauer and MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan last night found themselves just two of the targets in the latest "Media Mash" segment on Fox News Channel's "Hannity" show. NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the November 11 program to dissect NBC's biased coverage of former President George W. Bush's new memoir, "Decision Points," an ABC News puff piece on Michelle Obama's fashion…

Thursday evening, NB's Ken Shepherd accurately pointed out how little establishment press interest there has been in prominently carrying an Associated Press report about how the Obama administration has been, in the words of the wire service's Dina Cappiello, "downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited." This is…

New York Times reporter Channing Joseph engaged in light-hearted humanizing of those stuffy Communists in Sunday’s Metro section, “Where Marxists Pontificate, And Play.” The worst thing Joseph can say about the gathering of supporters of tyrannical regimes at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan is that Communists have a reputation for “seriousness.” There’s even a boring online slide show with…

"Leading hip-hop generation intellectual" and frequent pundit show talking head Marc Lamont Hill -- who's always on the lookout for instances of "intolerance" and "hate," and has never let even non-existent instances of "racism" slip by his view -- says he knows the reason why New Jersey Governor Chris Christie won't run for president: He's too fat. On the Philadelphia Fox affiliate, Dr.…

UPDATE (1:52 PM) - Check below the fold if you're convinced this is hyperbole. Dylan Ratigan seemed to tacitly endorse violent revolution on his show Monday. He hosted far-left radical Ted Rall who, when he's not comparing "idiot" American soldiers to suicide bombers, is lauding the necessity of political violence. Ratigan opened the segment by claiming the nation may need "more drastic…

Michael Cooper’s lead story in the National section of the New York Times on Saturday, "Debunking the Myths of the Midterm," offered up four alleged myths downplaying the import of the Republican takeover of the House and big gains in the Senate. The first four of Cooper's five "myths" centered around the idea that the Republican victory and Democratic defeat of 2010 had been overstated (the…

It seems that the Associated Press is selective in correcting errors it occasionally makes in calling election results. In the case of the GA-02 Congressional race between incumbent Democrat Sanford Bishop and Republican challenger Mike Keown, the wire service declared Keown the winner at 10:55 p.m. on Election Night, only to reverse its call and declare Bishop the victor three hours later…

It's strange how this "mandate" thing works, at least at the Associated Press. In Ohio, Republican John Kasich defeated incumbent Democratic Governor Ted Strickland on Tuesday with a victory margin of about 2.5%, or almost 100,000 votes. Strickland is the first incumbent Buckeye State governor to lose a reelection bid since Democrat John Gilligan lost to Republican Jim Rhodes in 1974. In that…

Sometimes Keith Olbermann struggles with reality. But he's apparently found a solution: insist that 2+2=5 and hammer with insults anyone who says otherwise. That was his strategy today when he flatly denied he had ever claimed that "cocky" was a "code word" for various racist attacks against President Barack Obama. Shown video of him saying just that, he denied it some more, and then started…

An hour after the panel on the November 1 edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" glorified the show's sanity and stability in the midst of a polarized news media environment, co-host Mika Brzezinski snidely blurted out that Sarah Palin is quite lost on reality in her possible 2012 presidential aspirations. "There's a thing called Kool-Aid, and if you drink too much of it you become less self-aware…