Events

In case you missed it, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have requested disaster relief assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to recover costs incurred during that city's April riots. You read that right. Yvonne Wenger at the Baltimore Sun predictably buried the lede in her May 26 story's third paragraph, giving uninitiated readers the impression that…

The headline is already gone from the Associated Press's national site, but it's still present elsewhere. In the context of events in Ferguson and elsewhere since August of last year, one could argue that it contains more truth than the wire service and the headline's accidental creators will ever admit.

Of all the rotten reasons not to execute Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, we'll give the booby prize to the one offered by Paul Raushenbush, a HuffPo religion editor and ordained American Baptist minister. On today's Melissa Harris-Perry show, Raushenbush imagined that in twenty years, Tsarnaev might become "a spokesperson for reconciling Islam with America. We don't know what this life is going to lead to."…

For the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack, this past weekend’s commemoration yielded a “fairly astonishing” juxtaposition of President Obama’s “largeness of spirit” and Republican apathy, or worse. In a Washington Monthly blog post, Pollack argued that the low GOP turnout for “an event sacred to African-Americans sent an unavoidable message: These are not our people...Such discomfort with a…

The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman argues that Republican base voters routinely wind up hurting the party’s center-right presidential nominee because he feels he has to throw them one or more bones: “Poppy [George H. W. Bush] didn’t really need to promise no new taxes, but it was a broken promise that cost him dearly. [John] McCain overcompensated for his weakness with the base by giving us…

Joe Scarborough is shocked by the outpouring of "sheer hatred, snarkiness and snideness" directed at Brian Williams.  On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough drew a contrast between himself, who as an opinion person has to expect much criticism, and Williams, who he claimed reported the news in a "straight" way.  But as Newsbusters and our parent MRC has carefully documented, Williams has been…

In his story on Brian Williams at 10:55 p.m. ET Tuesday, Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine reported that the now-suspended anchor and his agent "were presented with a dossier of Williams' apparent lies," and that "Williams himself was only slowly grasping the depths of the mess he'd created." That begs the obvious question of whether the public will ever get to know what's in that "dossier,"…

This is for the "false memories" and "he's an untouchable 'brand' crowds defending Brian Williams, who this afternoon announced that he has "decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days." At the 2-minute mark of the 2007 interview with a collegiate reporter following the jump, watch Williams speak of his alleged brushes with danger, including how he "looked down the…

In a softball interview with Joe Biden on Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer fretted over there being "more tension than normal" during Tuesday's State of the Union address with Republicans in control of Congress and slammed GOP reaction to a line in the speech: "...the President was talking about having arguments that are worthy of the body and the country, and then he said, 'I've run my…

On Saturday, in a post titled "Political Correctness Kills in Paris, Terrifies Media," Jeffrey Lord at NewsBusters cited how the New York Times, in covering the Charlie Hebdo massacre, deliberately changed a story subject's quote from what it originally reported. This post will show how the message massagers at the Times subsequently went another step further, attempting to convince readers that…

Thus far, the nation's de facto news gatekeepers at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, have utterly failed to address the growing worldwide controversy over the absence of U.S. representation above the ambassador level at Sunday's solidarity march in Paris in the wake of Wednesday's Charlie Hebdo massacre. Crowd estimates for the Paris march range from "hundreds of thousands"…

The list of unhinged statements and rants coming from left-leaning journalists in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris is getting miles long. Among them all, one especially sticks out. In one of the earliest retreats to twisted, gutless characterizations of the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who is also ABC's global affairs anchor, called them "activists." Greg…

CNN's Jim Clancy has been with the network for 32 years. His network's bio says that he "brings the experience of more than three decades covering the world to every newscast on CNN International." He also apparently has a lot of pent-up feelings about the Middle East. Those feelings boiled to the top over Twitter early Thursday. Clancy started it all by claiming that the cartoons published by…

At around 6 p.m. Wednesday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was still wondering: "Is Islam to Blame for the Shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris?" ("Shooting?" Singular?) Maybe he still is. This was many hours after it was known that the perpetrators shouted "We avenged the Prophet Muhammad!" and "Allah Akbar!" after completing the Charlie Hebdo massacre of 12 in Paris, and after ISIS…