Foreign Policy

The New York Times fessed up in its Tuesday edition about an erroneous claim it made nearly two weeks earlier. Mark Landler, in his reporting on President Obama's September 10, 2014 prime time address on ISIS, asserted in an article the following morning that "unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners."

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly appeared on Tuesday’s CBS This Morning to promote his latest book “Killing Patton” and was met with a barrage of questions for insisting that a mercenary army needs to be established to defeat the terrorist group ISIS. During the interview, O’Reilly maintained that we need a 25,000 “man force to be deployed to fight on the ground against worldwide terrorism.” In…

Starting Friday night, CBS began previewing an exclusive 60 Minutes interview with Leon Panetta, which aired on Sunday night, where the former Secretary of Defense said he had advised President Obama to arm the Syrian rebels as early as 2012. Despite Panetta’s criticism of President Obama’s strategy to combat ISIS, ABC and NBC have ignored the story altogether despite having multiple…

Could the "Islamic" in "Islamic State" be a clue?  Not for John Kerry.  Appearing on today's Morning Joe, our clueless Secretary of State insisted that what drives ISIS is a "radical, extremist, cultish" philosophy, but not—perish the thought!—a "religious attitude." Kerry was of course echoing the analysis of that noted theologian, Barack Obama, who two weeks ago declared that ISIS is "not…

On Sunday, CBS's "60 Minutes" will broadcast Scott Pelley's recent interview of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In CBS's promotional tease, which was broadcast on Friday, in response to Pelley's question about whether he was confident that the U.S. troop withdrawal "was the right thing to do" at the time it was done, Panetta said, "No, I wasn't." That's big news. How big? So big that,…

When White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest made his first Fox News appearance in that role, he may have thought that having Shepard Smith interview him would make the exercise a relative cakewalk. It didn't happen. Even though Smith, as Matt Sheffield observed last year at NewsBusters, is "not known as any sort of conservative," he was clearly critical of Earnest's breezy claims about the…

On Wednesday's The Lead, CNN's Jake Tapper tried to pull former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney out of acting like an apologist for President Obama. Tapper turned to his guest, who had just spent an entire segment defending his former boss's ISIS policy, and asked, "What is the difficulty in getting Arab allies to kick in with military assistance? Jay, you don't work for the White House…

On Thursday morning, CBS continued to ignore key results of the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, which show President Obama’s approval rating at 40 percent and his foreign policy approval rating at only 34 percent.  In contrast, the front-page New York Times article by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Dalia Sussman included dire statistics about the President’s low domestic approval rating: “The…

Starting off a gentle interview with United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power on Thursday's CBS This Morning, co-host Norah O'Donnell began to pitch what could have been a hardball question on the Obama administration's slow response to violence in Syria giving rise to the ISIS terrorist threat, but instead tossed out this: "When you first became ambassador, you pushed for air strikes in Syria.…

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has become a darling of the left for being an early promoter of the "you didn't build that" meme President Obama used during the 2012 presidential campaign, and for generally espousing positions to the left of Hillary Clinton. The press rushed to Warren's defense in 2012 when compelling evidence that she had used her barely present Indian ancestry to "cheat…

The major broadcast networks on Wednesday refused to cover the first hearing held by the House Select Committee on Benghazi to begin assessing what happened in the 2012 attack that left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty dead. Between their morning and evening newscasts, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and…

On Wednesday, CBS and The New York Times made the point of omitting results from their own poll which show President Obama’s job approval at 40 percent and his approval on foreign policy at only 34 percent from the newscasts and print newspaper, respectively. CBS This Morning and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley only mentioned the latest CBS News/New York Times poll in regards to how 57…

CNN and MSNBC viewers on Wednesday would have to switch channels if they wanted to watch the first hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. CNN aired a 15-second news brief at the top of the 10 am Eastern hour, mere minutes before the nearly three-hour meeting began, but didn't cover the proceedings live. MSNBC set aside 12 minutes worth of segments to the event, and sometimes showed…

President Obama cited American exceptionalism at least ten times in his speech at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa today. Early in his administration, Obama went out of his way to downplay the nature of U.S. exceptionalism, claiming that it was really no different than how any other nation's citizens saw their own country's uniqueness. So his speechwriters knew better than to use that word. But…