Labeling

There was much media angst over Donald Trump declaring he would be a dictator on “Day One” of a second term in office to promote border security and oil drilling. Scrape off the spicy language, and it sounds more like the standard executive orders every president issues upon taking…

PBS NewsHour anchor Geoff Bennett was right about one thing regarding a new book by journalist Joshua Green, The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle For a New American Politics: "what doesn't get nearly as much attention is the far left's influence in the Democratic Party." But the Green interview skipped controversies and any…

2024 is bound to be not only one of the most monumental years in American history, it ventures to be among the most chaotic. So, before we dive head first into 2024 at midnight, let’s look back one last time at 2023 to look at what stories you, the readers, visited the most on NewsBusters. As always, we can’t thank you enough for not only your readership, but also financial support. Amid a…

In a year-ending hour-long PBS election special America at a Crossroads, former NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff uncorked a  history of "mean" political debate and violence all conveniently came from the right, with leftism identified as going forward and MAGA going backward, bookended with bits of Woodruff labeling bias, from 1984 to 2023.

As testimony in the New York civil trial against Donald Trump’s businesses concludes this week, it’s worth asking why the networks are refusing to accurately describe New York Attorney General Letitia James as a Democratic partisan? Because, after all, she is.

Local “enterprise reporter” Christopher Maag’s latest New York Times byline boasted of having “spent four weeks reporting in Paterson and Clifton, N.J., interviewing members of the Palestinian community,” and the resulting journalism certainly identified with the Palestinian cause, with added melodrama that started in the headline: “In a Place Called Little Palestine, People Feel…

Thursday’s New York Times featured “Gaza War Widens Gap Between Arab Rulers and Citizens” by Vivian Nereim, the Gulf bureau chief for the Times, based in Saudi Arabia. Nereim offensively portrayed those Arab leaders who dare agree to accept Israel's existence as pampered and privileged, in contrast to the poor citizenry marching in the streets of the Middle East country of…

Tuesday’s CBS Mornings had a piece in the second half-hour peddling a tiresome liberal media trope of melting down over election results that don’t go their way, especially when it comes to bemoaning the “far right” and “hard right” in Europe. This time, they bemoaned the “hard-right,” “populist,” “right-wing” “backlash” that’s “shak[ing] up politics across Europe”, most notably in…

New Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (LA) certainly isn’t getting a honeymoon at the New York Times. The paper’s chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse is both a veteran correspondent and a long-time player of the labeling bias game, as he showed in his Sunday edition story. The labeling slant started in the headline: “Mike Johnson's Rise to Speaker Cements Far-Right Takeover…

After the Democratic Mayor of New York City was hit with a $5 million sexual assault suit, ABC and CBS hid Eric Adams’ party identification in their Thursday evening and Friday morning coverage. NBC failed to cover the story at all.

One definition of genocide given by the United Nations is “a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Hamas wants to wipe Israel’s Jews off the map and have Islamic control “from the river to the sea,” a slogan both sides have previously recognized as a genocidal statement. But is Hamas ever accused of genocide in the…

The “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC unsurprisingly failed this week to convey even the most basic facts about what they’ve insisted were “thousands of pro-Palestinian” marchers “ma[king] their voices heard” this past weekend — including in Washington D.C. — when the more adept description would be pro-Hamas rallies calling for Israel’s eradication and support for Hamas’s October 7…

The New York Times ran a story by Robert Jimison on Friday that was immensely sympathetic to the fiery progressives in Congress unable to make political progress against a “far right” that “wrought havoc”: “Left-Wing Freshmen in a Right-Led House.” The paper actually put an unflattering label on a Democrat (albeit with an “ultraconservative” to balance it out).

Thursday’s CBS Evening News chose continue to early browbeating of the public into turning against the calm and steady new House Speaker, Mike Johnson (R-LA) by trashing him as “anti-LGBTQ,” “an election denier, climate skeptic,” and “staunch conservative” whose overall politics is riddled with “far-right stances.”