Labeling

You would think that the establishment press and the rest of the opposition to Donald Trump's administration might be able to capitalize substantively (shrieking fundraising letters don't count as "substance") on Kellyanne Conway's shaky reference to "alternative facts" about a week ago. (She should have said, "I have different, more defensible estimates than you do," because she did.) So far…

CNN's New Day on Monday trumpeted Kal Penn's online fundraiser for refugees, and gave him a platform to attack President Trump over his recent executive order on immigration. Penn underlined that "the Women's March was a great example of coming together and standing up against the, sort of, tyranny that we're experiencing right now." The former Obama administration official later cited how his…

In what seemed like the ramblings of a 19th century Luddite, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Tom Friedman appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday where he issued a ridiculous warning about the US economy under President Donald Trump. “So what’s going to happen if prices go up? American companies will build those factories here,” he exclaimed, “And you know what they'll do?…

Saturday may have been the first day in Donald Trump's presidency when members of the leftist press which so despises him looked forward to going into work. You see, people from those nations affected by Trump's travel ban were in transit to the U.S., and certain conflict awaited. The media surely must have thought they had a strong candidate for designated victim in Iraqi Hameed Khalid Darweesh…

A January 24 item in the East Bay Times, which serves the San Francisco East Bay area, wondered: "What’s behind the spate of recent restaurant closures?" While it didn't ignore the problem, the article made only glancing references to current and planned increases in state and city minimum wages. Preliminary year-end statistics at the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Bay…

All that "non-partisan" posturing, and they couldn't even get CNN to buy it. On Friday, CNN presented a segment on the 44th annual March for Life before it began. The press usually ignores the march's existence until after it has taken place, typically barely recognizes it afterwards, and almost invariably insists on describing crowd sizes which have often been in the hundreds of thousands as…

What a difference an election makes: The annual pro-life March for Life, long ignored by the New York Times, led the paper’s National section on Saturday, driven by a little political star power in the form of Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway and Vice President Mike Pence. Jeremy Peters and Yamiche Alcindor’s account was teased with a photo from the rally on the front page: “Thousands March…

One of the more revealing side effects of the 2016 presidential campaign, and especially the November election, is how old-line liberal publications which once had at least a veneer of respectability have completely gone off the deep end. Readers have come to expect completely unhinged, error-ridden material to routinely appear at places like Salon.com. But at the Atlantic? Beyond occasional…

CNN's Wolf Blitzer thrice claimed on his early afternoon program on Thursday that diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico had entered a "crisis", due to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto cancelling his upcoming meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. Blitzer trumpeted "the breaking news: a major diplomatic rift — a crisis, I dare say — between the United States and Mexico…

In a late Wednesday afternoon NewsBusters post, I commented on the extraordinary hostility reporters at the Associated Press exhibited towards Donald Trump and his administration during their first two full business days in power. In that post, I wondered if they might be carrying a childish grudge over not being able to ask the first question at Press Secretary Sean Spicer's briefings, as they…

Tuesday afternoon, the Washington Examiner broke the story of a Secret Service agent who, in October on Facebook, declared her unwillingness to put her life on the line for a potential President Donald Trump. At that point, Kelly O'Grady, the special agent in charge for the Denver district, decided to become a selective Service agent, writing, per the Examiner, that "she would endure jail time'…

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday a series of executive orders that will pave the way for the building of the US-Mexico border wall and the crackdown on sanctuary cities. The Democrats raged at the idea and the Big Three networks took exception to the orders, showing almost exclusively negative reactions. “Here in New York, a massive protest has erupted against his wall plans and policy…

Since last decade, it's been White House tradition that the press secretary typically calls on an Associated Press reporter to ask the first question at briefings. Trump administration Press Secretary Sean Spicer has not selected AP for the first question at either of his first two briefings, and numerous press outlets have noted that avoidance. It's more than fair to ask, given the tone of the…

New York Times reporter Nicholas Fandos fact-checked President Trump under the leading headline “The Truth Behind a Lie on Voting Fraud.” The paper is quite pleased with its new word, like a child who learns a bad one, and shouts it as often as it can. The online headline was even more blunt: “Trump Won’t Back Down From His Voting Fraud Lie. Here Are the Facts.”But is Trump stating a proven…