Labeling

The establishment press wants readers, listeners and viewers to believe that the search engines and social media are being overwhelmed by "fake news." Those making such allegations are, with rare exceptions, thinking of conservative and center-right web sites which have been countering their established wisdom and taking readers and dollars away from them. Well, if that's so, at least in regards…

At Roll Call on Tuesday, Jonathan Allen went after four-term Republican Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions with a vengeance. Even before Sessions had been nominated for a government position by President-Elect Donald Trump, Allen wrote that "the Senate should reject him for any post that requires confirmation," calling Sessions "a partially reconstructed baiter of minorities" who "is beyond the…

The two stories in the lead slot of Saturday’s New York Times under the umbrella headline “Trump Selects Loyalists On Right Flank to Fill National Security Posts” both hammered Trump’s “hard-line” national security choices. But it was Michael Rosenberg’s profile of Trump’s pick for national security, Gen. Michael Flynn, that truly lifted the hood on the paper’s seething contempt for Trump’s…

On Friday's New Day, CNN's Alisyn Camerota and David Gregory hammered General Michael Flynn after Donald Trump selected him to be his national security advisor. Gregory asserted that Flynn demonstrated "short-sighted, ignorant thinking" and apparently, "jump[ed] the shark into...Islamophobia" over his controversial remarks about Islam. Camerota played up a "fake news" post from Flynn on Twitter,…

The Associated Press's coverage of the U.S. economy is undergoing its own presidential transition. One might expect a bit of chaos as the AP moves from frequently and inordinately praising and defending the historically awful economy we've seen during the past eight years under a Democratic administration to eventually downplaying and bashing it at every opportunity once a Republican takes over.…

If it’s Friday, it must be juvenile anti-Trump fearmongering New York Times. In “Is It Safe for Me?’ Foreign Students Consider College in Trump’s U.S,” was about international college students foreign possibly forgoing American universities, or at least those in “red states,” for fear of a Donald Trump presidency. Another story found a silver lining in a surge of donations to unlabeled left-wing…

The weekend before Election Day, Jake Tapper at CNN, interviewing Democratic Minnesota Senator Al Franken, used the classic "some people say" tactic to allege that there were anti-Semitic undertones in the Donald Trump campaign's closing ad. Why? Because three of the many people briefly pictured in the ad, in which the candidate criticized the political establishment's attitudes and actions which…

Thursday's New Day on CNN harped on how supposedly for "millions of American women...the pain runs deep" in the wake of Hillary Clinton's defeat. Kyung Lah touted that "if 2016 was identity politics, women across social media feel theirs is under attack in Clinton's loss." Lah spotlighted three female Clinton supporters at UCLA. One undergraduate revealed, "I've had to wake up to the reality that…

The latest media meme on President-Elect Donald Trump is that his presidential transition effort is in "chaos," "total disarray," etc. Establishment press outlets from the supposedly chastened (but not really) New York Times, to the Associated Press, to the fever swamps at the Huffington Post, are relentlessly playing that tune. As Bret Baier at Fox News noted on Special Report Wednesday night,…

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the "everybody knows" conventional wisdom in the establishment press which never went away, even as some contrary evidence appeared, was that Donald Trump's campaign, away from his rallies, was a haphazard operation which was doing very little to identify, target and persuade voters. At the New Republic in mid-June, Jeet Heer confidently summed up the media…

Jessica Roy spotlighted Merrimack College Professor Melissa Zimdars's list of "False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical 'News' Sources" in a Tuesday item on Los Angeles Times's "Trail Guide" blog. Roy pointed out that "Breitbart, the 'platform for the alt-right' whose chairman was just named Trump's chief strategist, is on there." However, Professor Zimdars, a self-identified feminist,…

On Wednesday, ABC's Good Morning America touted the scores of high school students in the Washington, D.C. area who protested Donald Trump outside of the billionaire's hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Anchor Robin Roberts marveled, "Looking at some of those protesters from yesterday, they're too young to vote; but yet, they still want to be out there." Correspondent Mary Bruce replied, "Many of them…

The national is predictably failing to describe the true nature of the post-election "protests" and of the "protesters" involved who are upset at the presidential election's result. We've seen versions of this movie before, repeatedly. As fellow NewsBuster Jeffrey Lord said on CNN yesterday, it's been going on for 50 years — only there are now more tools available to detect what we've always…

ABC's George Stephanopoulos questioned President Obama from the left on Tuesday's GMA, as he interviewed Megyn Kelly. The Fox News host disclosed that "we're being told that Steve Bannon will really have the ear of Donald Trump." Stephanopoulos replied, "So that would suggest, perhaps, that President Obama was wrong in his judgment...when he said that he doesn't think Donald Trump is ideological…