Labeling

On Friday, Salon featured two articles taking fire to presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Authored by Heather Digby Parton, one piece was titled, “Paranoid Rise of the Militant Right: Inside the Growing Threat of Domestic Extremism” and examined the Department of Justice’s new focus on domestic extremists, and the author zeroed in on right-wing extremism. The second was written by Simon Maloy, who…

New York Times reporter David "hard-line" Herszenhorn is making hostile labeling of conservatives a bad habit, especially in his post-Boehner reporting. The shock resignation of the Speaker of the House gave Times reporters an excuse to target the "far-right" conservatives who had supposedly hounded John Boehner out of office, and granting the speaker never a popular figure in Times-land, some…

The disgraceful determination of Hollywood to rewrite history not favorable to the left, its causes and its personalities has perhaps reached its nadir with the laughably misnamed movie Truth. The film is about Dan Rather's September 2004 60 Minutes report on President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard Service during the 1970s. In Rather's words, "The nuanced, not preachy, script makes…

The New York Times admitted on Thursday that a staff writer's F-word attack on former Governor Jeb Bush was out of step with their standards. Politco's Hadas Gold and Marc Caputo quoted an unnamed spokesperson for the liberal newspaper who labeled the now-deleted Twitter post from Philip B. Richardson "completely inappropriate," and stated that "the staffer is being dealt with."

On Thursday, CNN's John Berman took aim at a claim by President Obama moments after he announced that thousands of American troops would remain in Afghanistan. Berman highlighted that the President "did make clear he is not a president who has ever supported endless war," but continued that "if Afghanistan, at this point, is not an endless war, I'm not sure what is." Liberal historian Douglas…

Philip B. Richardson, a writer for the New York Times, unleashed his rage at Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush in a Wednesday post on Twitter: "F**k you Jeb Bush for telling poor people they need stronger families to not be poor. Poverty weakens families." Richardson subsequently deleted the tweet, but not until after it was noticed by several conservatives on the social media site.

The "mainstream media" came under attack at Salon.com on Tuesday. Paul Rosenberg raged against the Associated Press for refusing to use the term ‘climate denier’ after activists on the Left demanded that. Rosenberg argued that denier was more appropriate than skeptic or doubter, and gave undeserved legitimacy to the skeptic movement. Rosenberg would continue on to describe how Climate Change, or…

CNN lived up to its nickname of the "Clinton News Network" on Wednesday, as New Day played up how Hillary Clinton checked off an apparent "debate check list with surgical precision," as John Berman put it. Chris Cuomo hyped that viewers "got to see Hillary Clinton at her best." Berman also glossed over the liberal politics in the Democratic Party by underlining Clinton's "appeal to the grassroots…

The last thing the press wants low-information voters to learn is that there has been far more interest in the contest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination than there has been in the Democrats'. That disparity has naturally carried over into the size of the audience watching the respective parties' debates. Despite months of buildup to the first left-side debate of the season and…

During the 2012 election the New York Times treated Rep. Paul Ryan, currently a reluctant Speaker-elect, as fearsomely conservative. But now the paper is defending him from the "far-right" on the front page. Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer got to the labeling bias right off the bat: "Far-right media figures, relatively small in number but potent in their influence, have embarked on a furious…

Life is so unfair. "The rich" live in nicer places, have nicer amenities, drive nicer cars, etc., etc. Here's the last straw: Now they even have better breakfast sandwiches. But never fear: The press's inequality police are on patrol to supply the outrage.

CNN's Michaela Pereira and The Daily Beast's John Avlon heralded several clips from Hillary Clinton's past on Tuesday's New Day, and repeatedly touted her as "formidable." Pereira touted the footage as "some of the moments from her very storied career." Avlon hyped that Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, "have been forces for change," and asserted that "the Clintons'…

In preparation for Tuesday's Democratic debate in Las Vegas, the New York Times Sunday offered side-by-side profiles by Jason Horowitz and Amy Chozick documenting the brilliance and tenacity of the top two Democratic candidates, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. This goop was offered as a front-page tease: "He's So Confident. She's So Prepared. Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Rodham…

On Sunday, ABC's Good Morning America and CBS's Sunday Morning followed the lead of the New York Times in omitting the extremist history of Louis Farrakhan in their coverage of the "Justice or Else" rally marking the 20h anniversary of the Million Man March. The Big Three programs also failed to mention that former pastor to then-Senator Barack Obama, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, spoke at the event and…