Labeling

Newly-declared 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul took a shot at the media during a Wednesday campaign appearance in Milford, New Hampshire. An unidentified reporter asked the Kentucky senator about a recent interview he did with the Associated Press that centered on the controversial issue of abortion. Paul replied, "Why don't we ask the DNC: Is it OK to kill a 7-pound baby in the uterus?"

After all three networks declined to label Senator Rand Paul a conservative during their morning news shows, on Tuesday night ABC’s World News Tonight broke ranks and labeled him a “mainstream conservative” on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and tax cuts. Fellow networks CBS and NBC continued to not use the conservative label and stuck to labels such as “Republican” and “libertarian.”

The business press and the financial analysts and economists they consult continue to mostly blindly rely on the seasonally adjusted figures the government and other economic report generators hand them on a silver platter. If these de facto stenographers had dug just a little deeper a month ago, they might have avoided the serious embarassment of predicting a level of seasonally adjusted March…

New Republic staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has clearly run out of defenses for the conduct of those involved in the disgraceful, scandalous journalistic malpractice which gave rise to the now-retracted and thoroughly discredited "A Rape on Campus: The Struggle for Justice at UVA" at Rolling Stone. So here's her last refuge: Conservatism deserves some of the blame, because Sabrina Rubin…

Alexey Eremenko spotlighted "teen weight-lifting wunderkind and ardent Communist" Maryana Naumova in a Tuesday item on NBCNews.com. Eremenko, NBC News's Moscow producer, played up how "sports is only part of Naumova's agenda. As a member of the youth arm of Russia's Communist Party...she tours schools and orphanages across Russia to promote weightlifting." However, the journalist never mentioned…

On Tuesday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul became the second Republican to officially enter the 2016 presidential race, following Senator Ted Cruz’s announcement on March 23. However, on the morning of their respective presidential announcements, the “Big Three” (ABC, CBS, and NBC) networks went out of their way to label Cruz a “conservative” 13 times, compared to zero conservative labels for Senator…

Earlier this evening, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued its report on Rolling Stone Magazine's November "A Rape on Campus" story. The report follows up on the magazine's request of Columbia to conduct an independent review of how the disastrously false 9,000-word story made it through to publication. USA Today is reporting that for all the harsh criticism the piece's…

UPDATE, April 6: An email sent by "Virginia Commonwealth University News" insists, despite the November 2014 tweet originally found at the link about Bryan's "GoFundMe" effort, that Alix Bryan "has not been employed by Virginia Commonwealth University." Accordingly, the text in this post's final sentence now refers to Bryan's claim in her WTVR bio and at her LinkedIn profile to have received a "…

Chickens came home to roost yesterday at the Associated Press. The AP, the economy's most consistent cheerleader when a Democrat is in office, has not only been ignoring and downplaying the significance of disappointing and negative reports for several months, pinning its claim that all is well on the streak of seasonally adjusted 200,000-plus job gains seen during the past 12 months. It has…

Update, April 3: The Indiana man who claims to have been hacked now admits that he wasn't, but says he was "joking" about robbing Memories Pizza, and is threatening to sue those who exposed his (ahem) public comments.  Those of us following the Memories Pizza story won't have trouble remembering it as the years go by, thanks only partially to the Walkerton, Indiana store's fairly unusual name…

A short unbylined Associated Press report at its national site on the situation at Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Indiana this afternoon made sure to mention that the pizzeria "won't cater gay weddings" (in the headline). It also misstated the owner's statement to a South Bend TV station, claiming, using its own words, that she "said the state's new religious objections law backs their right to…

CNN's Gary Tuchman condescended towards Christian florists in rural Georgia on Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360 over their religious-based stance against participating in homosexual "commitment ceremonies," as the state hasn't legalized same-sex "marriage" yet. Tuchman used the Bible as a club against two female employees: "The Bible talks an awful lot about love and loving your fellow man....You'…

CNN's Wolf Blitzer utilized a regular liberal media double standard on Wednesday's AC360: giving a liberal guest the kid glove treatment, while tossing tougher questions at a conservative – in this case, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist website. When Hemingway underlined how Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have protected Sikhs and Native Americans, Blitzer countered,  "But Mollie, you're…