Labeling

In covering the latest debate between incumbent Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Mary Burke, the Politico's James Hohmann significantly understated the number of jobs added in the Badger State during Walker's tenure. Hohmann wrote that "Burke attacked Walker for his 'broken promise' to create 250,000 private sector jobs during his first term. He’s now at a…

Another day, another dishonest Associated Press headline. No one realistically expects the AP, aka the Administration's Press, to go after Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis for her vicious ad attacking her opponent, Greg Abbott. The 30-second ad, seen after the jump, denigrates Abbott as a man who sued for millions when he was crippled by a falling tree and then supposedly…

This morning, I received two identical daily briefing emails from USA Today. The subject line was "Life Expectancy in USA Reaches Record High." As USA Today's web-page version of the email shows, the email body contained no link to or mention of a life-expectancy related article. Giving the paper the benefit of the doubt, I clicked on the email's "5 things you need to know Friday"; it also has…

In a Thursday column for The Daily Beast, former CNN contributor Roland Martin attacked the supposed "cowardly bullies" at the National Rifle Association for opposing President Obama's surgeon general nominee. Martin's op-ed follows in the footsteps of MSNBC's Krystal Ball and NBC's Anne Thompson, who politicized the Ebola crisis nearly a week earlier when they bemoaned that due to "Senate…

It's disconcerting, and occasionally infuriating, to watch facts originally reported in some national stories disappear or get sanitized in later versions. What the Associated Press has been doing to its more recent reports on the September 25 beheading of Colleen Hufford in Moore, Oklahoma has moved firmly into the infuriating stage. Several examples after the jump will demonstrate this.

In a sign that the historical revisionists and Barack Obama legacy builders at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, may have shifted their operation into high gear for the final weeks of the midterm election campaign, Andrew Taylor has written that "Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." The occasion for Taylor's tripe is the…

Wednesday's CBS This Morning promoted an Oregon woman's planned suicide, to the point that all three anchors of the morning show acted like cheerleaders for the cancer patient. Charlie Rose lauded the "powerful" testimonial-style video from Brittany Maynard, the "29-year-old newlywed with stage IV brain cancer," as co-anchor Gayle King described her. The newscast aired 47 seconds of Maynard's ad…

Left-wing academic Marc Lamont Hill blasted atheists Bill Maher and Sam Harris on Monday's CNN Tonight for their blunt views about the Islamic faith: "When he [actor Sam Harris] says that Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas, that is horrific; it is offensive; and, as Ben [Affleck] said...quite frankly, it's racist." Hill contended that "Islam is not uniquely violent or primarily violent or any…

Managing Editor's Note (Jan. 15, 2015; 5:15 p.m. Eastern): I've republished this to the front page today given the news that Sen. Ernst will be give the official Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union Address next Wednesday. If Chris Matthews doesn't make repeated sneering references to hog castration on MSNBC next Wednesday night, look out your window. You'll probably see a…

Samuel Burke touted Amazon's new streaming TV series Transparent on Monday's CNN Newsroom as "groundbreaking," and underlined that it's "tackling a topic that TV has rarely touched." The main character in the series, "Moira," is an elderly father who begins to dress as a woman. Burke acclaimed that "this role of a 70-year-old trans-gender character might just give Netflix a run for its money."

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli promoted the cause of dissenters inside the Catholic Church on Sunday's Weekend Edition, as she covered the beginning of special meeting of bishops at the Vatican. She featured seven soundbites from four such dissenters (and didn't identify three of them as such), and none from orthodox Catholics. The correspondent also played up the "vehement response" from five cardinals…

At the end of each chorus in "I am the Walrus," the Beatles' 1967 song, John Lennon sings what is more likely than not a nonsense line: "Goo goo g'joob." Apparently, Margaret Williams, managing director of the World Wildlife Federation's Arctic program, interpreted that line as "cuckoo-ca-choo," and has gone cuckoo in talking about real walruses in the real world, blaming a large gathering of…

Yesterday's news that the economy added 248,000 payroll jobs, while the official unemployment rate dropped to 5.9 percent, generated the expected hosannahs from much of the establishment press. One utterly predictable such writeup came from the Associated Press. The headline at Christopher Rugaber's report, "SURGE OF HIRING CUTS US JOBLESS RATE TO 5.9 PCT," utterly ignored the fact that much of…