Labeling

A New York Times story on Friday by young Atlanta-based reporter Robbie Brown, "Mississippi Mayor Facing Trial Dies After Election Loss," dealt with the death of Frank Melton, the controversial mayor of Jackson, Miss., and included a bizarre characterization of Fox News host Geraldo Rivera:Less than two days after he lost his bid for re-election, and four days before he was to go on trial, the…

"Joy Behar has called homeschoolers demented" and "is an ongoing, non-stop anti-Catholic bigot... yet it's Elisabeth Hasselbeck" that the media label controversial, laments Media Research Center President Brent Bozell. [audio available for download here]The NewsBusters publisher appeared on the May 8 "Fox & Friends" to address how the media consider Hasselbeck "controversial" for teaching her…

Correspondent Jim Acosta, “carrying the CNN flag” on the island of Cuba, filed several reports for the American Morning program during the first week of May which slanted favorably towards an end to the trade embargo with the communist country. His May 1 report on the policy that allows Cuban-Americans to travel to their homeland featured no critics of the Castro regime, nor did it mention the…

Today's Washington Post Web site carries the Associated Press story "Who's Watching News Scorecards on Obama?"  Written by David Bauder, the piece begins by reporting:As President Barack Obama passed his 100th day in office last week, two studies judged that the news media has given him more coverage, and more positive coverage, than his two predecessors at the same point in their terms.…

While reporting on the announced retirement of Supreme Court Justice David Souter on Friday’s CBS Early Show, correspondent Wyatt Andrews explained: "Souter quickly stunned conservatives in 1992, casting the crucial fifth vote to uphold Roe vs. Wade in the landmark abortion case Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. Souter evolved into one of the court's more liberal justices." Andrews went on declare…

The evening newscasts on Tuesday night attributed Senator Arlen Specter's motivation for changing parties to how he realized he wouldn't win the Republican primary in Pennsylvania, but they also, just as they did with Senator Jim Jeffords in 2001, eagerly relayed -- without any challenge -- Specter's spin that, in the words of the TV journalists, he “had been driven out by the right-wing of the…

During the first hour and a half following Senator Arlen Specter’s announcement that he was switching from the Republican Party to the Democratic, CNN pushed the “big message” behind the defection, that “the Republican Party has moved so far to the right, that it is making itself uncompetitive in significant parts of the country, like the Northeast,” as the network’s senior political analyst Bill…

While the media are now painting turncoat Sen. Arlen Specter ( D-Pa.) as a Republican moderate who laments how the party has left him behind, a search through the Media Research Center's archives finds that the MSM have painted the Keystone State liberal anywhere from being a mere "conservative" to a traitorous Torquemada to pro-choicers.During the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in October…

A terse one-paragraph mea culpa by a White House staffer now qualifies as a "profuse apology" at least when it's the Obama White House, and the paper reporting the story is the Washington Post. That's how the paper's Tomoeh Murakami Tse and Michael D. Shear characterized an apology by White House Military Office director Louis Caldera for Monday's low altitude flyover photo-op of New York Harbor…

US News’s on-staff radical feminist Bonnie Erbe returned to attacking pro-lifers, her favorite subject of ire, in a blog entry on Monday. This time, she singled out “20-something abortion foe” Lila Rose, a junior at UCLA, for her “dishonest” and “pointless” undercover videos which she has taped at several Planned Parenthood locations. She seems to be most upset by how Rose has “created a public…

CNN’s resident curmudgeon Jack Cafferty blamed Republican losses in the 2008 election, in part, on their use of the “socialist” label against Democrats during his regular commentary on Friday’s Situation Room. After reporting on a “conservative faction of the Republican National Committee” wanting to use this label against their opponents, and how they petitioned RNC Chairman Michael Steele to…

Kansas City Star editorial page columnist Barb Shelly is miffed.  In today's "The (mis)labeling of Kathleen Sebelius," she explains why:In other words, this image that's being projected of Sebelius as some radical defender of the abortion industry is very much overstated. She's a pragmatic executive and it's ludicrous that her confirmation process has become so politicized.Sebelius is, of course…

CNN correspondent Alina Cho went out of her way to highlight First Lady Michelle Obama’s “meteoric rise to style icon status” and how it has inspired the fashion industry during a report on Thursday’s American Morning. After detailing how a dress Mrs. Obama wore on the cover of Essence magazine ended up selling well, she commented that “the bottom line is designers are looking at Michelle as a…