Media Bias Debate

Ever since Greta Van Susteren resigned from her weeknight On the Record program for the Fox News Channel on September 6, a great deal of speculation has centered on where the former criminal defense and civil trial lawyer would turn up next, with many pundits predicting that she would join the team on MSNBC.

Washington Post writer Callum Borchers lost it in a Thursday morning post reacting to the beating of a disabled white Chicago man by four African-Americans, lashing out at conservatives for condemning the mainstream media’s slow response and lampooning them as concerned with anti-white racism.  

You simply can’t make this up. The mood was grim on Wednesday’s Hardball as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Mother Jones editor David Corn, and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wallowed in how President-elect Donald Trump created a landscape where the news media is so distrusted that people might soon not trust movie times in newspapers.

A new poll released on Wednesday by Rasmussen Reports found that nearly half the American people are still convinced that the media are biased against President-elect Donald Trump since Election Day. Rasmussen reported that 48 percent “of all Likely U.S. Voters believe most reporters are biased against the president-elect” while “12% think they are biased for Trump, while 31% feel most reporters…

In the introduction for CNN’s book Unprecedented, CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley fawned over Hillary Clinton as “an avenging Joan of Arc” with an “appearance of elitism” losing to “a P.T. Barnumesque lead figure in Trump.” Brinkley also had plenty of scorn for Trump and praise for Bernie Sanders, spinning that Sanders “rose above the temptation to join Republicans in calling into…

The media remain steadfast in their opposition to now-President-elect Donald Trump.  In their attempts to deny him first the office and now legitimacy therein, they have come up with all sorts of shorthand descriptives that are either vague or outright disingenuous. One of the most annoying of these - is “Donald Trump is anti-(free) trade.”

On NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Chuck Todd devoted a whole hour to analyzing Trump vs. the Press, but he worked energetically to avoid the notion the media lost trust because it's seen as part of the Democratic National Machine. There were no questions about whether they failed in being too soft on Hillary Clinton, because they never think they've been too soft on Democrats. Todd displayed the…

In the mid-1990s, when the great Norm Macdonald was kicking off his “Weekend Update” segments of Saturday Night Live with, “And now, the fake news,” pretty much everyone knew what he meant. These days, however, disputes over definitions of “fake news” seem as common as fake news itself. It may be that the lefty writer angriest about fake news is media critic and political blogger Allison…

Fox News analyst Juan Williams offered a grand political post-mortem in The Hill newspaper this week: “Let’s agree on one fact: Donald Trump upended the political world with his win. But that incredible upset left an incredible hangover. The facts of political life are now subject to partisan interpretation.” So before 2016, the media had never offered facts with a “partisan interpretation”?

In an apparent attempt to frame the narrative of the 2016 election, CNN Politics published their “first-ever book” Unprecedented: The Election That Changed Everything in early December. Included in the tome is a longwinded essay crafted by CNN’s resident media critic Brian Stelter, where he chronicled the plight of the liberal media covering then candidate Donald Trump. His own anti-Trump bias…

With 2017 rapidly approaching, I decided that, as NewsBusters managing editor, it would be worthwhile to take a look back at the top ten most-read blogs from 2016. Once again, tens of millions of people flocked to NewsBusters for the best and worst media bias in newspapers, television news, social media -- and liberal outbursts from celebrities. 

Just another day at the office for NBC News, folks. On Thursday, Tablet magazine writer Yair Rosenberg caught NBC News correspondents Ayman Mohyeldin and Cal Perry publishing a error-laden piece on NBCNews.com about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was later rewritten without a correction.   

In a Christmas Day post, Digby (also a columnist for Salon) contended that, given the media’s hostility toward Hillary Clinton, that “it’s actually a testament to her rectitude that [the e-mail story] was all they came up with. They had certainly tried over the course of 25 years to come up with something real and they ended up having to make up this ridiculous fake scandal to justify their…

All this week, NewsBusters is recounting the most obnoxious liberal bias of 2016. Today, brace yourself for some the dopiest news media quotes of 2016 — everything from claims that Melania Trump’s white outfit at the Republican Convention was proof of her husband’s racist agenda, to a journalist committed to raising her cats as “gender neutral,” to Brian Williams’s expert commentary telling…