Media Bias Debate

Former Nightline anchor Ted Koppel attempted to explain away disgraced journalist Brian Williams’s lies as “tales” that would be acceptable at a bar. In an interview for the November 2 Time magazine, Koppel spun, “There is a difference unfortunately between the kinds of tales that you can tell while sitting at a bar, entertaining your friends, and what you can say when you’re on the air.” 

If you're a few hours late catching up on reports on economic data at the Associated Press, one of the best ways to determine whether the news was good or disappointing is to see whether the story's headline and opening blurb are still present about four hours later among the wire service's "Top (usually 10) Business News" items. The good-news items will usually still be there; the disappointing…

Today saw yet another "unexpected" disappointing development in the U.S. economy. The Census Bureau reported that seasonally adjusted sales of new homes, an area thought to be a bright spot, declined sharply in September to an annual rate 468,000 from 529,000 in August. The bureau also revised July and August significantly downward. As bad as the as the adjusted numbers were, the raw data was…

In a piece that appeared in the local opinion section of Sunday’s Washington Post, writer Peter Galuszka took to bashing conservative Congressman Dave Brat (Va.) for holding beliefs that provide “eerie allusions to the nation’s xenophobic past” that Galuszka characterized as the U.S. embracing “Judeo-Christian religious tradition, rule of law and free markets.”

In recent weeks, Univision News has offered fresh demonstrations that its biases extend far beyond immigration. The two examples below give us a further glimpse into the leading U.S. Spanish-language network’s institutional biases, and its commitment to progressive politics.

Can you imagine if in 2007 some conservative had dared call Barack Obama the "Little Mister" of anything?  The cries of racism would be ringing to this day. But on his MSNBC show this evening, Chris Matthews didn't hesitate to denigrate Marco Rubio as "the little Mister Firecracker of the bombs-away set."  For good measure, Matthews claimed that "Cruz hates as well as any Republican in modern…

On Saturday, MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry scolded guest Alfonso Aguilar for using the term “hard worker” because it’s demeaning to slaves and working women: "I want us to be super careful when we use the language 'hard worker,' because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like."

Late Sunday evening, the United Auto Workers and General Motors reached a tentative four-year agreement shortly before the union's 11:59 p.m. strike deadline. The agreement was expected, simply because the financial and political blowback of a strike at a company bailed out by taxpayers at a cost running into tens of billion of dollars back in 2009 would have been severe. Also expected: the…

As most NewsBusters readers know, conservatives argue that reporters tend to be liberal, and that their liberalism influences their reporting. A common lefty counterpart, which Paul Rosenberg expressed in a Saturday article, isn’t that most journalists are conservative, but rather that Republicans have manipulated them into ignoring (and thereby facilitating) right-wing extremism. “For quite…

Those folks at the Associated Press sure are "clever." Those looking for information about Hillary Clinton's damning email to her daughter Chelsea indicating that Mrs. Clinton knew that a planned operation by Al Qaeda — and not an Internet video — was behind the Benghazi attacks which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others trying to save him will find nothing at all at the AP's…

The news coming out of Detroit about near-deadline negotiations between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors has been pretty quiet. As the Sunday 11:59 p.m. deadline approaches, the Associated Press only has a four-paragraph blurb indicating that the union wants to get a richer package than it just garnered in negotiations with Fiat Chrysler. A Reuters report goes into detail about GM…

The press has consumed many barrels of ink and gigs of bandwidth providing free promotion for the eminently misnamed movie Truth, thus far virtually for naught. On Thursday, the Associated Press's David Bauder did his part to generate interest by pretending, despite obviously forged documents and a virtually complete lack of anything resembling corroborating evidence, that what Dan Rather and…

At the top of his Comedy Central program The Nightly Show on Thursday, host Larry Wilmore brought up the New York Mets advancing to the World Series and had some fun with the news at the expense of his viewers, former Daily Show host Jon Stewart, and disgraced ex-NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. 

A mini-war broke out yesterday between the Washington Post's Philip Bump, who would apparently prefer to keep discussions of Hillary Clinton's health off the table, and Matt Drudge. As would be expected, Drudge won in a rout, while Bump continues to pretend that he didn't. Bump, in his disingenuous Friday morning entry at the Post's all too appropriately named "The Fix" blog, told readers that…