Media Bias Debate

On Friday in a Facebook hangout, in a statement noted Saturday afternoon by Tim Graham at NewsBusters, MSNBC's Chuck Todd described himself as "stubbornly neutral." Sunday, Mr. "Stubbornly Neutral" attacked the NRA on "Meet the Press" for having the nerve to oppose President Obama's Surgeon General nominee, a man who is obsessed with gun control.

Elizabeth Williamson's coverage at the Wall Street Journal of the latest WSJ/NBC News poll has a very strange omission. It contains a graph showing "right track/wrong track" polling percentages heading each midterm election going back to 1990. But Williamson, while addressing why the American people feel as they do right now in larger historical context, never commented on the graph's specific…

Josh Lederman's report this morning at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, treats President Barack Obama's return to Chicago as a trip down memory lane: "Obama got glimpses of a simpler time when his life was for the most part, normal: the unpaid bills on his desk, the volunteers who pitched in on his first Senate campaign, the day he marched in seven Fourth of July parades."…

With the midterm elections two weeks away from Tuesday, the major broadcast networks on Monday night ignored gaffes from Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado and Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis as both seek to make up deficits against their Republican opponents Cory Gardner and Greg Abbott, respectively.

To the relief of sex offenders throughout the state, Arizona Democratic gubernatorial candidate Fred DuVal, during a Tuesday forum at Redemption Church in Gilbert, said that, in the words of an unbylined Washington Free Beacon story, "he is opposed to mandating parental consent for a girl as young as 14 years old to get an abortion." This is a non-story in the establishment press, which made it…

One would think, based on comparing dispatches from Reuters and the Associated Press, that President Barack Obama must have spoken at two different events in Upper Marlboro, Maryland today. The two dispatches are so radically different in tone and content that they it doesn't seem possible that they both could be from the same event. But they are. Jeff Mason at Reuters (saved here for future…

The White House is apparently feeling pretty full of itself over the fiscal 2014 federal budget result it has just reported. Reacting to the news that this year's deficit was "only" $483.4 billion, White House budget director Shaun Donovan crowed that "This is a return to fiscal normalcy." The press, of course including Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press, has accepted all of this with little…

On October 8, Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press wrote that "(President Barack) Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." In a NewsBusters post later that day, I pegged Obama's true inheritance at roughly $245 billion as of when he was first sworn into office, and at about $600 billion if projected over the full fiscal year. The actual deficit for fiscal…

In an all too typical unskeptical report, Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, allowed President Barack Obama to claim, in Kuhnhenn's words, that "health and security experts continue to tell him that the screening measures already in place for travelers are more effective" than "restricting travel to the U.S. from the three Ebola-stricken West African nations."…

CBS and NBC continued on Thursday night to harp on the so-called refusal of Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott to initially debate his opponent, Democrat and former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, on Wednesday because of Crist’s usage of a fan that broke the rules of the debate. After each of the “big three” (ABC, CBS, and NBC) mentioned it on their morning newscasts, the CBS Evening News …

For years, government watchdog groups have chronicled numerous instances of waste and abuse — at the very least — at the Centers for Disease Control and its National Institutes for Health. An establishment press corps doing its job, upon hearing the director of the National Institutes for Health claim that "if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have…

Early this morning, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's designated fact-checker gave the left's claims that Republicans alone were responsible for alleged "cuts" to Ebola research four Pinocchios (i.e., a "whopper"). That's nice, but it hardly undoes the damage news outlets like the Associated Press have inflicted on the truth in the apparent name of ginning up resentment among low-information…

Major broadcast networks ABC and NBC both refused to cover the news on Tuesday night that the lone individual the United States has in custody relating to the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya has been charged with murder on multiple counts with 17 total charges that could bring the death penalty if convicted. As for those that did cover it on their Tuesday evening newscasts, both CBS…

By and large the national liberal media have ignored gubernatorial races this election cycle, preferring to focus on the battle for control of the U.S. Senate. That is perfectly understandable, of course, but not when a juicy watercooler-worthy story comes along like this one.