Media Bias Debate

When President Barack Obama stepped off of Marine One today in New York City on Tuesday for a series of meetings at the United Nations, he chose to salute the two U.S. Marines saluting him at the bottom of the helicopter with a coffee cup in hand in what many have seen as an unprofessional gesture. By the time Tuesday night came and the evening newscasts of the major broadcast networks aired, two…

This morning (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted that Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis's awful performance in Friday's debate with Republican aspirant Greg Abbott was predictably ignored by the Politico, the New York Times, and the Associated Press's national site. The AP did have a story it apparently limited to distribution within Texas. As I also noted this morning,…

Sitting down with CBS This Morning co-host Charlie Rose at Monday's Clinton Global Initiative conference, former President Bill Clinton fawned over the longtime PBS interviewer: "The reason I like your program is you interview everybody the same. And you ask hard questions, just like you threw a few zingers at me, but you always give people the chance to tell their story....You never go into an…

The two major-party Texas gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Wendy Davis and Republican Greg Abbott, debated Friday night. I knew it didn't go well for Davis, once a national media darling, when I searched on "Wendy Davis Abbott debate" (not in quotes) and found no coverage of the event at the Associated Press's national web site, the New York Times and the Politico. Davis, trailing…

Starting on Monday night, a series of town hall meetings in Ferguson, Missouri began taking place in light of the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in conjunction with the Department of Justice (DOJ) that will be closed to the media. When it came to the major broadcast networks reporting this censoring of the press, none of them chose to cover it. According to an article posted on MSNBC’s…

Politico's Kenneth Vogel and Byron Tau filed a long Friday article moaning about how influential opposition research has become in the conduct of this year's political campaigns. My takeaway is that they really don't like it this time around — not because the money involved has increased, and not because supposedly lax campaign-finance laws have accommodated this increase. No, they're really…

On Sunday's Reliable Sources, CNN's Brian Stelter touted a disgraced former representative as a non-partisan pundit and as an expert on media bias: "Now, I could bring in two partisan commentators now to argue about the media, but I'd rather from someone who's been in the glare of the news media – someone who's all too familiar with what happens when you go from darling to bad boy – then, maybe,…

In an interview with Ken Burns on Sunday's web-based Meet the Press feature Press Pass, moderator Chuck Todd asked the historian and film-maker about his PBS documentary on the Roosevelts: "It's amazing what the press didn't cover....I mean, and if they had, obviously it could have changed history." Burns responded: It could. But I think we focus too much – we presume that because there was a…

It turns out the politician who called colleague Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) "chubby" and admonished her not to lose too much weight is none other than the late Sen. Daniel Inouye. So naturally when covering the story, MSNBC.com's Michele Richinick made sure to soften the blow against the late Hawaiian Democrat by tagging him as a longtime "advocate of women."

On Sunday, CBS's "60 Minutes" will broadcast Scott Pelley's recent interview of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In CBS's promotional tease, which was broadcast on Friday, in response to Pelley's question about whether he was confident that the U.S. troop withdrawal "was the right thing to do" at the time it was done, Panetta said, "No, I wasn't." That's big news. How big? So big that,…

The real problem with Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke's "jobs plan," the detailed version of which appears to be no longer available at her campaign's web site, isn't its plagiarized material. It's the content. The presence of certain obviously wrong facts and patently pathetic assertions indicates that Ms. Burke, a successful entrepreneur who one would think should have…

On Friday morning, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski joined the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein in calling for equal news coverage if Christie is officially exonerated in numerous investigations into his involvement of the scandal known as Bridgegate to the non-stop coverage when it broke in January. During a discussion with their panel on Friday’s Morning Joe, they discussed news that a…

On Wednesday night, it was reported that two Marine Corps veterans are walking from northern North Carolina to Washington D.C. and the White House to demand that President Obama take action to ensure the release of Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi from a Mexican prison. However, none of the major broadcast networks have stepped up and covered the actions of the these veterans. One of the two…