Media Bias Debate

At the Daily Beast on Sunday, liberal Peter Beinart called on Democrats and liberals to "strongly denounce" former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian's insult campaign against Palmetto State Governor Nikki Haley, or else "Democratic Party bigotry is likely to get worse." It's too early to test Beinart's long-term prediction (such bigotry is bad enough already), but the…

In the race to the bottom event known as South Carolina's First Congressional District special election, Mark Sanford has defeated Elizabeth Colbert Busch. Not that the establishment press didn't try to help Ms. Busch, to whose background they gave little or no scrutiny. And when two forms of scrutiny did arrive from independent quarters, first of her actual beliefs expressed in tweets before…

How apropos that in the week before Mother's Day, the Lean Forward network is announcing hires for its website who have ties to Mother Jones, the far-left magazine that blessed the journalistic world with David Corn, himself a fixture at MSNBC as a frequent contributor. "MSNBC.com is staffing up ahead of a major relaunch later this year," TVNewser's Alex Weprin reported last night. "The…

Fox News Channel analyst and former anchor Brit Hume asserted Monday night that for Benghazi “to become the scandal it surely deserves to be will require another ingredient: Relentless news coverage of the kind the media typically avoid when the subject is someone or some cause they favor.” He explained: “That’s why the Gosnell abortion horrors were played down for so long and that’s why the…

Mainstream media’s limited reporting on the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell has been obvious.  You might think that CNN, the self-styled “Most Trusted Name in News," would pay more attention to a case involving over 250 criminal counts, including ones for first-degree murder.  You’d be wrong.  Today, CNN’s Newsroom occupied six hours of air time.  The Gosnell trial…

A New York Times story posted online Sunday evening and appearing at Column 1 on Page 1 in today's print edition included a picture of 1995 Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh -- hardly a jihadist, at least not directly -- alongside that of three real jihadists: alleged Ft. Hood mass murderer Nidal Hasan, foiled Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, and accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar…

In a web interview after his appearance on ABC's “This Week” yesterday, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who suddenly withdrew after being nominated by President Barack Obama to be his first Secretary of Commerce in 2009, was asked the following about freshman U.S. Senator Ted Cruz: "Do you think he represents most Hispanics with his politics?" His answer (video is at link) follows…

"Mainstream media" are alarmed by reports that billionaires Charles and David Koch are considering the purchase of Tribune Company's eight daily newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. When Warren Buffett spent $344 million to purchase 28 newspapers, there were mostly sighs of relief from journalists glad to keep their jobs. However, reaction to reports of the Koch brothers' interest in…

Former CNN president Jon Klein and former NBC News president Steve Capus are reportedly among the finalists to take the helm of Al Jazeera America. "One of the biggest jobs in media is a new position and a high-risk opportunity: running Al Jazeera America," Sharon Waxman of TheWrap.com reported this morning (emphasis mine):

Time was, several decades ago, that local and regional news in many parts of the country served as a bit of an antidote against the relentlessly biased national establishment press. That certainly isn't the case in Aurora, Colorado, site of last year's horrible theater murders at the alleged hands of James Holmes. Dave Perry, the editor of the Aurora Sentinel, wrote a column on April 25…

It's not often that yours truly visits Huffington Post. One of those rare occasions occurred early today as I was preparing the post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) about South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian relishing the idea that his party's candidate for Palmetto State Governor in 2014 might send current Republican Governor Nikki Haley "back to wherever the hell she came…

The latest insensitive and arguably racist public utterance coming from the supposed party of tolerance and compassion comes from a Democrat in South Carolina. But not just any Democrat. This one is Dick Harpootlian, the Chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Harpootlian has a history of making outrageously offensive public remarks about South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, yet he…

Give Nancy Cook at NationalJournal.com credit for a generally well-written though somewhat naive report ("Forget the Unemployment Rate: The Alarming Stat Is the Number of 'Missing Workers'") on the unprecedented plight of the millions of adults who have dropped out of the labor force. But in discussing the "glaring caveat" in Friday's employment report from the government, namely that "the '…

Politico reported today that net income at The Washington Post Co. dropped an astonishing 85 percent from the first quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year. The newspaper division posted an operating loss of $34.5 million over that period. It looks as if the Post, like many other newspapers around the country, may have entered an age of decline. Newspapers just aren’t as…