Media Bias Debate

The August Monthly Treasury Statement released by the government today reveals that Uncle Sam ran a $134.2 billion deficit in August. That figure was $44.7 billion, or 48%, higher than the $90.5 billion deficit seen in August 2010. The year-over-year deficit increase occurred because outlays increased by 19% to over $303 billion, while receipts went up by 3% to $169 billion. Gee, that wasn't…

Daily Beast/Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown today announced the launch of the new Women in the World Foundation, which holds itself out as "a powerful, new initiative dedicated to highlighting and driving solutions for advancing women and girls" that "will serve as a resource to all who seek to learn about and engage on the issues facing women and girls." Sounds like a worthwhile venture…

Editor's Note: The following review, by NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell, appeared in the September 13 edition of the Washington Times. I lost my television debate virginity to Tom Braden, the old curmudgeon liberal counterpart to Pat Buchanan, on the original CNN“Crossfire” series. His first question was a haymaker: “Who the hell do you think you are passing judgment on journalists?” he…

A month before the 9/11 attacks, American missionaries Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were captured and imprisoned by the Taliban. Their detention and subsequent rescue by American troops in November 2001 received extensive media coverage at the time, including criticism by "Dateline" correspondent John Larson about their proselytizing in a Muslim country. So far, however, it seems no…

On the front of Sunday's Business section, Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein slammed GOP candidates: "If you came up with a bumper sticker that pulls together the platform of this year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates, it would have to be: Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP." Pearlstein seemed especially insulted that Gov. Rick Perry would suggest John Maynard Keynes and…

The folks involved in the storming of Israel's embassy in Cairo are probably wondering what they have to do to become the press's pet word for rampaging Muslims (the country is 90% Muslim, and it would be a very safe bet that heavily persecuted Coptic Christians aren't involved): "militants." I guess breaking through the Israeli embassy's security wall, ransacking offices, and dumping…

Having read E.J. Dionne's Wednesday column in the Washington Post (HT Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web), I am sooooo comforted -- not. Dionne assures his readers that "Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies." Thus, the last 10 years of the "war on terrorism" (lowercase letters and quote…

It's hard to figure out why Tom Krisher at the Associated Press bothered filing a report on the status of contract talks between Detroit's Big 3 automakers and the United Auto Workers. The only reason I can discern is that he wanted to brag about how he and his wire service pals have access to anonymously-sourced info about how the talks are going. Surprise: As has been the case almost always…

On September 4, Associated Press reporters Steve Peoples and Michael R. Blood celebrated the negatives towards the Tea Party found in a typically sample-skewed AP-GfK poll taken in mid-August. "Somehow," they failed to report on the president's growing negatives found in a separate AP-GfK poll report with the same respondents. Based on what I saw in AP-GfK's May effort, which had a sample of…

Is there no double-standard depths to which the liberal media won't sink when it comes to provocative political speech? No—judging by the pitiful performance of two MSMers on today's Morning Joe in defending James "Take 'Em Out" Hoffa.   Newsweek editor Tina Brown brayed that we must not "sanitize" political speech or take the "juice" out of it--all the while condemning Michele Bachmann and…

Yesterday, at organized labor's traditional Labor Day picnic at Cincinnati's Coney Island amusement park, Vice President Joe Biden gave the keynote address. His key lines, as reported by Carl Weiser at the Cincinnati Enquirer's Politics Extra blog (video is here at MRC-TV): "... this is a different kind of fight. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the labor movement. This is a fight for…

The Washington Post treated President Obama's Detroit Labor Day rally to page A3 coverage, with a 19-paragraph September 6 story by staffer David Nakamura. Controversial Teamsters president James P. Hoffa -- son of the late Jimmy Hoffa -- was quoted, but not the infamous "take these sons of bitches out" line that has been reported elsewhere. Indeed, Nakamura aimed to paint the partisanship…

That civility thing which Democrats and the Left thought to be all-important earlier this year is sooooo January. Unless it changes its stripes overnight, the incivility and hostility on display today in Detroit, which hasn't been seen much in establishment press reports to this point, won't appear on the Big 3 Networks' morning shows tomorrow. The American people really need to see what has…

When the Washington Post promoted snippets from Michael Moore's forthcoming book on Sunday, they portrayed Moore as a "lifelong Catholic" -- which is a bit of a strange label when a paragraph later, the Post was bashing the "uterus police" who oppose abortion as "really, really weird." But then, the "Catholic" blurb the Post picked let Moore imagine himself as a playwright composing an "avant…