Media Bias Debate

Managing Editor's Note: The following is a reprint of Michael Moriarty's original December 14 post to Big Hollywood. Moriarty, you may recall, played a prosecutor in the first few seasons of the long-running NBC drama "Law and Order."Well, I think I’ve been fairly calm and forgiving of "Law and Order" for about fifteen years. Living outside of the U.S. has certainly helped in more ways than one.…

In a Washington Post opinion piece published on December 6, longtime expansionary entitlement program apologists Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich ripped into the 1996 welfare reform law and its alleged effect on the poor during the struggling economy of the past two years. In the course of their rant, Edelman and Ehrenreich told readers something that the rest of the press has largely…

In “sharing my do's and don'ts” as a journalist, Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten found good fodder in the presumption journalists are out to help liberals and Democrats while hurting conservatives and Republicans. “When deliberately slanting stories in support of liberal causes, always cover your tracks by quoting the other side,” he advised. “Example: 'President Obama wants…

The last two times I remember this happening -- with Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s and New York City Mayor David Dinkins in the early 1990s -- it at least took a few years for exasperated establishment media liberals to blame the system for a favored politician's difficulties in achieving his agenda, and to call the country and Gotham, respectively, "ungovernable." Afterwards, Ronald Reagan and…

A number of the conservative movement's prominent online figures are battling to be the right's equivalent of Talking Points Memo or Huffington Post--political organizations that report hard news. Many believe that to truly harness the power of the Web, political organizations must report their own news, rather than comment on reporitng from traditional outlets."The left needs Daily Kos, but they…

Has anyone else noticed how chilling it has been during the past few days? Not chilly (though it's been that too). Chilling. On Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared, in the Associated Press's words, that "greenhouse gas emissions are a danger and must be regulated." The AP, in the item just linked, and many other news outlets carried U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and…

In his coverage of Uncle Sam's November Monthly Treasury Statement released yesterday, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger reached the wire service's usual quota of errors and misstatements. But what's remarkable is that the AP reporter's article seems to betray a belief that the country is still in a recession. Fascinating. Along the way, Crutsinger omitted the fact that November's deficit…

I mean really, what right do we have to expect anything from the world's best golfer except the world's best golf? That was the argument made Wednesday by "Married Jake" of Glamour Magazine at Yahoo's "Shine" site. The item is called "Why Is Everyone Disappointed in Tiger?" (HT Instapundit). In it, jaded Jake jabs at a substantial portion of the public because, silly us, we thought that the guy…

Battling the "Democrat-media complex" is hard work, but Andrew Breitbart shows no signs of letting up. He announced today in an interview with Mediaite that he will launch a new site entitled "Big Journalism" in January designed solely, in his blunt words, to "fight the mainstream media."Big Journalism will be the latest addition to the prominent network of Breitbart's sites, which include…

Sometimes libtalkers just make you shake your head in disbelief. Keith Olbermann trumpeted his most recent example of bias-denail on Daily Kos over the weekend, where he insisted that his show does not tout a partisan agenda, and simply serves as a watchdog against others' unchecked opinions (h/t Olbermann Watch's Johnny Dollar).I'll wait for readers to stop laughing. Done? Okay. It truly is…

Newsweek writer and native Australian Katie Connolly set out to lecture American readers today on the magazine's Gaggle blog yesterday about how Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize isn't really about the man or the United States as a country, but rather the U.S. as a lofty ideal -- an ideal she reckons in the eyes of "the collective world" to have been "almost entirely undone" by the Bush…

This is the fifth year I have looked into how the establishment media treats these two topics: The use of "Christmas shopping season" vs. "holiday shopping season" (the AP photo at right uses "holiday" and not "shopping," even though there is a C-C-, Chr-Chr-Christmas tree in the picture). The frequency of Christmas and holiday layoff references. I have done three sets of simple Google News…

On Thursday’s Good Morning America, it was announced that news anchor Chris Cuomo would be leaving the program and taking over as co-host of 20/20. Since joining ABC in 1999, the journalist has frequently spun for liberals and slammed conservatives. This has included worrying about American "racism" and wondering if it would be better to "nationalize the whole economy?" While interviewing…