Media Bias Debate

On CNN Saturday Morning News today, anchors Betty Nguyen and T.J. Holmes reported on a U.S. senator who nominated his girlfriend to serve as a federal prosecutor earlier this year:HOLMES: Well, it is something -a player, a name that a lot of people normally might not know a whole lot about, from a state that most people don't know a whole lot about. He's been important in the health care debate.…

Normally, it's news when a leading politician in a country hosting a summit expresses harsh dissent against that summit's agenda -- or at least it is when a leftist is the dissenter. But I doubt that what Thor Pedersen, Speaker of the Danish Parliament, has to say about the upcoming COP15 Climate Summit will get much if any play in U.S. network newscasts or in the nation's establishment media…

Responding to President Obama criticizing media coverage of the White House jobs summit, on Friday’s Hardball on MSNBC, host Chris Matthews wondered why the President wasn’t more appreciative of all the media’s help: “Why would you ride the ref when he’s calling all the plays for you? What’s he out there bashing the media for?” During a town hall meeting in Allentown, Pennsylvania on Friday,…

In the December 4, 2009 edition of Entertainment Weekly, CBS’s Katie Couric bizarrely asserted that the late Walter Cronkite possessed an "unwavering commitment to reporting the news accurately, fairly, and responsibly." In the brief tribute, she also repeated, "Walter Cronkite once said, ‘Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy.’"In reality,…

The White House's decision to include prominent left-wing blogs in its reporting pool has some journalists worried. Since members of the rotating pool often base their reports off of reports from outlets that attend, they worry that the presence of openly partisan news outlets could skew coverage of the White House.“This is really troubling,” New York Times reporter Peter Baker told Politico's…

The Washington Post on Thursday reported that ABC has offered the position of Good Morning America co-host to former top Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos. According to the Post’s Howard Kurtz, Stephanopoulos, should he take the job, wants more politics in the morning program: "...Stephanopoulos has pushed for a role reshaped to spotlight his interest in politics and hard news rather than…

The coverage yesterday by the Associated Press's Stephen Bernard of payroll and human resources giant ADP's monthly jobs report for November focused on a relatively small reduction in the size of the decline in jobs lost and not on the fact that continuing to lose jobs is a bad thing.That rhetorical sleight of hand enabled the AP reporter to tell us that ADP's reported private sector job loss…

A powerful Democratic lawmaker has stated his willingness to intervene on the behalf of the federal government in the nation's news sector. Insisting that the newspaper business is vital to democracy, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., suggested that the government "resolve" the problems in the industry, potentially though misguided federal bailouts.At a workshop on the future of journalism at the…

In their report on Ford's November sales results, the Associated Press's Tom Krisher and Dee-Ann Durbin seemed to downplay the company's pretty decent month, and definitely downplayed the company's better near-term prospects compared to its principal rivals. Additionally, despite the report's Wednesday time stamp, the pair didn't update the item's content to compare Ford's performance to its…

CNN’s Larry King carried water for President Obama’s move to send more troops to Afghanistan during an interview of Michael Moore on early Wednesday morning. King later shifted further to the left, asking Moore if he agreed with Jesse Ventura’s call for a new draft and a “war tax” and quoting from Bob Herbert of the New York Times, who labeled the Afghan war a “tragic mistake.”The CNN host…

Imagine if you will that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin was accused of taking gift cards donated to her office for redistribution to needy constituents and using them instead for a personal spending spree.The media firestorm would swirl uncontrollably, of course, and certainly you couldn't fault the media for reporting on the ensuing criminal trial.Well, this sort of this has happened, only…

The same CBS legal analyst who...: wrote that former Vice President Cheney "is just a dick"labeled Chief Justice John Roberts "silly and condescending" and Justice Alito a "rigid starboard-facing ideologue"and blamed Karl Rove for the Valerie Plame leak despite the fact that Richard Armitage admitted that he was the inadvertent leaker of that information...is now ending his CourtWatch blog, all…

On yesterday's CNN Newsroom, anchor Kyra Phillips shifted to "Bad Boys" mode:Lenders, lenders -- what you gonna do when they come for you? Call it an early Christmas present for people on the edge of losing their homes. The Obama administration cracking down on mortgage companies.We'll tell you about it.After the break:PHILLIPS: Well, from your health (ph) to your home, the foreclosure crisis…

The New York Times’s Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff published a long Saturday report on the Food Stamp program that went into print on Sunday. This is the second of three posts on their coverage; the first went up earlier today at NewsBusters and BizzyBlog. It addressed the pair's seeming happiness with the massive increase in program participation, their apparent unhappiness that 15-16…