Political Scandals

Less than two weeks after his suspension for previous intemperate tweets was lifted, CNN's Roland Martin was engaging in personally insulting "mis-tweetment" again this afternoon with PJ Media's David Steinberg. In a series of tweets at around 5 p.m. tonight seen after the jump, Steinberg criticized Martin for spending so much time on the press's Trayvon Martin obsession -- where one person…

If Scott Walker somehow loses his recall election in Wisconsin, will that be national news? Of course it will. Well, if the Walker recall really is a national story, why isn't it news that 29 judges who are supposed to be impartial in their rulings and who are under strict prohibitions against political activity were found by Gannett News to have signed petitions supporting Walker's recall…

On Friday, Darren Samuelsohn at the Politico (HT Hot Air), the place where it seems that inconvenient stories go so the Associated Press, the New York Times and the rest of the establishment press can claim they have an excuse not to cover them (respective proofs as of about 3:30 p.m. in the current instance are here and here), covering -- or I should say attempting to cover -- the latest of…

Posted on the Chicago Sun-Times's Web site today is "The rise and fall of Rod Blagojevich," written by Carol Marin, the newspaper's political columnist.  Illinois's former Democratic governor is heading to the Federal pen this week, and Marin writes "he had surrounded himself with con men and creeps."  She names a few, most notably convicted influence peddler Tony Rezko.  She ignores a man who…

Anyone who saw what the Associated Press wrote when former Bush 43 press secretary Tony Snow died in 2008 (original AP article; related NewsBusters post) knew that the wire service would do what it could to subtly distort Andrew Breitbart's considerable accomplishments in exposing leftist hatred, duplicity, and criminality. The only question was what form(s) it would take. Not surprisingly,…

On Thursday, over 40 hours after the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick (pictured here) revealed that he stole documents from the Heartland Institute by posing as one of that organization's board members, Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press finally broke the ice and filed a related three-paragraph "this is boring, you don't need to read it" dispatch. Two hours later, the AP science writer…

While the Associated Press and the wire service's Seth Borenstein dither on what to report or whether to report anything about confessed document theft from the Heartland Institute by the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick (a search on Gleick's last name at the AP's main national site at noon came up empty), Neela Banerjee at the Los Angeles Times incompletely reported the facts and fretted that…

The Associated Press's Seth Borenstein, his wire service, and most of the globaloney-advocating establishment press have a problem relating to development NB's Iris Somberg noted a short time ago. Peter Gleick, described in a related UK Guardian story as "a water scientist and president of the Pacific Institute," said last week that he "obtained" documents from the Heartland Institute about…

Maybe there's some unwritten guideline in the press relating to when a politician who is no longer holding office doesn't have to have his party label applied if he gets into some kind of trouble -- even if that trouble is related to when he was in office. The suspicion here is that the rule only applies to past Democratic Party officeholders, and that the guideline period is unduly short. A…

In what is apparently completely unimportant news to just about everyone except NBC2 in Southwest Florida and Andrew Breitbart, numerous instances of illegal voting by non-citizens have been uncovered. Projecting the problems across the state and into the rest of the nation would seem to indicate that many thousands of people who are registered to vote should never have been allowed to register…

Bill Clinton has done hundreds of TV interviews since leaving office in 2001, and journalists have very rarely found it appropriate to revisit his sex scandals. But for CNN, Republicans merit an entirely different standard of coverage. On Monday's Early Start, co-host Ashleigh Banfield insisted to Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that "I got to" bring up his 2007 prostitution scandal, so she could…

I guess what follows shouldn't be a total surprise, given that the Obama administration was perfectly comfortable ruining hundreds of thousands of perfectly good cars during the Cash For Clunkers program in 2009. The video which follows from CBS News in San Francisco last Thursday (full transcript here) tells viewers what is happening to valuable parts at the main manufacturing plant of the…

This morning, P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters pointed to how the Des Moines Register avoided identifying the employer of a "prominent member of a well known Democrat campaign consulting firm" who was also a "former Obama campaign staffer" until the firm, LINK Strategies, had a chance to fire him. Once Zachary Edwards was shown the door, it it became a "safe" story to cover, whereupon the Register…

Pete Yost's Friday evening story at the Associated Press, also known to yours truly as the Administration's Press, on the latest development in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal (that's my word, certainly not Yost's) has a "this is a boring story, don't read it" headline ("Prosecutor intends to take 5th if called in probe"), followed by an opening sentence which acts as if it has nothing…