Political Scandals

All three network morning shows on Tuesday led with Herman Cain's response to allegations of sexual harassment in the 1990s and even speculated the scandal could end his candidacy, with NBC Today co-host Ann Curry proclaiming: "Damage control. Herman Cain changes his story....Will the controversy and his reaction to it derail his presidential campaign?" On ABC's Good Morning America, co-host…

"This is the biggest single Twitter controversy of the campaign.  48,000 mentions!" That was Mike Allen doing his best "look--a squirrel!" dodge on today's Morning Joe.  Pressed by Joe Scarborough as to whether Politico had any more details beyond its story's vague allegation that Herman Cain had made gestures "that were not overtly sexual but that made women uncomfortable," Allen's telling…

Appearing on Saturday's NBC Today, left-wing Washington Post opinion writer and MSNBC contributor Jonathan Capehart dismissed a congressional investigation into the Solyndra debacle as just "the GOP looking to scratch, trying to find a scandal in an administration that is remarkably free of scandal." After co-host Lester Holt noted that "Republicans have seemed to caught a whiff of scandal"…

Herman Cain has been taking heat for his response to questions about Politico's story on alleged sexual harassment.  But today on Morning Joe, it was Politico's own Jonathan Martin, lead author of the story, who was being evasive about the details of the allegations against Cain. Incredibly, when Willie Geist asked him to describe specifically what Politico is accusing Cain of having done,…

CRITICAL UPDATE AT END OF POST A week ago (at BizzyBlog; at NewsBusters), I noted how Charleston Daily Mail blogger Don Surber quickly determined through all of a few minutes of Internet research that Berkeley professor Robert Muller, who convinced Washington Post Plumline blogger Brad Plumer that he was a "climate skeptic," has been a believer in human-caused global warming since the early…

Jonathan Alter, who spent 28 years at Newsweek, has been a columnist at Bloomberg News since early this year. Just this year, the reliably and insufferably liberal Alter, among many other things, called the Republican House's passage of Paul Ryan's budget plan in April an attempt "to throw Granny in the snow," and coldly calculated that in the wake of her shooting, Arizona Congresswoman…

Poor Steven Chu. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Obama's Energy Secretary stands "at [the] center of [the] Solyndra policy storm," where he's learning "lessons in political science" according to Washington Post staffer Steven Mufson's 45-paragraph front-page article in the October 28 paper. Although the Post has done a decent job thus far in following the Solyndra scandal and reporting…

Journalistic outlets, which were all too eager to accuse the Tea Party of bigotry, have been mostly silent in response to examples of anti-Semitism at the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests. Incidents caught on tape and the urging of the Anti-Defamation League to stop anti-Jewish bigotry have yielded very little coverage. Since October 1st, a Nexis search reveals no discussion of anti-…

ABC's Brian Ross on Friday investigated a $500 million government loan to a car company that is now operating in Finland. Ross highlighted how Vice President Joe Biden in 2009 claimed this would create jobs in America. Yet, the Good Morning America reporter left out a key component for the network version of the story: Fisker, the European car company involved, have ties to big Obama campaign…

Update (10:00 EDT, Oct. 20): CNBC has an update/correction on the story: <<Update: On Wednesday evening, a Department of Energy spokesman said that the press releases had been returned to their original content as a result of CNBC's inquiry about the changes. Correction: A previous headline on this article incorrectly characterized the press releases as being related to Solyndra…

ABC's Jake Tapper on Tuesday pressed Barack Obama on the Fast and Furious gun scandal, but his network didn't allow the question to appear on Nightline, World News or Good Morning America. (All played clips of the interview.) Instead, ABC found time to air Tapper and the President playfully discussing children's books and the greatness of Dr. Seuss. During the two-segment long Nightline…

In a front-page story today, Politico's Darren Samuelsohn relayed the ire of liberal think tanks and blogs "bemoaning the 'out of proportion' Solyndra coverage" in the media. We at NewsBusters are not sure what planet these folks are living on. A search of the Nexis database for Solyndra stories on ABC, CBS and NBC between September 8 -- when the FBI raided the company's headquarters -- and…

Walter Cronkite's longtime producer Leslie Midgley once wrote that "News is what an editor decides it is." News today is what TV producers decide can help President Obama. News that hurts isn't news at all. In the last week, network anchors like Brian Williams repeated endlessly that the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are "increasingly resonating." It’s the story reporters will declare "isn’t…

On October 9, an unbylined Associated Press story reported that Congressmen Darrell Issa "could send subpoenas to the Obama administration as soon as this week over weapons lost amid the Mexican drug war." On Wednesday, October 12, Issa did just that. Mike Vanderboegh's Sipsey Street Irregulars blog has a succinct summary (HT Ed Driscoll) of the establishment press's coverage of Issa's…