War on Terrorism

When it comes to deciding between covering the many controversies of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and the Obama administration’s secret $400 million cash payment to Iran, all of the “big three” networks devoted vastly more total time to the former, Wednesday evening. Between ABC, CBS, and NBC they contributed a whopping 13 minutes and 46 seconds to Trump, while only giving the…

On Monday's CNN Newsroom, Patricia Smith hammered the media over their clear double standard between the often-negative way they treated her anti-Hillary Clinton speech at the Republican National Convention versus their hyping of Khizr Khan's anti-Donald Trump speech at the Democratic National Convention: "I was treated like dirt. I don't think the Khan family was treated that way. But I was…

As Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy appeared as a guest on Friday's New Day to discuss Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, the CNN anchor duo of Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota both fretted over Trump promising to defend homosexuals from terrorists without going to the left in supporting gay rights issues. Cuomo at one point slammed running mate Mike Pence…

With still nothing definitively known about the identity of the Munich, Germany attacker or attackers early Friday night, MSNBC’s MTP Daily ushered the Brexit vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union into the conversation as an example of anti-refugee sentiment that, in their speculations, was behind the mall shooting in Germany.

In the midst of MSNBC’s rolling coverage Friday afternoon of what appeared to be an act of terrorism in Germany, breaking news anchor Brian Williams and NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel used the occasion to lament the rise of “a rightward tilt” in Europe of “intolerant” ideologies and parties against Muslims and Middle Eastern refugees. 

There’s the entertaining kind of irascible old guy (e.g., Grampa Simpson) and there’s the scary kind, which several liberal pundits thought they beheld Monday night as they watched Rudy Giuliani speak at the Republican convention. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall remarked that “ever since the late and great Molly Ivins quipped that she thought Pat Buchanan's speech at the…

Playing on long-established stereotypes of the melanin-challenged Republican Party, New York Times coverage of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday put racial controversies front and center, accusing speakers (particularly Rudy GIuliani) of lecturing and moralizing to blacks about law and order as an all-white crowd lapped it up. The paper led with Melanie Trump's speech with this…

On Wednesday's New Day, during a discussion of Chris Christie's speech at the Republican National Convention and audience reaction, CNN panel members used words like "vitriolic" and "pretty ugly" to describe the GOP gathering. Co-anchor Chris Cuomo warned that Republicans are helping Hillary Clinton by "going too far," and also worked in a rationalization of his claim from Tuesday that Clinton…

On Monday and Tuesday, CBS Evening News failed to cover the ISIS-inspired knife and ax attack by an Afghan refugee on train passengers in Germany.  Instead, the newscast ended on Tuesday with a report on the celebrities who condemned Donald Trump for walking out to Queen's "We Are The Champions" at the Republican National Convention on Monday. NBC Nightly News covered the Islamist terrorism with…

Adam Ragusea, writing at Slate.com, believes that the word "terrorist" has become "uselessly arbitrary and loaded," because it "has acquired a powerful religious—and specifically Islamic—connotation" that "is substantively consequential." As a result, Ragusea believes that the Associated Press, whose Stylebook sadly exerts nearly ironclad control over language used in U.S. establishment press…

In a rather action packed interview during CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, host Jake Tapper grilled Secretary of State John Kerry about the extent of the ISIS threat and the government’s response. “They are shrinking … they are on the run,” Kerry claimed. But in a show of force Tapper countered hard, “Well, with all due respect, sir, I'm not sure that it looks that way to the public,…

UPDATE, July 17: The Enquirer corrected the error by removing the related sentence and placing the following "correction" below the article's boilerplate describing the paper's three-part series — "Correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated that 220,000 were murdered last year. The total was since Sept. 11, 2001." A Cincinnati Enquirer reporter and her editors thoroughly embarrassed…

On Thursday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, during a discussion of the terrorist attack in Nice, France, self-described liberal Republican FNC analyst Geraldo Rivera seemed to be in touch with his more right-leaning side as he criticized President Barack Obama for not dealing with ISIS and depriving them of a safe haven from which to attack the West. Rivera declared that "I want to love the…

The New York Times is notorious for downplaying or ignoring links to radical Islam in the wake of terror attacks, and its response to the truck massacre in Nice, France mostly followed that pattern, with a news columnist shrugging off the idea the war on terror could ever be won and a front-page headline confidently stating the perpetrator was “A Surly Misfit With No Terror Links....” the morning…