James Taranto

Talk about refreshing.

The Pentagon announced Russian forces have left the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, which is good news. So naturally, the Morning Joe crew wanted a "victory lap" for President Biden. Only they didn't want to say that up front. 

The press rose as one in outrage Wednesday upon learning that Fort Sill, an Army base in Oklahoma, which is being used as a temporary shelter for migrant children, had been used as a Japanese internment camp during World War II. One fact buried and downplayed: Fort Sill was also used to hold migrant children as recently in 2014, under the administration of one Barack Obama. But at the time, it…

Showing classic journalistic hypocrisy, New York Times reporter Nicholas Fandos shared the Democrats’ alarm that Republicans may actually reveal what the country’s domestic surveillance organization is doing behind closed doors in his report for Tuesday’s front page, “Republicans Vote to Release A Secret Memo.” An aggrieved Fandos led with criticism of the Republican vote to release the now-…

On the same day conservative author Ann Coulter announced she would not speak to a campus group at the University of California in Berkeley, the New York Times blamed the victim and claimed that conservatives facing violent riots and protests on campuses across the country have no one to blame but themselves.

Early Wednesday afternoon, Washington Post writer Chris Cillizza attempted to silence those who pointed out his massive double standard in reporting about the health of Republican Senator John McCain (Ariz.) during the 2008 presidential campaign and his rampant dismissal of any doubts being raised about Hillary Clinton’s physical state here in 2016.   

Even though Barack Obama is more than four-fifths of the way through his presidency, a large part of his popularity among liberals still rests on what they view as his exceptional talent for speechmaking -- a reputation which dates to his 2004 Democratic convention keynote address. Now Alter, one of Obama’s biggest fans in the media, wants the POTUS to use his skill as a performer in a different…

In the past week, several pundits and alleged "experts" have been on a mission to tell us rubes that Hillary Clinton's email and private-server controversy doesn't rise to the level of being a scandal. They have absurdly argued that even if she "technically" violated State Department protocols and even broke some pesky laws in handling her communications while she was Secretary of State, Mrs.…

New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan on Monday made a mea culpa for her past criticism of her paper's reporting on the racially-charged Ferguson case, when she called out a Times lead story for including the views of anonymous sources who supported police officer Darren Wilson's account of the shooting of Michael Brown -- a view eventually vindicated by the Obama Justice Department.

The New York Times continued to spread skepticism about the decision by a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., not to seek criminal charges against a white police officer who shot a black teenager. The Times hypocritically upended its own liberal sensibility by suggesting more prosecutorial zeal would have been a good thing in this particular case. And a lead editorial likened the Ferguson police to "an…

James Taranto's Opinion Journal page features a long-running gag, "Fox Butterfield, Is That You?" an homage to former New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield, who wrote an article under a now-notorious headline: "Crime Rates are Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling." Yet the paper's liberal confusion had a straightforward explanation: Crime was down at least partially because more criminals…

James Taranto performed an invaluable service from his Opinion Journal "Best of the Web" perch this week, revealing New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a notorious liberal crusader on various fronts, to be perhaps the most gullible of the paper's many liberal writers. (He's also suggested Mao Tse-Tung and Saddam Hussein weren't that bad.) Taranto teed up Kristof with this example of…

A new Fox News survey tested Team Obama’s credibility: "The Internal Revenue Service says that two years of emails from IRS employees about targeting conservative and tea party groups were accidentally destroyed because of a computer crash and cannot be recovered. Do you believe the IRS that the emails were destroyed accidentally or do you think they were destroyed deliberately?" The answer…

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal ably summarized the "hindsight and hypocrisy" of the New York Times editorial page. "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Donald Sterling scandal is that virtually no one in the sports world was surprised to hear that Mr. Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, may have been caught on tape spewing racist sentiments," the Times proclaimed…