Jonathan Martin

New York Times political reporter Jonathan Martin went snide and condescending in his "Political Memo" on Republican presidential prospects for 2016, "In G.O.P., a Divide of Ideology and Age." Treating the Republican Party like a dour religious sect, whose opposition to Michelle Obama's stringent "health" campaign is equivalent to being "a cheerleader of artery-clogging calories," Martin used all…

A Christmas Day article in the New York Times left no doubt which party they would leave a lump of coal for. The paper impressively managed to spin a current controversy into a problem solely for the Republican side -- as if crime has not long been a losing election issue for the Democrats -- by portraying the GOP as making knee-jerk, stiff-necked appeals to white fear.

Surprising news that President Obama would normalize relations with Cuba by establishing full diplomatic relations while easing restrictions excited reporters and editorial writers at the New York Times, who saw the demise of the "dinosaurs" and "aging...hard-liners" who opposed liberalizing ties to the authoritarian Cuban government.

Saturday's front-page report on Jeb Bush, "Looking to ’16, Another Bush Stakes Out the Middle Ground," marks the latest New York Times profile to flatter the moderate Republican, at least in comparison to those "hard-line" right-wing conservatives. But such reportorial flattery from the Times would end the day Jeb Bush won the Republican primary, as John McCain found out in 2008.

On Sunday, CNN’s Inside Politics spent several minutes hyping the supposed headache Tea Partiers could give GOP leadership despite the Republican Party winning their 54th Senate seat following Saturday’s runoff in Louisiana. During the discussion, Robert Costa of The Washington Post insisted that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying “to govern responsibly and he wants to set the party up for…

On Monday's New Day on CNN, Jonathan Martin of the New York Times and Bloomberg's Margaret Tavel ran to President Obama's defense over his handling of ISIS. Martin hyped that "the President is in a tough spot here....these two beheadings of journalists...have really outraged a lot of folks....and the President is forced to act. But again, there is not any appetite in this country to put ground…

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2016, was indicted by a county grand jury for abuse of power, after threatening to cut off state funding to a public corruption unit unless the district attorney in charge of it resigned. Perry had pushed for the removal of DA Rosemary Lehmberg after her arrest for drunk driving. The indictment predictably made the front…

The front of Wednesday’s Washington Post sports section worries “If Michael Sam goes undrafted, NFL might have a public-relations problem on its hands.” Sam announcing his homosexuality apparently makes it mandatory that he be drafted this week. That's a little insincere. The media are promising they'll give the NFL a PR problem is Sam goes undrafted. For example, Post reporter Kent Babb…

The headlines over the lead story of  Sunday's New York Times reduced the fierce opposition to the Common Core education standards among both conservatives and liberals to cynical "wedge issue" anti-Obama politics by the angry right: "As G.O.P. Wedge, the Common Core Cuts Both Ways – Associated With Obama – Education Benchmarks Once Backed by Party Now Divide It." The actual article by…

On Tuesday's New Day, CNN's John King hyped the Congressional Budget Office's projection about ObamaCare – that "yes, ObamaCare is expensive, but less expensive than they thought – by about $104 billion over 10 years. That's a decent junk of change." King asserted that the health care issue is "the big domestic challenge for the President and for Democrats this election year: that is...trying…

The New York Times is allowing anonymous sources in politics to slime a political leader. But this time it’s Barack Obama. In a Saturday story by Jonathan Martin and Ashley Parker on “new urgency about the need to address” Democratic prospects, an anonymous “Democratic lawmaker” said Obama was becoming “poisonous” to the party’s candidates.

One of the more humorous attempts at furious spin this weekend occurred over at the New York Times. Jonathan Martin and Ashley Parker somehow managed to cover how association with President Barack Obama is becoming “poisonous” to Democratic Party candidates in this fall's elections without identifying or even acknowledging the existence of the primary reason for his toxicity — namely his…

The New York Times covered the latest annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with its usual mix of suspicion, overloaded labeling bias, and anti-GOP doomsaying. The paper's skeptical coverage of the three-day conservative confab, held this year at National Harbor on the Potomac, opened with two stories in Friday's edition, one on the organizers's attempts to put…

Anyone who's heard Hillary Clinton sing would know that comparing her to one of the great rock singers is a ludicrous comparison. But it stands out as a notable air-kiss in the new book HRC by White House reporters Jonathan Allen (Bloomberg News) and Amie Parnes (The Hill). When Hillary arrived at the State Department to begin work "as the new boss" in 2009, they wrote, "she brought with her…