Lester Holt

This week, after a federal judge delays implementation of President Obama's executive amnesty, the networks frame it as “a historic day... on hold,” and a ruling that “dashes American dreams for millions of families.” Also, a rogues’ gallery of journalists led by Dan Rather leap to the defense of suspended NBC News anchor Brian Williams, while others in the media wish we'd stop talking about ISIS…

Julianna Goldman spotlighted the latest ObamaCare glitch on Friday's CBS Evening News. The same evening, ABC's World News Tonight aired a ten-second news brief on the "outrage over another glitch to the ObamaCare website – nearly 800,000 people received inaccurate forms from the site." However, Friday's NBC Nightly News ignored this story completely. Instead, the evening newscast hyped Rudy…

In covering President Obama’s refusal to refer to terrorism as Islamic extremism, CBS and NBC devoted portions of their reports on Thursday night to comments Rudy Giuliani made the day before with NBC reserving a majority of their airtime to attacking the former New York City Mayor for having “set off a war of words” and taking presidential criticism “to another level.” Andrea Mitchell declared…

While his fellow network news colleagues all but ignored any criticism of President Obama’s speech on Wednesday afternoon and his avoidance of using the term Islamic extremism, NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel ripped the current U.S. strategy for defeating ISIS during NBC Nightly News. “ISIS is spreading like a virus and months of U.S.-led air strikes don't seem to be containing…

In their Wednesday night coverage of President Obama’s speech on “violent extremism,” CBS and NBC did the best they could to ignore the criticism surrounding the President’s speech in addition to his conscious and repeated inability to refer to the beliefs of terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda as Islamic extremism.

The “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC each devoted full segments on their Wednesday evening newscasts to a speech given by possible 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush in Chicago and how the former Florida Governor would be the latest member of the Bush family dynasty to run for president. In focusing on the dynasty angle, however, ABC and NBC failed to even note that Hillary Clinton’s…

Just shy of 24 hours after a federal judge halted President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty, the major broadcast networks displayed their palpable opposition to the ruling during their Tuesday night broadcasts, lamenting that it “dashes American dreams for millions of families under the threat of deportation” after Wednesday was set “to be a historic day for millions of illegal immigrants” when…

While reporting on the aftermath of the weekend terrorist attacks in Copenhagen, ABC and CBS neglected to mention in their Monday evening reports that the man believed to have carried out the attack that killed two had pledged his allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, just prior to the first attack at a free speech event. Even though ABC’s Terry Moran referred to the attack as…

On Friday's NBC Nightly News, Richard Engel zeroed in on an ISIS atrocity that hasn't gotten enough media attention – its sexual enslavement of women from Iraqi minority groups, especially the Yazidis. Engel interviewed two Yazidi women who escaped from their Islamist captors, and spotlighted that "ISIS is reviving the barbaric tradition of the slave trade." He later bluntly added, "There's a…

When it came to the major broadcast networks covering the full congressional passage of the Keystone XL oil pipeline on their Wednesday night newscasts, ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley chose to ignore the story completely and left their viewers in the dark on this issue. Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News made it the second topic covered on its…

On its first broadcast since the announcement of anchor Brian Williams’s suspension, NBC Nightly News took the step of dropping both Williams’s name from the program’s title, opening graphics, recorded introduction, mastead of the show's website, and Twitter account. Following four teasers from now-interim anchor Lester Holt, the opening theme of the program was played as normal, but instead of a…

In his story on Brian Williams at 10:55 p.m. ET Tuesday, Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine reported that the now-suspended anchor and his agent "were presented with a dossier of Williams' apparent lies," and that "Williams himself was only slowly grasping the depths of the mess he'd created." That begs the obvious question of whether the public will ever get to know what's in that "dossier,"…

In his first night subbing for the embattled Brian Williams, Lester Holt took time before the first commercial break on Monday’s NBC Nightly News to again inform viewers of the reason for Williams’s absence. Holt used similar wording that he did on Saturday's show to describe the situation by making clear at the onset that he wanted “to take just a moment tell you where Brian is tonight” before…

On Monday night, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC each devoted a segment of their Monday evening newscasts to the news that Alabama State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and some local government officials chose not to carry out a federal ruling that calls for gay marriages to be permitted despite a voter-approved ban. Naturally, the networks provided favorable coverage to those in…