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This is the eighth year I have done shopping and layoff-related searches on how often the words "Christmas" and "holiday" are used. As has been the case since the enterprise began in 2005, news reports are far more likely to refer to the commercial time frame between Thanksgiving and Christmas as the "holiday shopping season." Meanwhile, compared to shopping references, news reports are…

An unbylined Associated Press story at 1:34 p.m. (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) disgracefully covered a federal ruling which delivered a defeat (for now) against the enforcement of ObamaCare's contraception mandate. Unlike the Hobby Lobby situation (covered earlier today at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), where the dispute is over certain portions of the…

Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times touted her "exclusive report that President Obama is urging the Illinois General Assembly to legally recognize "gay marriage" in his adopted home state. Legislators may debate the measure as early as this week in Springfield. Both houses of the state legislature there are Democrat-controlled. "While the president does not weigh in on every measure being…

TV Guide published a “Cheers and Jeers” issue to analyze “2012's Best and Worst in TV.” When it came to political TV, the magazine made it quite clear that Obama’s re-election was a highlight, and conservative celebrities were only mentioned in “Jeers.” Raddatz was hailed for “asking direct questions and keeping the candidates on point,” which does not describe her first question to Joe…

It's the last day of 2012, and NewsBusters is recounting the worst media bias of the year, as catalogued in the MRC's Best Notable Quotables of 2012. Earlier, we documented journalists' most partisan potshots against the Romney-Ryan ticket, as well as the most effusive "Obamagasms" of the preceding twelve months. Today, some of the most infuriating and/or wacky quotes of 2012, including the…

Liberals always think humor has a liberal bias. That wasn't certainly true when The Washington Post magazine published "Dave Barry's Year in Review" on Sunday. Barry mocks Obama for his victories: "President Obama, in the State of the Union address, boldly rebuts critics who charge that his economic policies have been a failure by displaying the scalp of Osama bin Laden, which a White House…

One of the establishment press's favorite tactics to diminish the perceived strength of a position taken by people or companies they are inclined not to favor is to take objectively true facts and statements and reduce them to things only those people or companies "say" or "believe." Hobby Lobby's court battle against the ObamaCare mandates is a perfect case in point, with both the Politico…

On Friday, CNN’s Ali Velshi perfectly represented the typical liberal journalist who cares only about raising taxes on the rich, and not about the larger picture. (He clearly doesn't care about looking objective.) Velshi announced “the central question is whether it will hurt all that much to raise income taxes a little bit on the highest earners in the country. Well, to push the country to…

In their December 27 story about Lisa Jackson's resignation from atop her perch at the Environmental Protection Agency, Darren Samuelsohn and Erica Martinson at the Politico wanted readers to believe that occurred after "after four years of battling Republicans and industry while also giving the White House some heartburn along the way over her push for new clean air rules." Please. It's not…

Talk radio never has been as big a deal on the left as it is on the right, but some lefty talk hosts have found a sizable national audience. One of them, self-described democratic socialist Thom Hartmann, has been a staple in the top ten of Talkers magazine's Heavy Hundred host rankings (he was #8 on the 2012 list, just behind Mark Levin and just ahead of Glenn Beck). Hartmann's program airs…

Time magazine’s Joe Klein can’t get his basic biographic facts straight, but he’s sure the “fiscal cliff” impasse should be blamed on Grover Norquist on Rush Limbaugh for leading a conservative culture “removed from reality” and “extreme in the most egregious way.” On CBS’s Face the Nation, after Peggy Noonan regretted how President Barack Obama allows “dreadful enervating dramas” while…

When the White House initiated the “We The People” website for persons to use in getting the attention of the Obama administration by accumulating at least 25,000 electronic signatures, I don't think they expected it to be used as much and as often as it is. One of the complaints that has surpassed the halfway point is a petition to have NBC News reporter David Gregory arrested for using a…

So it's come to this: While those who gather by the hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even by the hundreds of thousands in support of conservative causes or against liberal ones usually are either ignored, underestimated, or denigrated by the establishment press, one gun-grabbing advocate protesting at a local gun show gets sympathetic treatment in one-third to one-half of a two-minute segment…

During the past two years, Republican governors and lawmakers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan have been the targets of a great deal of negative attention from the establishment press, particularly on TV, as a result of taking necessary actions to get their states' fiscal houses in order and to become more economically competitive. Meanwhile, the Midwest's largest and Democrat-dominated…