Latest Blogs

The producers and directors of the movie Concussion might not want to ask ESPN’s Robert Smith how many thumbs-up he wants to give their new movie. Because, based on his tweets this weekend, Smith might extend them an entirely different digit.

At 30, MSNBC guest host Luke Russert  is young enough to gush over Bill Nye the Science Guy by saying he used to watch his Nineties PBS show when they had a substitute science teacher in class. But in this December 23 interview, Nye got weird and insisted no one on TV says the words “climate change.” Is this guy a scientist? This is like saying no one on TV says the word “politics.” “We have a…

Yesterday, I noted that Associated Press reporter Karl Ritter actually wrote, and AP actually published, a story about how complying with the Paris climate agreement would require greenhouse gas emissions "To Drop Below Zero." Perhaps Ritter, whose beat includes "cover(ing) climate change, from UN negotiations to Arctic melt," looked around and realized that if he didn't put out something…

Since last week, NewsBusters has been presenting each category from the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Hopeless Haters Award,” for the worst quotes denigrating the conservative GOP presidential candidates. Winning the top slot: MSNBC Morning Joe regular Donny Deutsch, who on March 23 slammed just-declared…

This is what occurs in a slow-news environment at The Washington Post: they lament the lack of honors for Barack Obama. The front page of Saturday’s paper carried the headline “Hawaii wipes out in Obama honors.” Reporters Greg Jaffe and Juliet Eilperin spent 1,286 words unspooling  the “embarrassing record” of Hawaii’s failure to name more than a snowcone after the current president.

President Obama considers the Republican party an international outlier, and so does MSNBC's Steve Benen. (That’s “outlier,” not “outlaw,” though, who knows, for them that may be a distinction without a difference.) After quoting Obama’s recent comment that the GOP is “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change,” Benen, who’s also the…

In the annual competition between leftist media outlets for the screwiest (or most Scrooge-like) criticism of Christmas traditions, a Huffingon Post item published Thursday morning by Michael McLaughlin (HT Breitbart) was a formidable entry. After the HuffPo reporter's headline noted that "U.S. Christmas Lights Burn More Energy Than Some Nations In A Year," he suggested that "maybe we should…

One of the more tiresome cliches of political coverage is the “secret weapon.” Twenty years ago, Hillary Clinton was promoted as her husband’s “secret weapon.” Now it’s the reverse. Peter Nicholas of  The Wall Street Journal wrote a story aping the Clinton spin, headlined “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Secret Weapon’ Could Escalate Campaign Rhetoric.” Bill has been described by reporters as a secret weapon…

In Saturday’s New York Times, reporter Matt Flegenheimer took a hostile tone in an ostensibly light-hearted story about Jeb Bush’s surprising reserves of humor in Saturday’s “Bush Camp Suggests (Very) Secret Weapon: Its Candidate Is Funny.” Turns out Jeb! has a decent line in dry wit, but the Times resolutely refused to be amused by the struggling Republican candidate: “Who says @JebBush doesn’t…

“At the very top of my naughty list” for the year, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes announced on the Christmas Day edition of FNC’s Special Report with Bret Baier, are “the mainstream media.” Hayes cited how “the coverage of President Obama and Hillary Clinton in particular this past year has been abysmal,” pointing to the failure to correct Obama’s “unequivocally wrong” assertions about…

Time columnist Joe Klein conceives of himself as outside the “blinkered orthodoxy” of the political parties, but for many years he’s been a blinkered adorer of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, touting them both as centrists despite the governing realities. In handing out his “Teddy” (for Roosevelt) awards for "doers, diplomats, and leaders who ignored our worst instincts," the trend continued. He…

The detachment from reality of those who actually believe that the recent international climate agreement in Paris is anything but a dangerous and potentially expensive charade has become especially irritating. The goals identified in Paris are obviously unachievable, and have no direct tie-in to reducing "global warming." Convincing evidence of the link between carbon dioxide generation and…

Since Monday, NewsBusters has been presenting each category from the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Ruining the Revolution Award,” for journalists wailing about how awful it will be for communist Cuba to become more like the capitalist U.S. Winning this award, Fox News Channel anchor Shepard Smith who…

ABC News devoted a fluffy two-hour special to the year in review, studying the news and pop culture. They had a “Dishonor Roll” segment where they mocked the adultery of Josh Duggar and the scandal of the adultery website Ashley Madison when its client list leaked. They scorned the dentist that shot “Cecil the Lion,” white activist Rachel Dolezal pretending to be black, Real Housewives of Beverly…