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"Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has voted to approve more than $900,000 in deals with Johns Hopkins since her husband began working for one of its divisions late last year — a possible violation of the city ethics code." That's how the Baltimore Sun's Julie Scharper began her March 16 story -- published last night online here -- about the Democratic mayor's votes on the city's board…

The national debt jumped by $72 billion on Tuesday even as the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for just three weeks that will cut $6 billion from government spending. If Congress were to cut $6 billion every three weeks for the next 36 weeks, it would manage to save between now and late November as much money as the Treasury…

New York Times media reporter and columnist David Carr discussed the surprising recent audience gains of the newly controversial National Public Radio in “Gains For NPR Are Clouded,” featured on the front of Monday’s Business Day section. Carr sometimes grasps the conservative point of view on media issues, but on Monday he joined his boss, Executive Editor Bill Keller, in chiding the…

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik has not only done one story trying to dig out former top NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller's nasty comments against deeply racist, gun-toting, phony-Christian conservatives (as Matt Hadro first noted), he's performed three slanted versions of NPR self-defense. Just as CBS in the first days of the Dan Rather fiasco embarrassed themselves by stonewalling Rather…

There has been quite a bit of howling from the right over the president's continued golf outings in the midst of two international crises - in Japan and Libya. But Gene Healy gives an interesting take in a column Wednesday, noting that the more time Obama spends on the links, the less time he has to ram his misguided agenda into law. Of course, there is the entirely separate issue of the press'…

National Public Radio hasn't exactly been inviting real conservatives -- the ones who think NPR is not a "very valuable" treasure for taxpayers to involuntarily support -- since the Ron Schiller tape was posted. But kudos to Michel Martin, host of the afternoon talk show Tell Me More, for putting on Kevin Williamson of National Review Online on Monday. He said God bless Ron Schiller for…

As strife continued in Libya, and Japan dug out from an epic earthquake and tsunamis leaving one of our largest trading partners in the midst of a nuclear crisis, Barack Obama went golfing this past Saturday. Obviously clueless about the President's numerous golf outings and vacations since Inauguration Day, comedienne Wanda Sykes actually asked Jay Leno on Tuesday's "Tonight Show," "Has…

As NewsBusters reported in February, vulgarian comedienne Kathy Griffin was cast to do a guest stint on the hit series "Glee" portraying a Palinesque Tea Partier. The advanced billing turned out better than the reality, for on Tuesday's show, Griffin mocked Palin and Christine O'Donnell while depicting Tea Party members as homophobic birthers (video follows with transcript and commentary):

No one can fairly accuse whoever wrote the Tuesday evening report on 2010 newspaper industry revenue of looking through rose-colored glasses. The same cannot be said of John F. Sturm, President and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, whose press release today reads as follows: Quarter after quarter, newspaper advertising has shown signs of a continued turnaround and an essential…

If only Larry O'Donnell could have restrained himself, he had an opening to take a deserved shot at a Republican. But they don't call him 'Crazy Larry' for nothing. And so on his MSNBC show this evening, O'Donnell couldn't resist going beyond the bounds, fantasizing about "good Christians" as murderers of illegal immigrants. A meat-head of a Kansas Republican state lawmaker named Virgil Peck…

In the public policy conversation today, there is nothing funnier than hearing the leadership of National Public Radio deny there’s a liberal bias at play over there. Even when the Daily Caller posted sting video of their top fundraiser Ron Schiller describing America as remarkably under-educated and the Republicans as ruined by racist, gun-toting, phony Christians, NPR’s reaction was…

Danielle Kurtzleben at U.S. News & World Report crunched some numbers of federal campaign contributions and discovered that the NPR Board and the board of the NPR Foundation are -- surprise, surprise -- much more likely to donate to Democrats. A review of campaign finance data found that NPR board members' campaign contributions have sharply favored Democrats. Since 2004, members of the…

Suddenly, unions aren't looking so bad ... On her radio show Friday, Rosie O'Donnell fielded a call from a California woman who said she is a member of a correctional officers' union. Although the union has helped her, the caller told O'Donnell, it comes with baggage (audio) --

Actor and filmmaker Harry Shearer, best known for his voice work in 'The Simpsons', blasted the news media in a speech to the National Press Club on Monday. Specifically, he singled out the media's "myth-making" tendency - its constant desire to fit current events into mostly pre-formed narratives. "What I’m calling a ‘template,’ is based on facts. Some facts. A partial collection. The first…