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Happy Tax Day, NBers!Who's attending a Tea Party rally today? Did everyone get their forms in on time? How about some tax-themed discussion and debate.

Los Angeles Times media reporter James Rainey discovered the Pulitzer Prize jurors weren't going to touch the National Enquirer with a ten-foot pole over their expose of John Edwards: One juror told me that, among that competition, the Enquirer's stories about Edwards did not even make the top 10. The tabloid had first revealed Edwards' relationship with his campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter,…

Well, it only took them nearly a year to tackle this breakdown journalistic ethics, but the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) took on a CBS "60 Minutes" segment that aired back in May 2009. Nonetheless, an analysis by Martha M. Hamilton posted on the CJR Web site on April 14 found several flaws with a May 3, 2009, segment (critiqued by the Business & Media Institute on May 4, 2009). According…

Pelley's so-called investigation of oil companies alleged pollution in Ecuadorian rainforest 'an exercise in innuendo.'

“A CBS News/New York Times poll out tonight finds 18 percent of Americans support the movement,” Katie Couric announced at the top of Wednesday's CBS Evening News as the newscast provided a surprisingly neutral summary of the findings in the new survey, though reporter Dean Reynolds couldn't resist asserting “there is some inconsistency in the Tea Party viewpoints. For example, for all their…

Ed Schultz brags that he would have the "courage" to confront anyone putting a Hitler mustache on Barack Obama . . . So what of the innumerable occasions on which George W. was portrayed as a Nazi? Did Ed ever utter a peep of protest?  Or is he OK with Republican presidents being portrayed as mega-mass murderers?Schultz made his macho claim on his MSNBC show this evening, in a clip from an…

Bill Maher and Chris Matthews, on Wednesday's Hardball, denigrated Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann as merely "attractive" women with very little smarts with the HBO host even going as far to use a vulgar euphemism to describe them as he claimed: "They're attractive especially to the Republican Party, which is not known as a party that really does well with the opposite sex. Usually they're…

  At the top of the 3PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Peter Alexander reported on a Tea Party event being held in Boston and grilled conservative author Kevin Jackson on "the fringe elements who show up for these rallies. Some in the past have had offensive signs and rhetoric." As Alexander spoke a large sign from the Boston rally appeared on screen, displaying the word 'LOVE' and a heart symbol.

During a discussion of John McCain's drift rightward on Wednesday's Morning Joe, MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle smeared the Arizona Senator as more scared of Republican primary challenger J.D. Hayworth than he was of his Vietnamese torturers. Barnicle mocked, "The ultimate sadness is that, here, in the 21st century, running for re-election, he shows more fear of J.D. Hayworth than he showed…

In his Wednesday Business Day column, David Leonhardt, the New York Times's conscience on economic matters, defended the current skewed tax system, in which almost half of U.S. households paid no income taxes last year, and even argued that those now paying the highest rates should be paying even more: "Behind The 47% Talking Point." Leonhardt never addressed the underlying point of conservative…

White House adviser calls 15-25 percent European tax 'not as toxic an idea;' some online news media praise consumption tax as 'efficient,' 'only option.'

Double standards are often nothing of the sort, and charges of double standards are often dodges by the disingenuous designed to convince the sophomoric that adhering to any kind of standard is inherently unjust.  But then there are some actual double standards that are so shamelessly transparent that one should be embarrassed to even utter them.Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood-Elsewhere.com does…

As procrastinators rush to beat the April 15 tax deadline and thousands rally at Tea Parties to oppose out of control government spending, politicians and the national news media are mulling the possibility of a new European-style national sales tax. On April 6, former Federal Reserve chairman and current White House economic adviser Paul Volcker revealed the Obama administration's possible…

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times's Media Decoder blog reported on Tuesday that CNN, a network known for its consistent liberal bias, is now incredibly touting itself as "the only credible, nonpartisan voice left" on cable television. Elliott noted that this spin was being pitched by the network at a Tuesday morning event for advertisers at the Time Warner Center in New York City.The New York…