Blogs

On Christmas evening, appearing in print on Sunday, December 26, Jeremy Peters at the New York Times pretended that the term "fake news" has only gained common currency very recently during the social media era. He also effectively contended that the establishment press holds ownership rights over the term, claiming that "conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. (…

The purveyors of what the establishment press likes to describe as "fake news" have nothing on the fake news the establishment press itself generates at the Obama administration's behest. For example, the Associated Press, in a very late paragraph in just one of its three reports on the topic Thursday, admitted that "Though the FBI and Homeland Security Department issued a joint report on '…

Here's an update from the “fake news” front: The Associated Press published an unbylined “Fact Check” of what anyone with an ounce of sense could see is a satirical article published almost 15 months ago. That’s only the start. PolitiFact also “fact-checked” a December 23, 2016 version it knew was of that same 15 month-old item and gave it a “Pants on Fire" rating. What in the name of Mark…

In an item published on Tuesday, Matt Sedensky at the Associated Press reported on what he observed in a graduate "Faith and Politics" class at Emory University immediately after and during the weeks following this year's presidential election. Class members' immature reactions to the election's result and the reporter's injected commentary are both disturbing, but very useful. That's because…

Steve McMahon, a Democratic Party member described as a media consultant, apparently either hasn't followed the news sufficiently since the presidential election, or is determined to rewrite history. My vote is with the latter. McMahon appeared on MSNBC on Tuesday. Before criticizing President-Elect Donald Trump's victory rallies as "incendiary, he outrageously claimed that Hillary Clinton has "…

Evidence that leftist bias has deeply infected local and regional news coverage arrived in the form of the "Top Stories of 2016" poll results at the Associated Press last week. In an exercise performed since 1936, the AP's "annual poll of U.S. editors and news directors" asked participants to identify the top 10 stories of 2016. "Black Men Killed by Police," referring to the controversial…

Nate Silver has been the establishment press's designated polling hero since 2008, when he correctly predicted the outcome of that year's presidential contest in 49 of 50 states. He also had a great year in 2012, predicting all 50 states' presidential preference results. This year's election? Not so much. Donald Trump won, and Silver is not handling it well. In fact, he's violated one of the…

Fear not for the future of investigative journalism. Rest assured that the folks at the Politico have poured significant journalistic resources into such efforts, delving into many all-important matters relating to Donald Trump and his new administration. Why, on Friday, its Darren Samuelsohn reported that Donald Trump's 2012 driver's license says he's 6'2" inches tall, while The Donald and one…

The leftist press really wants to disappear the story of the man who, accompanied by his husband, was kicked off of a Jet Blue flight for harassing President-Elect Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka. Having learned more about the ejected pair, I can understand why — but it's not the media's job to try to minimize and suppress the incident's details, which they are clearly doing. TMZ broke the news…

In the aftermath of Monday's Christmas market attack in Berlin which killed 12 and injured nearly 50, Geir Moulson at the Associated Press seemed to be more worried about Angela Merkel's political future than the dreadful mayhem perpetrated by the truck-driving attacker. This puts the reporter in the same camp as MSNBC's serial fabulist Brian Williams and a host of other establishment press…

As one would expect, there is plenty to criticize in Stephen Ohlemacher's Monday evening coverage of Donald Trump's achievement of an Electoral College majority earlier in the day. This post will concentrate on Ohlemacher's questionable counting of "protesters." A separate post looks at a very revealing failure in the wire service story's photo collection, in a graphic showing how the…

Tuesday, the press focused on whether Mevlut Mert Altintas, who assassinated Andrei Karlov, Russia's ambassador to Turkey on Monday in Ankara, acted alone or was, in the words of Russia's Vladimir Putin, "directed." There will almost certainly be similar speculation over the driver of the "truck that mowed down the crowd on Monday, killing at least 12 people" in Berlin, Germany, if and when he is…

News travels slowly into the Kansas City metropolitan area — or at least into the newsroom at the Kansas City Star. On Friday, the paper's Dave Helling produced a 950-word writeup on Monday's Electoral College voting. With all of the widely published news about Republican electors receiving death threats, all Helling had to report was a rumor: "One spouse of a Missouri elector claimed to know of…

On December 5, the New York Times published an op-ed column by Republican Texas Elector Christopher Suprun entitled "Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump." The Times celebrated Suprun's "courageous stand" in a December 6 editorial. In that op-ed, Suprun claimed that "Fifteen years ago, as a firefighter, I was part of the response to the Sept. 11 attacks against our nation." The…