NBC Nightly News

NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams on Thursday became the first evening news broadcast to cover the recess appointment of Donald Berwick to run Medicare. Anchor Brian Williams asserted that "Republicans are angry, claiming it's antagonistic." He also observed, "Berwick has spoken about the need to ration medical care to control costs." NBC has offered the most reporting on Berwick: 20 seconds…

President Obama’s recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick – a controversial advocate of socialized medicine and of government rationing of health care, particularly for the elderly – as head of the Medicare and Medicaid programs has so far received no attention on ABC’s World News or on the CBS Evening News, while the NBC Nightly News on Thursday devoted just 38 seconds to the President’s…

Last week, Matt Robare at NewsBusters noted the fact that the Big 3 networks' combined year-over-year audience fell by a bit more than 1 million during the second quarter. Last week's showing appears to be to a slight pickup over the previous week, but it may have been much worse. Here, per Media Bistro, is how the the week of June 28 as reported by Nielsen compared to the week of June 21, the…

At the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog (HT Instapundit), Byron York documents the results of some Lexis Nexis searching: Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the New York Times: 0. Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the Washington Post: 0. Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on NBC Nightly News: 0. Total words about the NASA…

The big three nightly news broadcasts, NBC Nightly, CBS Evening and ABC World, lost a combined one million viewers in the second quarter of 2010, according to TVNewser.These numbers are comparable to the first quarter, which saw Evening News and World News get their lowest average viewers ever, while NBC's Winter Olympics coverage helped it get their highest average viewers since 2005. In the…

Wednesday's evening news shows and Thursday's morning programs continued to minimize or leave out important moments of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's confirmation hearings. ABC's Good Morning America, for instance, has offered only 67 seconds of coverage over three days. Today and The Early Show each provided a single ten second news brief on Thursday. It's not as though the second day of…

CBS and NBC took time Wednesday night to showcase Democratic Senator Al Franken's artistry -- not to scold Franken's frivolity, but to luxuriate in it. As CBS displayed Franken's drawing of Republican Senator Jeff  Sessions next to a picture of the Alabamian, fill-in anchor Scott Pelley admired what Franken had created during the hearing for Supreme Court nominee Elana Kagan:A look over Franken's…

“For the first time, Americans got to see the woman President Obama called a ‘trailblazer’ in action,” ABC anchor Diane Sawyer trumpeted Tuesday night before Jonathan Karl framed his story on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s hearing around how “a confirmation hearing isn't usually a laughing matter, but if we learned one thing about Elena Kagan today, it's that she has a sense of humor.” Like…

All three network evening newscasts on Monday downplayed the start of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings, with NBC Nightly News squeezing in just 24 seconds for Kagan at the tail end of a story about the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor the 2nd Amendment. For their part, CBS and ABC offered full stories outlining Kagan’s first day before the Judiciary committee after…

When President Obama picked Elena Kagan to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the broadcast networks referred to the upcoming Senate confirmation process as “contentious” a “meat grinder” and a “battle,” warning Kagan was “in for a fight.”But a Media Research Center analysis of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts in the six weeks since Kagan was nominated shows the broadcast…

Unlike Katie Couric on Monday night, on Wednesday evening NBC's Brian Williams didn't hide the bad news for President Obama in the network's latest poll, but Williams and Savannah Guthrie sure seemed to lament the public mood's swing against Obama as Williams attributed it to how Obama “had to touch” the gulf oil leak, “he had to own it and now he's getting tagged with how he's reacting to it.”…

Tough times don't last; tough people do. That's the theme of author John S. Cohoat's new book "No Thank You, Mr. President," which tells the story of 10 private companies in Elkhart County, Ind., that made their own way to economic recovery without government handouts. "My hope is that these stories provide some inspiration for you or make you remember why our capitalist economic policies and…

Network anchors can’t resist misconstruing Arizona’s upcoming immigration enforcement law. The latest instances came Friday night when ABC and NBC caught up with news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an interviewer in Ecuador that the Obama administration will sue to block the law. Diane Sawyer erroneously described the anti-illegal immigration measure as “Arizona's controversial new…

Catching up on an item from last week on the Tuesday, June 8, NBC Nightly News, correspondent Tom Aspell portrayed the residents of Gaza as living through a life prison sentence imposed by Israel: "Israel's blockade on Gaza isn't just about preventing goods from getting in, it's about preventing 1.5 million Palestinians from getting out. It sentences them to life inside a 140-square-mile prison…