Ohio

Assessing the presidential race in the Midwest with Chris Hayes on Thursday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said Ohio Gov. John Kasich may be the "cockiest of all of the cocky breed of the Republican governors right now," but his loss on union bargaining rights was so stinging "I actually think the Republican establishment in Ohio is pretty wussy compared to what they were like in 2010." That…

Updated below | Not only has the Obama administration failed to live up to its promise of "transparency," it appears the president's reelection campaign shares the same issue. Politico media reporter Dylan Byers noted this morning that "Joe Vardon, a reporter with the Columbus Dispatch, says campaign aides stopped him from speaking to voters at a rally featuring Vice President Joe Biden in…

As their circulation numbers continue to decline, the self-described mainstream media has errected a new idol for Americans to worship: so-called “fact checking” websites which ostensibly exist to vet claims from all sides about political disputes. A review of one such site, PolitiFact Ohio -- an arm of Cleveland's Plain Dealer -- shows that the supposedly non-partisan fact-checkers there have a…

Leading off Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, fill-in anchor Savannah Guthrie declared the presidential race in one key battleground state all but over: "Tonight, both candidates are in Ohio as a spate of new polls shows the all-important bellwether may be slipping away for the Republican challenger." In the report that followed, correspondent Ron Allen reiterated that "new polls show Ohio…

All this week during the 11 a.m. Eastern MSNBC Live program, "we're going to look at the ballot battles that could decide the race for the White House," MSNBC's Richard Lui noted today as he set up a segment with two liberal opponents of voter ID laws -- "wired into the concerns of minority voters" -- Ohio State Senator Nina Turner (D) and Common Cause staff counsel Stephen Spaulding.…

This afternoon, NB's Kyle Drennen did a great job of runnng down the pathetic contention by establishment press "fact-checkers" that vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan somehow lied or misled viewers during his speech Wednesday night concerning the closure of the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin and what presidential candidate Barack Obama said at the plant in 2008. No, WaPo, …

As we at NewsBusters have documented repeatedly, MSNBC has done its level best to hype voter ID laws as a "voter suppression" attempt by the GOP to "disenfranchise" voters who traditionally fall into the Democratic column. Today's MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts was no exception. Roberts informed viewers of ruling by a judge on the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court yesterday -- read the PDF of…

A small business owner in a crucial swing state has found herself losing business from loyal customers due to her ad being featured in a Mitt Romney campaign ad. It seems her customers believe she is a Romney backer, but in fact she prefers to keep politics out of her business. And so this business owner demanded that the Romney camp either pull the ad or blur her deli's name from the frames…

On May 2, Matt Sheffield at NewsBusters ran down a list of national media outlets which failed to report the Occupy movement connections of the five men arrested by the FBI for plotting to blow up a suburban Cleveland bridge, despite the fact that the Cleveland Plain Dealer began noting those relationships from the get-go. Matt wrote that the Associated Press recognized the connections, but…

Barack Obama has trouble telling the truth. This is the man who admitted his memoir "Dreams of My Father" was semi-fictional. “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” Translation: On some pages, I’m taking poetic license with the facts to burnish my image.

New York Times reporter Mark Landler spun for the president in Ohio in Friday's "Obama, Hitting Road in Rust Belt, Offers Tough Talk on Jobs and Trade." Landler, whose reporting on Obama is getting more gushy as the election nears, shone his journalistic flashlight on any slivers of good economic news he could find and suggested they would benefit Obama in the Midwest.

Neil Munro at The Daily Caller is pointing out that Barack Obama has a truth-telling problem when it comes to being outspent on his previous campaigns. Someone should alert Politifact and its users in the press corps. “I got outspent when I ran [the] first time for Senate,” the president claimed in his campaign speech Thursday in Maumee, Ohio. Munro found "Obama was misleading." Yeah, that's…

As Obama prepared to tour northern Ohio cities by bus on Thursday, NPR's Morning Edition was trying to take apart the Republican challenger to liberal Senator Sherrod Brown. First, correspondent David Welna dismissed 34-year-old GOP state treasurer Josh Mandel as someone "who could easily be mistaken for a teenager." Then he added that "independent" (read: liberal media elite) fact-checkers…

The last national press reports on the five men arrested Monday for plotting to blow up a Cleveland-area bridge reassured everyone that none involved were in responsible roles in the Occupy movement. On Thursday, the Associated Press's Thomas J. Sheeran wrote that Occupy Cleveland spokespersons "said the men were associated with the group but didn't represent Occupy Cleveland or its non-violent…