Online Media

Call the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" people. Politifact, the alleged fact-checking site which has for years almost invariably insisted on calling obvious truths stated by Republicans and conservatives "Half True" at best and often worse, while taking flat-out lies by leftists and pretending they contain some element of truth, has issued a "Pants on Fire" rating on Senate Minority Leader Harry…

MSNBC host Chris Matthews kicked off his roundtable segment on Tuesday's Hardball by denouncing Ted Cruz's amusing "machine gun bacon" video for conservative media outlet IJReview.com. Unfortunately for Matthews, no one else on his panel was as stuck in the mud, agreeing among themselves it was a clever viral video to put out in the midst of a crowded primary campaign.

Leave it to the Daily Beast to find objectionable a completely voluntary religious, not-for-profit alternative to for-profit ObamaCare-regulated health insurance. 

I noted on Sunday how former Associated Press reporter Philip Elliott, writing for Time Magazine's Time.com website, joined the Scott Walker pile-on brigade criticizing the Wisconsin Governor's reasonable — arguably to a fault — position that he doesn't personally know whether Barack Obama is a Christian. A separate post by Elliott, which covered a weekend retreat hosted by Charles Koch,…

One of the more outrageous chapters during presidential campaign season so far, the press harassment of 2016 GOP candidate and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in February over his statement that he "doesn't know" whether President Barack Obama is a Christian, is back. Nobody in the press seems interested in asking Obama himself how he can still profess to be a Christian and support homosexual…

On Thursday, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three networks and the two leading Spanish-language networks ignored the latest developments in the now 813 day-old IRS targeting scandal. As usual, only Fox News covered a congressional hearing on, in Fox's words, "the lack of accountability following the IRS targeting of tea party and other groups" as well as a federal judge's threat "…

These economics reporters at the Associated Press have become experts at deadpan humor. Earlier today, I noted how the wire service's Christopher Rugaber told readers, in the wake of a government report showing the lowest wage and benefit increases on record, that "the job market is not yet back to full health." No kidding, Chris. On top of that, the AP's Martin Crutsinger reacted to yesterday's…

David Roberts has penned a tale of two media, dealing first with how a profusion of conservative outlets has pulled the Republican party to the right -- the subject of a recent Harvard study -- then pivoting to analyze the mainstream media’s belated (and still incomplete) awakening to the GOP’s “radicalism.” “One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left,” wrote Roberts in a…

Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press and the "expert" he quoted in his writeup on the government's awful Employment Cost Index report seemed to be taking their cues from Steven Wright's deadpan comedy act. The problem, of course, is that they were writing and saying isn't funny at all. Rugaber, with his "expert" help, assembled an impressive array of understatements and misstatements in…

The bar-lowering in the business press continues. In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":

On his Tuesday night show, with the help of Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News described how the "Black Lives Matter" movement sustains itself. The rest of the press wants readers, listeners and viewers to presume that it is a self-sustaining, grass-roots movement. It isn't. O'Reilly also noted that megastars Jay-Z and Beyoncé, numbers 28 and 29, respectively, on…

In some areas of the country, Planned Parenthood has gone on the offensive against local and regional news outlets in an attempt to minimize the exposure of damning undercover videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress. They are telling these outlets that the videos "should not be aired." This is an attempt at corporate censorship which the establishment press would treat as important…

I guess the slogan of labor has changed from "Look for the union label" to "Look for the union waiver." The Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story early this morning on an issue some people thought disappeared after its initial exposure two months ago. The issue is whether union workers should be exempt from minimum wage laws, especially the sky-high minimums being enacted in some U…

Slate writer Amanda Marcotte claimed this week that a drop in the number of teens having sex is the result of encouraging teens to use birth control and engage in sexual behavior. Meanwhile, she posited, education encouraging abstinence couldn't possibly, ever, in a zillion years, have anything to do with it.