Online Media

Old stereotypes die hard — especially the ones which have long been false. The June 1 cover of The New Yorker Magazine depicts the Republican Party's current crop of declared and undeclared 2016 presidential candidates as an all-white-boys affair, showing seven of them in different locker-room postures, with Hillary Clinton peeping in through a window. How is this possible, you ask? Where are…

As noted in my previous related post, one of the authors of a late-2014 study which made the nonsensical claim that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage,” causing "a cascade of opinion change," issued a retraction last week, because the data supporting it was faked. Since it was published in Science Magazine — and because it conveniently…

"Science" has a problem — or more accurately stated, those who produce and publish "scienitific" studies — have a problem. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, one of the leading weekly peer-reviewed general medical journals, caused quite a stir last week when he said that "much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." That may be an underestimate. One of the more…

This has to be the month's top entry in the "Just when you think you've seen it all" category — and it will be more than a little interesting to see how the nation's press handles it. As the Associated Press reported a week ago, the City Council in Los Angeles, by a vote of 14-1, ordered the drafting of a law mandating a citywide minimum wage of $15 per hour by 2020, noting that "the support of…

The Associated Press and Stephen Braun did all they could to cover for the Clintons yesterday. First, the wire service attached the most boring headline imaginable to Braun's story about Bill Clinton's shell company shenanigans: "Bill Clinton company shows complexity of family finances." The message to subscribers, particularly the broadcast networks: "This is boring and time-consuming. Don't…

Associated Press reporter Sarah El Deeb and Abu Bilal al-Homsi, the person she now describes as a "Syrian fighter," have had a long acquaintance. Sarah's and Abu's long-term relationship culminated in a Tuesday afternoon story which AP condensed into 140 characters on Twitter as follows: "Marriage, honeymoons and welfare: @AP exclusive shows Islamic State membership has its privileges." A great…

I think it's a safe assumption that I need to inform the vast majority of readers here that former Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Patrick Murphy has a new weekend show on MSNBC. On that show on Sunday, Murphy interviewed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. In the "Who was more out of touch?" contest between the two, it was a draw. Murphy asserted that the war against ISIS had "mixed…

In a Thursday interview recorded for Megyn Kelly's Fox News show that evening, Charles Krauthammer provided stunning evidence rarely mentioned even on Fox — and almost never in the establishment press — relating to how unserious the administration's and the Pentagon's "strategy" has been in containing, let alone defeating, ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Krauthammer began discussing the inadequacy of…

Given how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there was in the press when the old Hostess liquidated in 2012, a mid-April story at Forbes on the company's has gotten surprisingly little attention. Well, maybe it's not that much of a surprise, for reasons which will be indentified here. Readers may recall that the final straw in that drama occurred late that year when the the AFL-CIO-affiliated…

Kimberly Dozier of Daily Beast has an excellent piece today you might not see picked up by many in the Obama-puffing national media: "Special Ops to Obama: Let Us Fight ISIS, Already."

In a complete non-surprise given her career track record, Hillary Clinton's definition of "cooperation" with requests to turn over whatever emails she unilaterally deigned could be seen meant giving them to the State Despartment on paper. That's lots and lots of paper, 55,000 pages in all, some of them double-sided, all seemingly part of a conscious strategy to deliberately slow down the process…

When it comes to taking questions from representatives of the legacy media, Hillary Clinton has been making herself rather scarce, and Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas thinks that’s just peachy. “The day when the political media was instrumental in getting a candidate's message out is over,” wrote Kos in a Thursday post. “Candidates now have myriad vehicles to communicate their…

Patricia Miller ecstatically touted that the apparent "demographic free-fall" of the Catholic Church is "good news for the country" in a Thursday item for Salon. Miller bemoaned the American Catholic bishops' "outsize role in U.S. politics" in the past, given their opposition to abortion, contraception, and same-sex "marriage," and asserted that "with their flock fleeing and Pope Francis…

Web and news searches at Google, as well as a search at the Associated Press's national site, indicate that there is very little interest in the establishment press in getting the reactions of current and former U.S. soldiers who defeated enemy forces in Ramadi during last decade's Iraq War to the loss of that city to Islamic State forces. Sadly, that's not surprising. As usual, Fox News is…