Online Media

A funny thing happened on the way to finding yet another year of media emphasis on the use of "holiday" vs. "Christmas" in describing the shopping season. Google News searches conducted this morning at about 7:30 ET on "Christmas shopping season" and "holiday shopping season" came back with the highest percentage of "Christmas" results I've seen in the six years I've been doing these searches…

Update (17:23): Monkey see, monkey do: MSNBC's Chris Matthews quoted extensively from this post on today's "Hardball" in a segment entitled "Whatever Happened to John McCain?" Matthews and his guests lamented McCain's swing to the right in 2010. Hell hath no fury like Joe Klein disillusioned. The Time magazine writer apparently had a bit of a liberal journalist man-crush on Sen. John McCain…

Today liberal Senate Democrats failed to garner the 60-vote threshold to end debate on and move to a final passage vote for the DREAM Act. In covering the story, the news wire credited Republican opposition for "doom[ing]" the legislation, but the math doesn't work out when you look at the breakdown of the votes on the motion to end debate -- also known as invoking cloture. [h/t reader Kevin…

Tonight marks the final edition of Larry King Live. While we have a compendium of his bias, the veteran talk show host is equally known for some pretty tremendous gaffes.

It seems to be almost required by now that any indictment of Kwame Kilpatrick must be accompanied by two or more establishment media outlets reports that fail to inform readers that the former Detroit Mayor is a Democrat -- in fact, a Democrat who was singled out for copious praise during the early stages of Barack Obama's campaign for president. In unbylined reports, CBS News in Detroit and…

Tuesday's Washington Post print edition ran a front-page obituary for Richard Holbrooke which closed by noting that the veteran diplomat told his surgeon "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." Of course numerous news outlets latched onto that quote. Leftist magazine Mother Jones even made the line their quote of the day late Monday evening as blogger Kevin Drum approvingly added in a…

Maybe we need to add the word "Palinography" to the dictionary. Its definition would be: "The process of preparing news photographs and accompanying captions about Sarah Palin in a deliberately negative light." One example many will likely remember involved the amateurish wire service shoes-and-calves-only photos frequently seen during Palin's vice-presidential run. Lori Ziganto at the…

Earlier today, a federal district judge in the 4th Circuit found the individual mandate section of the ObamaCare law unconstitutional. Tribune Newspapers Washington bureau writers Noam N. Levey and David G. Savage wrote up the 19-paragraph story, which I accessed at LATimes.com. Levey and Savage waited until the 12th and 13th paragraphs to actually quote U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson:

Justin Fenner at Styleite needs to buy a clue or two about how women who like Sarah Palin think and act, and about Palin herself. In a post late Friday afternoon, he asked, "Why Isn’t Sarah Palin Selling More Clothes?" (bolds are mine):

Most of the news coverage I've seen of yesterday's violent demonstrations against a hike in tuition fees in London's Parliament Square portrayed it as a show of strength of student protesters. Yet while there were doubtless numerous students protesting, left-wing and anarchist groups have easily glommed onto the occasion to hijack formerly peaceful demonstrations for their trouble-making…

President Obama is a nice, moral family man. Too bad he has to deal with wild-eyed ideologues in the congressional GOP. That's the sentiment of Eleanor Clift's December 10 Newsweek.com piece, "Filling In the Blanks," which examines where the president stands in the public's perception at the midway through his term in office. As is standard operating procedure for Clift, Republicans and…

Shortly after 5 p.m. yesterday, Time's Michael Scherer laid out his reasons why he believed Democrats would eventually come around to President Obama's compromise with congressional Republicans on tax policy. In "Why Democrats Will Probably Swallow The Tax Cut Compromise," Scherer noted that, according to one economic analysis, the Obama-GOP compromise would result in both stronger economic…

With a brief 8-paragraph article, Time.com's David Kaufman today approvingly explored the trend of 'ultra-gay hotels":

There are many areas where the establishment press's terminology preferences are significantly out of sync with everyday usage by the general public. To name just two examples, the ever so PC press routinely replaces publicly favored and more informative terms such as "illegal immigrants" and "Muslim terrorists" with "undocumented workers" and "militants." And of course, we can't forget the…