Online Media

The weekend before Election Day, Jake Tapper at CNN, interviewing Democratic Minnesota Senator Al Franken, used the classic "some people say" tactic to allege that there were anti-Semitic undertones in the Donald Trump campaign's closing ad. Why? Because three of the many people briefly pictured in the ad, in which the candidate criticized the political establishment's attitudes and actions which…

The latest media meme on President-Elect Donald Trump is that his presidential transition effort is in "chaos," "total disarray," etc. Establishment press outlets from the supposedly chastened (but not really) New York Times, to the Associated Press, to the fever swamps at the Huffington Post, are relentlessly playing that tune. As Bret Baier at Fox News noted on Special Report Wednesday night,…

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the "everybody knows" conventional wisdom in the establishment press which never went away, even as some contrary evidence appeared, was that Donald Trump's campaign, away from his rallies, was a haphazard operation which was doing very little to identify, target and persuade voters. At the New Republic in mid-June, Jeet Heer confidently summed up the media…

Jessica Roy spotlighted Merrimack College Professor Melissa Zimdars's list of "False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical 'News' Sources" in a Tuesday item on Los Angeles Times's "Trail Guide" blog. Roy pointed out that "Breitbart, the 'platform for the alt-right' whose chairman was just named Trump's chief strategist, is on there." However, Professor Zimdars, a self-identified feminist,…

At a press conference in Greece on Tuesday, President Barack Obama claimed that when he came into office, "the economy was contracting faster than it did during the Great Depression, but we were able to intervene, apply lessons learned and stabilize and then begin growth again." Naturally, Elena Becatoros and Josh Lederman at the Associated Press and Gardiner Harris at the New York Times, all of…

The national is predictably failing to describe the true nature of the post-election "protests" and of the "protesters" involved who are upset at the presidential election's result. We've seen versions of this movie before, repeatedly. As fellow NewsBuster Jeffrey Lord said on CNN yesterday, it's been going on for 50 years — only there are now more tools available to detect what we've always…

On Sunday, Matthew Harrigan, the President and CEO of PacketSled, Inc., posted specific threats to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump on Twitter and Facebook. The company's board placed Harrigan on administrative leave on Monday and announced his "resignation" very early Tuesday morning. That a company CEO could do what Harrigan did has to be national news, right? Well, not yet. Searches…

On CNN Newsroom Monday, host Brianna Keilar claimed that she covered an incident or incidents involving Tea Party "people" (plural) who spit on members of Congress and hurled racial slang terms at African-American members of Congress. In the Tea Party's seven-plus years of national presence, there is only one known event involving two separate incidents when what Keilar referred to could…

On Monday, ABC's GMA and NBC's Today pressed Reince Priebus over his future role as chief of staff to Donald Trump. NBC's Matt Lauer hyped that "to some, you're an odd choice for chief of staff, because they've...heard Donald Trump say....we're going counter to the establishment. You are the establishment. You're the ultimate insider."

Considering that it's coming from the New York Times, reporter Sabrina Tavernise's account of what happened in Ohio to swing it from a close Obama win in 2012 to a near-blowout for Donald Trump in 2016 was reasonably well-done, but still had glaring flaws. Her story's human interest elements were strong, but the accompanying statistics provided were sparse, and really needed to be there to tell…

Wednesday morning at 12:42 a.m., as it was becoming clear that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was on the verge of officially defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton for the presidency, Paul Krugman at the New York Times noted at the paper's election night live blog that the "markets are plunging." He then wrote: "If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never…

Alex Pareene unleashed an extended diatribe in reaction to the election of Donald Trump in a Wednesday item on Deadspin: "Blame white people. Blame white men in particular, but reserve plenty of blame for white women....Blame rich people, as always. Blame the public...for Donald fucking Trump getting more votes than Donald Duck....Blame the Founders for enshrining white supremacy in our…

Shortly after noon on Monday, in three publicly visible tweets to Missouri Democratic Party Senator Claire McCaskill, Mitchell referred to how "we're going to be fine in terms of taking back the Senate," whined about how FBI Director James Comey had "muddled this race," and wondered why "he sent that letter" — presumably referring to his letter to Congress in late October concerning the Hillary…

If you believe the Obama administration, the Hillary Clinton campaign and their apparatchiks in the press — and as we've learned during the past several weeks, all three work assiduously to sing from the same hymnal — the economy we've seen during the presidency of Barack Obama has been one of slow but still acceptable recovery and (yes, this word has been frequently used) "durable" expansion.