Online Media

Bob Ley, ESPN's longest-serving commentator, was in Cuba yesterday after the Tampa Bay Rays defeated the island nation's national team 4-1 in an exhibition baseball game. Shortly after the conclusion of that game, ESPN had Ley report from a rather nice-looking streetscape in Havana (not your typical avenue in the workers' paradise). As he did, a demonstrator interrupted him. ESPN, acting as if…

It has been nine days since Ingham County, Michigan prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III, a Democrat, was arrested and charged with "15 criminal counts" in three different counties involving engaging prostitutes, pandering prostitution, and willful neglect of duty by a public officer. The press has been reluctant to identify Dunnings as a Democrat in its news coverage, either avoiding the tag…

Today's report on February's new-home sales from the Census Bureau showed seasonally adjusted declines in three of the nation's four regions and an increase in the West. The Associated Press and reporter Josh Boak, displaying brazenness which might have even embarrassed the scribes at Pravda during the worst days of the Soviet Union, concentrated on how great things were in the West in their…

According to the Daily Beast's Jay Michaelson, not only is the lawsuit against the Obama administration over the contraceptive mandate based on "tortured logic," it's sinful.

At Salon.com at 10:28 a.m., Amanda Marcotte wrote that "It will likely be days, perhaps weeks, before we know much about the horrific terrorist attacks on an airport and subway in Brussels on Tuesday morning that killed dozens of people." Actually, dear, as of when I began this post about 90 minutes later, we alreadly know plenty. Most crucially, the Associated Press reported that the Islamic…

Eric Niiler boosted environmentalists' concerns about Cuba in a Monday item for Discovery News. The journalist pointed out how "the time-warp nature of Cuba's Cold War-era embargo with the United States (sic) has....kept developers from exploiting the island's natural resources." He also spotlighted how "many conservationists worry the political thaw between Washington and Havana could bring a…

Ridicule by media critics has apparently made some headway against the business press's annoying habit of describing bad news about the economy as having occurred "unexpectedly." Now they seem to be reserving the "U-word" for unexpected improvements, which haven't been seen very much during the past seven-plus years. Instead, reacting to today's bad news from the National Association of Realtors…

Matt Lauer, aka Mr. Softee (when interviewing people with whom he sympathizes), tried to act like a tough guy in his Friday interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. You're not fooling us, Matt. After observing that he had "an enormous outpouring of questions about censorship" after he asked his Twitter followers what they would like to see discussed, Lauer "cleverly" asked Dorsey: "Does Twitter…

Does anyone remember how The Onion "humorously" satirized then-Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's refusal to consider the federal court nomination of Miguel Estrada in 2003? Oh come on, it was the one where there was an accompanying cartoon showing Daschle holding Estrada's "Severed Head Aloft in Front of the Capitol Building"? That was just a laugh riot, wasn't it? Of course, no…

Most readers here are by now painfully familiar with how miserable mainstream media reporting on police shootings of criminals can be. That said, the Associated Press's headline writers and reporter Lindsay Whitehurst have lowered the bar even further in their coverage of the shooting of a 17 year-old who was beating a man "near a homeless shelter" in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In a Monday afternoon post which gets close to taking pleasure in the serious economic decline in the heart of the coal mining industry in West Virginia, CNN Money's Patrick Gillespie observed, based on Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about coal miners' jobs, that she "has no love for coal companies." But in Gillespie's world, what Mrs. Clinton said doesn't matter, because "Clinton won't have…

The business press's determination to convince the public that weak economic news is really strong seemingly knows no bounds. Today, shortly after the Federal Reserve's Industrial Production report for February showed a seasonally adjusted 0.5 percent decline — worse than expectations of -0.3 percent — the Associated Press pretended in its headline and in reporter Christopher Rugaber's first…

Today's report from the government on February's retail sales was awful. Last month's sales fell by 0.1 percent, which was bad enough. Beyond that, January's originally reported 0.2 percent increase was revised down to a 0.4 percent decrease. Additionally, as I noted at my home blog this morning, January's seasonally adjusted revision should have been much worse, based on how terrible that month'…

Replying to a tweet about a story reporting that Ben Carson hints he was promised a position in a potential Trump administration, MTVNews senior writer Ira Madison III quipped "House or field?"