USA Today

“Dad, what’s ‘humor?’ “Well, it was a way of talking about things – mixing truth with absurdity or irony – that helped us navigate uncomfortable issues. It made people smile and laugh. They even allowed it in the media sometimes. But that was all long ago, before the Rise of the Perpetually Offended.” If you think that conversation is far-fetched, get a load of USA Today’s Ted Berg. Berg got…

Liberal media bias lives beyond the borders of the United States. As Michael Wolff noted in a front page article for Monday’s USA Today: “Many popular media notions of what a restless electorate is against (bankers, corporate power, tax dodgers, economic austerity) and what it is for (fundamental change, leveling the powerful, taxing the rich and big social program promises) came a cropper in the…

The National Rifle Association annual meeting in Nashville drew nasty coverage from Anita Wadhwani, who reports for the Tennessean and for USA Today. On Saturday, the local paper reported “At NRA, little love for media turnout.” The NRA’s not used to fair and balanced coverage. Wadwhani dramatically underscored their hostility on Monday with a story headlined “Big conventions, like NRA, can draw…

A Wednesday "Good Morning America" piece gave President Barack Obama an open mic to claim that, in ABC's words, "climate change became a personal issue for him when his older daughter Malia, now 16, was rushed to the emergency room with an asthma attack when she was just a toddler." Somehow, ABC managed to avoid another possible contributor — besides the obvious possibility that Malia developed…

One would think the editorial boards of the nations’ top newspapers – journalism’s brightest and best – wouldn't lightly throw around inflammatory language, slurs and insults. But it appears that an Indiana law protecting the religious freedom of businesses and individuals is so beyond the pale it had the journalistic high-priests at many of America’s top 20 papers sputtering “bigot,” “…

Earlier this evening, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued its report on Rolling Stone Magazine's November "A Rape on Campus" story. The report follows up on the magazine's request of Columbia to conduct an independent review of how the disastrously false 9,000-word story made it through to publication. USA Today is reporting that for all the harsh criticism the piece's…

Nancy Armour was a sports writer for Associated Press for years before coming a sports columnist for USA Today. Or a sports censor. Armour believes anyone holding a conservative view based on some ancient holy text that homosexuality is a sin should be punished and exiled in some say. It's a "lunatic fringe," she writes. When Indiana’s governor signed a law creating a religious-freedom exception…

The press's reluctance to let go of a popular but debunked meme — in this case, the nonexistent "epidemic" of college campus sexual assaults — is sometimes inadvertently humorous, though still intensely annoying. Take how John Bacon and Marisol Bello at USA Today characterized the news that "Police in Charlottesville were unable to verify that an alleged sexual assault detailed in a…

Today the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Associated Press's Scott Bauer reported, "turned away a challenge to Wisconsin's voter identification law," meaning that "the state is free to impose the voter ID requirement in future elections." Bauer then focused on the impact of the state's off-year primary elections on April 7. Bauer's relatively tolerable (for him) report tagged the law as "a political…

The Associated Press's most recent story on the controversial Starbucks USA Today "Race Together" campaign came out Wednesday evening. In that story, AP Food Industry Writer Candice Choi quoted Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz at his company's annual shareholders' meeting predicting that "Some in the media will criticize Starbucks for having a political agenda," but that "Our intentions are pure."…

Coffee retailing giant Starbucks is getting an earful of outrage and ridicule over its "Race Together" campaign. Its intent, according to chain CEO Howard Schultz, in a joint interview with USA Today's Larry Kramer, is to do something about what he claims is "the divisive role unconscious bias plays in our society and the role empathy can play to bridge those divides." USAT's Kramer claims that…

In Friday’s USA Today, media columnist Michael Wolff came out defending Hillary Clinton’s shifty e-mail tactics as ... “responsibly paranoid.” Wolff barely nods to the argument of "do-gooders" and “schadenfreudeists” that perhaps when four Americans die in a terrorist attack at a badly secured consulate in Benghazi, e-mail might help figure out the mess. That’s “vastly disingenuous,” because e-…

How low does left-wing hate-tank Southern Poverty Law Center have to go before the media stop sharing its “studies” as if they had objective merit?  Even though the activist group uses easily disproven, bogus stats and a “hate map” that has inspired a potential mass murder at the Family Research Council in 2012, the media continue to cite them as a legitimate and neutral source.