Wire Services/Media Companies

Along with a few of his police bodyguards Mayor Frank Melton of Jackson, Mississippi has been indicted on Federal civil rights violations. It seems that in his zeal to curb drug crime, Melton forced some local youngsters at gunpoint to take a sledgehammer to a private residence that Melton claimed was a drug house. One little problem, Melton had no court order and no right to destroy a private…

As the media systematically ignores the good news in Iraq, the AP instead turns to “reporting” on a “journalist’s” Iraq love tryst. Why we need to see a story of CBS' Lara Logan's romance troubles is anyone’s guess? But apparently the AP thinks that Lara Logan's love tryst with a married contractor in Iraq is "news" while the surge and the complete lack of any real civil war in Iraq is not. Here…

Although the term isn't used, it's clear that the Obama campaign sees itself and their candidate as victims of a vast conspiracy of right-wingers. Going all the way back to the 1988 presidential election, Obama's "Fight the Smears" chart (featuring the campaign's new sort-of "presidential seal," replacing the one that was "dropped," at the top left) purports to tell us "Who's Behind These Lies."…

This post builds on Noel Sheppard's NewsBusters entry earlier this morning. Noel covered portions of Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha's Thursday interview with Pittsburgh TV Station KDKA used by CNN's "Situation Room" on Friday (transcript here [Murtha segment is about halfway through]; video here). CNN carried KDKA footage showing that Murtha has grudgingly acknowledged the obvious: That…

It appears that the New York Times would prefer that its readers know as little as possible about Barack Obama's abortion flip-flop, while still retaining the ability to claim, "yeah, we covered it." As a refresher, here is part of Thursday's Associated Press report on this particular item in the ongoing Obama Flip-Flop festival, first noted at NewsBusters by John Stephenson: Democratic…

Earlier this week, to avoid "undue" emphasis on how much the situation has been improving in Iraq, the press, in search of bad news, switched its focus to Afghanistan (examples here, here, and here). Kyle Drennen and Warner Todd Huston at NewsBusters noted this on Tuesday. Similarly, Associated Press writer Ellen Simon, confronted with a key report showing economic improvement, decided that it…

With less than 10 hours remaining until the end of June in Iraq at the time of this post, it is clear, barring heavy last-minute casuaties, that May and June will show the lowest two-month total for US troop deaths in the five-year history of our involvement there. How with the media handle the news? Here is the detail (source: icasualties.org):

The question that is this post's title occurred to me as I read through this report earlier today by Seth Sutel of the Associated Press. I believe the question is important, and that its potential implications are underappreciated. Sutel first summarized the week's financial events in the media business. It wasn't pretty: Even for an industry awash in bad news, the newspaper business went through…

UPDATE: Hard to imagine, but it's even worse than originally thought. AP's go-to "historian" is, as Wikipedia shows, a shameless politically active far-leftist (HT Eric at Vocal Minority). _______________________(begin original post) Two Associated Press writers, with the help of accompanying photos at ABCnews.com, have dug down deep and reached a new low in dismal, depressive reporting. You can…

It looks like Reuters is trying to say that the United States stands against the rule of law with their latest piece on a recent ruling from the so-called World Court -- the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ wants the U.S. to vacate the death penalty sentences of several Mexican nationals that sit on death row in prisons in several states and Reuters is shaking its finger at the nasty…

It's not just the Associated Press that can't get basic facts right. No wonder Barack Obama doesn't get challenged by the media on fundamentals -- y'know, things like how many states there are in the union (he says 57 or so), whether Illinois is closer to Kentucky than Arkansas (he says it's not), or whether Warren Buffett's income (!) is $56 billion (Obama seems to think that income and net…

(photoshopped by Michelle Malkin commenter Ugly American) Tim Conneally at Beta News reported this yesterday:The AP's disharmony with bloggers may have only just begun, as the alternative it's now offering to being served with takedown notices involves paying an up-front sum for excerpting online articles -- as few as five words.The pricing scale for excerpting AP content begins at $12.50 for 5-…

An unbylined Associated Press report yesterday, at least as carried at MSNBC, acknowledges improvement, and then explains why it's not going to get much future coverage from the wire service as long as things stay that way: BAGHDAD - Signs are emerging that Iraq has reached a turning point. Violence is down, armed extremists are in disarray, government confidence is rising and sectarian…

A liberal-leaning organization has produced a report on the 2008 presidential candidates’ tax plans and, accordingly, the Associated Press has jumped on it.In her June 17 article, AP’s Liz Sidoti used a recent study by the Tax Policy Center -- a project of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution and Urban Institute -- to advance the notion that Obama’s tax policies favor the middle class while…