World News Tonight

Two weeks ago (noted at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the combined audience for the Big Three Networks' Evening News shows for the week of March 29 fell to just below 20 million. That audience was about 5% less than what Matt Drudge in the summer of 2006 headlined as "TV's Lowest Week." The Big Three's combined audience crawled back above 20 million during the week of April 5. But Chris Ariens of…

“Watch your words,” fill-in ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas scolded in teasing Friday's World News, as she trumpeted: “Former President Clinton warns harsh anti-government talk could lead to violent acts, like the Oklahoma City bombing.”Introducing the subsequent story, Vargas identified talk radio and Tea Party participants as the culprits:There is a lot of attention tonight on comments made by…

“There aren't a lot of African-American men at these events,” NBC News reporter Kelly O'Donnell, a white woman, told Darryl Postell, a black man at a Tea Party rally held Thursday in Washington, DC, pressing him, in an exchange she chose to include in her NBC Nightly News story, to address her prejudiced assumptions: “Have you ever felt uncomfortable?” Postell rejected her loaded premise that…

On Monday evening and Tuesday, ABC, CBS, and CNN all highlighted a Catholic priest's call for Pope Benedict XVI's resignation due to his alleged mishandling of the Church sex abuse scandal, labeling him "outspoken," and even going so far to compliment him as "brave" and "gutsy." All three networks, however, ignored the priest's affiliation with a liberal group and his dissension from Church…

Wrapping a look at those whom President Obama may nominate to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, ABC’s Terry Moran worried Friday night if Obama can “even hold” the liberal ground espoused by Stevens given “today’s bitter political climate.” He fretted that “the real question for President Obama” is: Could a nominee with positions as liberal as Justice Stevens on…

Words, just words. But which ones excite journalists and which ones don't? A test case Wednesday night as ABC and NBC, matching the focus of CNN and MSNBC throughout the day, aired segments on controversy over Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell leaving condemnation of slavery out of a proclamation issued last week calling April “Confederate History Month,” but neither had any time for an AP report…

The broadcast networks couldn't ignore Holy Week, the pinnacle of the Christian calendar, so instead they used it this year to smear the Catholic Church as a harbor for abusive priests. ABC, CBS and NBC featured 26 stories during Holy Week about Pope Benedict's perceived role in the sex abuse scandal the Catholic Church is now facing. Only one story focused on the measures the church has…

After a bit of a respite primarily due to NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics, the audience desertion from the Big 3 networks' evening news broadcasts has again resumed. Not that the first quarter of 2010 was all peaches and cream. Last week, Media Bistro noted that ABC's "World News Tonight" had "its lowest-rated first quarter ever." But the results for the first week of the second ratings…

“The Cold War ended more than two decades ago, and today American nuclear strategy finally caught up with history,” as the Obama administration has recognized “the greatest threat is no longer all-out nuclear war, but the chance that just one weapon will fall into the hands of a terrorist or rogue state,” an effusive David Martin declared on Tuesday’s CBS Evening News.His story, unlike those on…

This week, the MRC’s regular Notable Quotables newsletter, documenting the latest outrageous quotes from the liberal media from the past two weeks, could not fit in its normal 3-page format, so we created a super-sized special edition, “Celebrating ObamaCare, Demonizing Its Opponents.” It’s chock full of quotes touting the wonders of the liberal health care scheme, and slamming the Tea Party and…

ABC anchor Diane Sawyer, who in February demanded to know who will “keep insurance companies from jacking up premiums while making huge profits?”, on Friday found her champion in the Superintendent of Maine’s Bureau of Insurance, hailing Mila Kofman as a “super-cop” and a “gladiator” for rejecting a rate hike requested by Anthem Blue Cross. Kofman proclaimed “we are the super-cops on the street.…

New fuel standards make both the left and the media happy. It's easy to tell. There wasn't a single voice of opposition criticizing the latest act of Big Government on major prime-time news outlets ABC, CBS or NBC. "Environmentalists are hailing the move as nothing short of historic," NBC's Lee Cowan said of the federal government's new fuel efficiency standards. The networks did much the same.…

The folks at ABC and CBS News are certainly not humming Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" this morning given the plummeting ratings of their respective evening anchors Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric.Adding insult to injury, Brian Williams' numbers continue to climb.So reported the New York Times Friday in a piece destined to raise some liberal media eyebrows:

NBC on Monday night squeezed in a few seconds for the arrest of “a Philadelphia man for threatening the life of the number two Republican in the House of Representatives, Eric Cantor of Virginia.” Yet after the networks led last week with less-immediate threats against Democrats, they weren’t so interested in a real case of a death threat against a Republican as neither CBS nor ABC aired a word…