Hans Bader

Reporters are supposed to cover both sides of the story, where there are two sides to it. Journalists trumpeted this principle in defending a recent story in the Harvard Crimson that sought to quote both sides about an immigration controversy. But in the real world, this principle is often ignored. If a reporter doesn’t want to cover both sides of the story, she just pretends there aren’t really…

People will believe silly things when it fits their ideological preconceptions. Even when they have been debunked and are contradicted by first-hand information and news reports. A handful of mostly left-leaning publications repeated a British tabloid’s wild claim that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch started a “fascism forever club” in high school. This bizarre smear of Gorsuch was debunked by…

It would be difficult to think of any principle more basic than that criminal defendants can’t be convicted except by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But left-leaning “fact-checker” PolitiFact doesn’t even know it. In an error-filled January 19 “fact-check,” PolitiFact’s Anna Orso writes about “the ‘clear and convincing’ standard used in criminal trials.”  The clear and convincing evidence…

PolitiFact has received a fair share of criticism from conservatives for their spin-heavy fact-checks. The liberal media, for the most part, has accordingly been dismissive of such conservative complaints. But now even The Daily Beast/Newsweek is joining in on the criticism, with contributor Megan McArdle joining conservatives in noting the fact-checker repeated repetition of a falsehood…

During the September 25 broadcast of the PBS Newshour, anchor Gwen Ifill invited Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass and former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns to discuss President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and his recent address to the UN. Reporter Judy Woodruff also had a segment on the president speech. Yet none of the segments dealing with the address mentioned the fact…

As we at NewsBusters have noted, the liberal media have done little to discredit Rex Nutting's erroneous analysis of federal spending under President Obama. Numerous conservative and libertarian critics have pointed out how fatally flawed Nutting's analysis, but we'd like to recommend Hans Bader's post at Competitive Enterprise Institute's OpenMarket.org website, who takes on not only Nutting…