Eric Engberg

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple devoted a whole post to a fuss caused by David Corn of Mother Jones magazine claiming Bill O’Reilly exaggerated the drama of covering the Falkland Islands war for CBS in 1982. The left is trying to knock off O’Reilly after the Brian Williams scandal. At the very bottom of the post was this: “(Disclosure: The wife of the Erik Wemple Blog works for Mother…

On June 4, 1989, the communist regime in China cracked down violently on democratic protesters in Tiananmen Square. American networks had provided weeks of coverage of the protests, and the crackdown was a global outrage. But both then and later, some national reporters embarrassed themselves by making odd comparisons between the communist crackdown and allegedly similar outrages in America:

Tomorrow, June 4, is the 20th anniversary of the Chinese army massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Back in 1989, the big networks provided in-depth coverage of the massive protests that swelled in mid-May, and harsh coverage of the brutal reaction from the communist authorities.But, as the Media Research Center noted at the time, the networks also used the occasion for…