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Media Bias Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 22, 2016 74 Comments
Donald Trump's acceptance speech last night was a hit with viewers, as Yahoo News reported:
The majority of viewers who watched Donald Trump's speech to the Republican National Convention on Thursday night said it made them more likely to vote for him in November, according to a CNN/ORC instant poll. The poll found that 56% of speech viewers were more likely to vote for the New York businessman after seeing him formally accept the Republican nomination. 32% of viewers said his speech had little effect on them, and 10% said it made them less likely to cast their vote for Trump in November. Overall, 57% of viewers said they had a "very positive" reaction to Trump's speech. Meanwhile, 18% said they were "somewhat positive" and 24% said it had a "negative effect."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on July 19, 2016 8 Comments
This could go down as the most egregious example of an MSM "anchor" groveling at the feet of a liberal activist . . . During MSNBC's coverage of the opening night of the Republican convention, Tavis Smiley complained that, unlike cop killers, "killer cops" are not called "vicious and despicable and cowardly and reprehensible." Brian Williams immediately piped up: "Tavis, if I appointed you president and you still refused to run we would have to appoint you." I'm guessing Williams meant to say "if I nominated you for president you and you refused to run we would have to appoint you." But in his obsequious excitement, poor Brian stumbled on his words. But we get it, Williams: there's nobody you'd rather see as president, even if it means overturning democracy and appointing him, than someone willing to call cops "vicious, despicable, cowardly and reprehensible."

Posted by Mike LaChance on July 16, 2016 42 Comments
It took less than 24 hours for liberals in media to begin attacking Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Just days ago, many of these folks never would have bothered writing anything about Pence but now that he's on the ticket with Trump, they're in a rush to define him. Here are some choice examples. Think Progress invented a new term for the Governor:
Mike Pence, Cigarette Truther Over his political career Gov. Mike Pence (R-IN) has consistently carried the tobacco industry’s water, denying the dangers of cigarettes, opposing government regulation, and slashing smoking cessation efforts. In return, they rewarded him with more than $100,000 in campaign donations.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on June 30, 2016 23 Comments
Wow! Mika Brzezinski absolutely ripped into Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch today for holding a private meeting earlier this week. More importantly, the Morning Joe host clearly seemed to swipe at the rest of the media and punditry class for refusing to focus on the outrage. When Mark Halperin said "I bet you they didn't talk about" the FBI investigation of Hillary, Brzezinski literally laughed in his face. "Come on, stop! Everybody stop! Okay, well this is why this is never going to be a problem for Hillary Clinton. People are too afraid to talk about the truth." In a parting shot, Mika said "we'll just move on, just like everyone else does. Even though it's a complete sham."

Posted by Mirabelle Ward on June 25, 2016 2 Comments
The victim-blaming narrative that says that Israel’s so-called “occupation” of the West Bank is responsible for Palestinian violence has been getting a lot of air time since the murder of four by a terrorist in Tel Aviv earlier this month. It has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and has even been parroted by the mayor of Tel Aviv himself. This narrative ignores decades of history, and has no more truth to it than the vile claim that LGBT people deserved the Orlando attack. Israel’s military presence in the disputed territories of the West Bank is the result of Arab violence against Israel, and not the cause of it.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 18, 2016 23 Comments
The reader may remember NY Daily News reporter, Gersh Kuntzman, and his harrowing tale of the AR-15 that bruised his shoulder and gave him PTSD. After his article was published, the gun shop that accommodated his request was, "disgusted" and has mounted an effort to have Kuntzman's article taken down. "We acknowledged his offer so that we could prove that an AR-15 is indeed a great and safe weapon as stated in the video," Frank's Gun Shop Double Tap Shooting Range posted to their Facebook page, "To our knowledge we did not know that Mr. Kuntzman would completely turn things around and make our establishment look like one of anti-gun advocates."

Posted by Miriam Elman on June 17, 2016 14 Comments
Several media watch dog groups (see here and here) have blasted reports published in The Independent, International Business Times, Times of London, and other news outlets for falsely accusing Israel of cutting off drinking water to Palestinians in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Each of these news outlets picked up a blatantly incorrect Al Jazeera report that initially included no response from Israel. They ran their own stories with it, accompanied by headlines denunciating Israel for maliciously working to deprive Palestinians of water. https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/742968004686778368

Posted by Leslie Eastman on June 08, 2016 19 Comments
As I noted in my post on the AP announcing that Hillary Clinton has clinched the nomination ahead of the California election, the November 2016 battle is ultimately between the elite media and average Americans. As predicted by many, the American press has started pressuring Bernie Sanders to stop his campaign entirely. This gem from the San Diego Union Tribune is just one example of many attempts to cajole Sanders voters into supporting Clinton.
This is why we urge Bernie Sanders to drop his now-futile challenge to Clinton for the Democratic nomination after the final primary next Tuesday in Washington D.C. At this stage, after a historic speech as a major party’s first presumptive female presidential nominee, Clinton shouldn’t have to spend her time and resources defending herself from Sanders and his allies.
But the California media has not mentioned that Clinton has not experienced smooth sailing they portray in their coverage.

Posted by Mary Chastain on May 31, 2016 18 Comments
Katie Couric has changed her mind and finally decided to take responsibility for an edit in her "Under the Gun" documentary that made a pro-gun rights group look idiotic. She released this statement last night:
As Executive Producer of “Under the Gun,” a documentary film that explores the epidemic of gun violence, I take responsibility for a decision that misrepresented an exchange I had with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL). My question to the VCDL regarding the ability of convicted felons and those on the terror watch list to legally obtain a gun, was followed by an extended pause, making the participants appear to be speechless. When I screened an early version of the film with the director, Stephanie Soechtig, I questioned her and the editor about the pause and was told that a "beat" was added for, as she described it, “dramatic effect," to give the audience a moment to consider the question. When VCDL members recently pointed out that they had in fact immediately answered this question, I went back and reviewed it and agree that those eight seconds do not accurately represent their response.

Posted by Mary Chastain on May 25, 2016 22 Comments
Katie Couric's documentary Under the Gun edited out remarks by a guns rights group to make them look unprepared for a simple question. Couric sat down with the Virginia Citizens Defense League and asked them, “If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?” The clip shows the members sitting silently for around nine seconds, but audio provided to the Washington Free Beacon's Stephen Gutowski shows the group provided an answer.

Posted by Mary Chastain on May 09, 2016 25 Comments
Former Facebook employees have told Gizmodo that the company regularly told them to stamp out conservative news even if it trended on the website. From Gizmodo:
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module. In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

Posted by Mike LaChance on May 07, 2016 7 Comments
FOX News lives rent free in the heads of liberals all over America. They just can't stand the fact that one news network dares to include conservative voices alongside liberal ones. Obama has been complaining about the network since taking office and now Bernie Sanders is singling out FOX and suggesting that liberals should have a similar network. Here's the best part - He made the comments to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. The Hill reports:
Sanders calls for Democratic version of Fox News Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called for a more liberal version of Fox News to help fix the problems he sees in corporate media.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on April 20, 2016 17 Comments
Kemberlee Kaye just described a deliciously alleged hoax involving a Social Justice Warrior, a cake, and now the legal department of the Whole Foods chain of stores. However, this particular story leaves a bitter aftertaste. Because our "Schools of Journalism" no longer produce real reporters pursuing solid news leads and doing basic research, but propagate progressive activists dependent on iPhones and filled with a toxic blend of moral  superiority and outrage, the concoction was set to be spread courtesy of KVUE-TV in Austin. This is how the initial report on the cake began:
Austin-based grocer Whole Foods Market is being sued after an openly gay pastor alleged a cake he ordered from the flagship store on North Lamar Boulevard contained a gay slur.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 15, 2016 36 Comments
It was going to be yuge. There was going to be a march on the Colorado State Capitol the likes of which had not been seen before, reflecting seething anger among voters over Ted Cruz "stealing" Colorado in a "voterless" process. It was pure media manipulation based on a lie spread by Trump and his campaign about how the Colorado process worked. And it was aided and abetted by Trumpmedia, that hyperbolic group of formerly conservative websites and media personalities who are riding the Trump horse. Turns out the massive rally didn't get thousands, not even hundreds. A few dozen showed up.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 09, 2016 81 Comments
The Boston Globe published a curious tweet yesterday, warning of a front page it "hope[d] never to publish." https://twitter.com/BostonGlobe/status/718537190704353282 Drudge has obtained images of what purports to be the Sunday front page, plus some:

Posted by Andrew Branca on April 08, 2016 19 Comments
The Washington Post reports on a new study that suggests racial bias motivates police to fatally shoot black suspects at a disproportionally high rate.  That study, entitled “Fatal Shootings By US Police Officers in 2015: A Bird’s Eye View,” is published in the once well-respected scientific journal Nature. The first alarm bells went off for me when I noted the source of the "data" used for this "study":  journalists from the Washington Post itself, as well as the left-wing UK newspaper, The Guardian.  As we've seen in the past, "data" collected by journalists is rarely worth the paper it's printed on, not surprising given their generally utter lack of expertise in the subject being covered.
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