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Media Bias Tag

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on July 18, 2017 19 Comments
Give Joe Scarborough credit. Just when we were getting bored with all the Trump/Nazi analogies, Joe has come up with a new one. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough compared Trump press secretary Sean Spicer to an old Soviet spokesman and propagandist. Scarborough's beef was that Spicer had supposedly said that the meeting of Trump campaign people including Donald, Jr. and the Russians was "just about adoptions." Joe called that a "lie." But have a look at the screenshot below, showing what Spicer actually said.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 17, 2017 53 Comments
The last post I wrote about the Donald Trump Jr. meeting was last Thursday, Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer: “there’s something very unusual about this whole thing”. Subsequent to that post, NBC News broke the story that there were additional people at the meeting than had been disclosed previously. Nonetheless, I think my Newsmax interview that was the subject of the post has held up pretty well:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on July 13, 2017 37 Comments
Credit where credit's due: the HuffPost (now just HuffPost since founder Ariana Huffington parted ways) is launching a bus tour, stopping in 23 cities so their reporters (or bloggers) can find the answer to this burning question: What does it mean to be American today? The bus tour turned mobile video studio hopes to showcase "what we share as Americans, rather than what divides us."

Posted by Mike LaChance on July 09, 2017 16 Comments
The Washington Post has fallen almost as far as CNN. In a news analysis article, the paper tries to shift blame for James Hodgkinson's attempt to murder Republican congressmen on conservative talk radio. It's an established fact that Hodgkinson was a Bernie-loving, anti-Trump, Rachel Maddow "super fan," so wouldn't it make more sense to blame MSNBC?

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 06, 2017 35 Comments
A misleading video clip of Donald Trump supposedly being passed over for a handshake by the First Lady of Poland is sweeping the internet. In fact, there was a handshake a couple of seconds later, but the clip is cut so tightly that it appears that this was a sign of disrespect. If it were just another misleading internet meme, it would be bad enough. But it is being pushed by the Washington Post on Twitter and on its website, as well as by other major media. Here is WaPo's tweet:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on July 05, 2017 26 Comments
CNN is having a rough time, albeit completely self-inflicted. The network with a penchant for making itself and its reporters the story is now the subject of universal internet ridicule and rightly so. Andrew Kaczynski, CNN reporter (formerly of Buzzfeed) who loves to dig through Trump appointee books and academic thesis in search of improper citation, penned a post describing how CNN was able to track down an anonymous Reddit user who claimed responsibility for CNN gif President Trump tweeted. The gif showed Trump punching a figure with a CNN logo affixed in place of a face.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 29, 2017 38 Comments
Thursday, Trump used his personal Twitter account to tweet less than kind things about MSNBC Morning Joe hostess, Mika Brzezinski. As is now customary for the weekly Trump Twitter tirade, the entire political media set quickly condemned Trump's tweets and members of Congress rushed to release official statements expressing their disgust with the President's behavior (because there's not more pressing business), and the daily White House press briefing was overrun with questions about Trump's tweets.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on June 24, 2017 17 Comments
Yesterday, we noted Kellyanne Conway mocking CNN's Russia fixation. Conway told Alisyn Camerota: "I know that we just like to say the word 'Russia, Russia' to try to mislead the voters. And I know that CNN is aiding and abetting this nonsense as well.” Well, if CNN likes to say "Russia, Russia," we'll need to multiply that 28 times to understand the depth of MSNBC's obsession with the subject. In the first hour of Joy Reid's MSNBC show this morning, the word "Russia" or "Russian" was heard . . . 56 times!

Posted by Leslie Eastman on June 18, 2017 14 Comments
As we approach the 150 day mark for President Donald Trump's first term, I thought in might be useful to have a retrospective post about how the American press has presented his record, outside of Twitter, Russia and Comey hearings...and highlight some of his underreported victories. Professor Jacobson so noted, the news cycle is essentially over for the assassination attempt on the Republican congressional baseball team. To be sure, if the Democratic congressional representatives had been targeted (and the assassin found with a list of Democratic targets in his pocket), this would have been "top of the fold" for many more weeks to come.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on June 18, 2017 82 Comments
In the wake of the Scalise shooting, Fareed Zakaria hosted a segment on his CNN show this morning devoted to addressing how Republicans and Democrats can stop their "internecine struggle" and "reconcile." Two of the guests bought into the premise, discussing the challenges involved and possible approaches to reconciliation. But the third guest, Jill Abramson, who was fired in 2014 as executive editor of the New York Times, was having none of the kumbaya. To the contrary, she decried a supposed "false equivalency" between Democrats and Republicans. Abramson put the blame on Republicans for the divisive political climate and accused them of "benefiting from a kind of rage machine that operates in this country."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on June 15, 2017 37 Comments
Yes, let's all come together, hold hands, unite . . . and blame President Trump for the shooting of Steve Scalise and others yesterday. Morning Joe opened today with predictable pieties, Joe Scarborough saying, for example, that "the heated rhetoric in this country has to calm down." But before the show's first hour had ended, Mika Brzezinski turned the heat up to 11 by pointing the finger for the Scalise shooting in part at the president. An emotional Mika, after accusing President Trump of "promoting violence on the campaign trail," continued:
"I'm not putting anything squarely on the president, but I have to say that this is the new added dynamic to what is a very dangerous climate."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on June 13, 2017 17 Comments
In the wake of the Kathy Griffin severed-head fiasco, and the Central Park play depicting the assassination of President Trump, you'd think that pundits might have the good sense to lay off metaphors invoking the violent death of the president. But today comes law prof Jonathan Turley with yet another sanguinary simile. Appearing on Morning Joe to discuss President Trump's executive order on travel, Turley suggested that President Trump's tweets on the subject are undermining his case. Then Turley went there: "it's like a presidential version of death by cop. Every time you seem to make advances, the president seems to stand up and say 'shoot me, shoot me.'"

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on June 08, 2017 3 Comments
The French-German broadcaster ARTE has reportedly shelved a documentary on antisemitism because it doesn’t bash Israel enough. ARTE and WDR, the publicly-funded TV networks that commissioned the 90-minute documentary, have decided to confine the film to the archives, calling it “unbalanced”. “You can’t make a film on antisemitism without saying every three minutes that the Palestinians are the victims of Israelis,” the co-producer of the documentary, Joachim Schröder, told The Jerusalem Post. The documentary makers reject the objections publicised by the broadcasters as eyewash. “It’s not about balance,” Schröder was quoted saying in the German newspaper Bild, “How can a film on Antisemitism be ‘balanced’? ARD with offices in Strasbourg is obviously fearful of calling out the Jew-hatred in France and Germany.” Both ARTE and WDR are financed by German taxpayers.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 05, 2017 17 Comments
Video surfaced Sunday showing what appears to be a CNN film crew staging or at the very least, assisting with the optics of an anti-ISIS Muslim protest in London. Film crews from CNN, BBC, and the AP set up in the middle of the street well before any protest began and before protesters were in place.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on May 31, 2017 31 Comments
Q. Is there anything—anything!—about which the MSM won't criticize about the Trump administration? A. No, judging by the mind-bogglingly minuscule, absurd and hypocritical thing that Chris Matthews has found to carp about. On his Hardball show of May 30th, Matthews got bent out of shape over the fact that Jared Kushner . . . might have a car and driver take him to work at the White House. After video rolled of Kushner emerging from what is presumably his DC home and getting into an SUV with someone at the wheel, a vexed Matthews said:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 30, 2017 19 Comments
I was a guest on the Tommy Tucker Show on Louisiana superstation WWL this morning. We covered a wide range of topics over almost 17 minutes. Thanks to Tommy for giving me the time. 17 minutes in radio world is like a million years in real people time. We started with the weekend media eruption over Jared Kushner, "Backchannels," and the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation. I'll add some transcription shortly.
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