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Media Bias Tag

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on September 14, 2016 15 Comments
How deeply has Joe Scarborough dived into Hillary's tank? On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough offered Hillary a script of how she should attack "right-wing Republicans." Howard Dean was so impressed by Scarborough's work on Hillary's behalf that he exclaimed "I actually think you could actually be her speechwriter. That's exactly what she should be saying. I'm sure you don't want that job, but I'm just saying, you know?" Howard, don't be so sure Scarborough doesn't want that job. Sure looked this morning like Joe was auditioning for a spot in Hillary's West Wing.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on September 13, 2016 36 Comments
As liberal pundits go, I find Sam Stein among the least objectionable—a low bar to be sure. The HuffPo editor has a streak of fairness to him. But on today's Morning Joe, Stein served up some absurd spin on Hillary's "basket of deplorables." "Deplorables," according to Stein, in a way "does work to her advantage." Why? Because some moderate Republicans will "look at this division between the deplorables and the non-deplorables . . . and do say to themselves: do I want to be part of that?" A kind of snob appeal, Sam? Don't think so, and even Joe Scarborough, who continued his attacks on Trump throughout the show dismissed the notion, saying "you don't win voters by calling other voters irredeemable."

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 12, 2016 51 Comments
The history of Hillary Clinton is one of deep paranoia. From the secretive health care taskforce during her husband's presideny to the secret home server, fear of sunlight drives her actions. And the mainstream media is a willing participant most of the way until the obvious can no longer be denied or covered up. There is no better example than Hillary's "medical event" at the 9/11 Memorial service yesterday. For weeks the mainstream media and the Clinton campaign have been berating anyone who pointed out that her coughing fits were not only odd, but perhaps a sign of deeper trouble. The wagons were circled. Then, yesterday Hillary collapsed. The video is devastating. Hillary starts out propped up by a stone auto barrier, but even then looks wobbly. As soon as the van pulls up Hillary goes into obvious convulsions as she tries to move towards the van while being held up by her arms. Even so, she falls forward towards the ground as she is dragged into the waiting van. Hillary Clinton Helped to Van 9-11 Memorial 2016 Those around her, presumably mostly Secret Service, create a visual barrier preventing cameras from capturing what happened in the van.

Posted by David Gerstman on September 12, 2016 4 Comments
In two editorials last week, The Washington Post inadvertently made the case for Donald Trump to be president. To be sure the Post still believes that Trump is a "unique" threat to our republic, but the two editorials highlighted the dangers of President Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, an editorial opposing the impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen asserted that the behavior at the center of the controversy, "was more about bureaucratic obliviousness than purposeful anti-conservative activity." Later the editorial asserted that the whole incident was a "non-scandal," which mostly took place under Koskinen's predecessor Lois Lerner. Absent from the editorial was any acknowledgement that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled last month that the targeting of conservative group is ongoing and that the IRS could not be trusted to stop the practice on its own.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on September 02, 2016 13 Comments
Remember the whole Rolling Stone/University of Virginia/faux rape story?
An investigation conducted by the Charlottesville Police Department found no evidence of rape at the accused University of Virginia fraternity. Months ago, Rolling Stone broke Jackie’s story. Jackie claimed she’d been gang raped by members of Phi Kappa Psi in 2012. When the Rolling Stone article sparked national outrage, UVA’s administration acted swiftly and without facts, punishing Greek life on campus. Then the Washington Post began to dig deeper into the Rolling Stone shocker. And that’s when the story began to quickly unravel and was eventually debunked in entirety.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on August 27, 2016 16 Comments
On Joy Reid's MSNBC show today, conservative Latino Alfonso Aguilar cited Hillary Clinton's praise of the eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Hillary has said that she "admire[s] Margaret Sanger enormously." Reid responded by saying Sanger was not a legitimate issue because she is a "dead person." Even worse, when Aguilar tried to make that point that a majority of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood are on minority women, Reid shut Aguilar down, calling his statement "incredibly offensive. I think that smear of Planned Parenthood cannot go forward and we're not going to continue with that line of questioning." Reid abruptly returned to another Trump-bashing topic.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on August 25, 2016 23 Comments
This would be funny if it weren't so ironically hypocritical. There was reporter Jeremy Peters, of the New York Times—appearing on MSNBC—piously condemning "Sean Hannity's incredibly inappropriate role as an adviser to Donald Trump who is essentially giving him tens of millions of dollars of free advertising." Just what does Peters think the MSM is: from his own New York Times to MSNBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, etc., if not one huge monolith devoted to electing Hillary Clinton and other Dems while destroying Donald Trump? If Hannity is giving Trump "tens of millions" in free advertising, what is the combined value of free advertising that the MSM is giving to Hillary Clinton? Peters spoke after a clip ran of Hannity's show in which Trump asked people at a rally to show their support for different policy options on immigration.

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 23, 2016 71 Comments
If you've been paying attention, you already know the media coverage of Trump is a daily drum beat of negativity and undue scrutiny unlike anything we've ever seen. The media may not be crazy about Hillary Clinton, but they're on a special mission to make sure Donald Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office. The New York Post's Michael Goodwin made this the subject of his most recent column:
American journalism is collapsing before our eyes Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on August 23, 2016 13 Comments
In recent days, Donald Trump has made a concerted effort to moderate the tone, and some would say the substance, of his campaign. So how does a notable member of the MSM reward him? By analogizing him in explicit terms to a Nazi. On Monday evening's Hardball, Matthews asked if Trump is "in the bunker?" Making the Nazi analogy clear, Matthews said that "somebody compared him to Downfall, the movie about the end of the Third Reich." Matthews admitted: "it's never fair to do that," but that of course didn't stop him, as he suggested that "he's in the bunker but doesn't know what's going on outside. "

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on August 22, 2016 47 Comments
The MSM can't stop talking about Donald Trump having brought onto his campaign the Chairman of Breitbart News. But Hillary's closest aide being for 12 years an editor of an Islamist magazine that among other things blamed the US for 9/11? Meh! On today's With All Due Respect, guest co-host Alex Wagner seconded the excuse that the Clinton campaign is shopping. Said Wagner: "as you and I have both worked on magazines, we know that there are a lot of editors who do absolutely nothing but are listed on mastheads anyway." John Heilemann similarly argued that while his title at Bloomberg Politics is Managing Editor, he doesn't do any managing or editing. He went on to assert that not many voters care about Huma Abedin "one way or the other." Added Heilemann: "I know people on the right will hate me for saying that."

Posted by Leslie Eastman on August 20, 2016 40 Comments
A few weeks ago, my colleague Mary reported that an Australian artist removed his mural of Hillary Clinton after a local council vote. His first rendition put her in a very revealing swimsuit; the second featured a burqa after the council first told him to paint over it. In the US, an "anonymous art collective" has focused its questionable creative efforts on Donald Trump.
It's Donald Trump like he's never been seen before. Life-size naked statues of the Republican presidential nominee greeted passers-by in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Cleveland on Thursday. They are the brainchild of an activist collective called INDECLINE, which has spoken out against Trump before. In a statement, the collective said the hope is that Trump "is never installed in the most powerful political and military position in the world."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on August 19, 2016 6 Comments
On a certain level, it was refreshing to see an MSM member admit how he sees his role: as that of a "defense attorney" for Barack Obama. On another level, it was disgusting . . . On today's Morning Joe, during a discussion of the Iran ransom deal in which even State Department spokesman John Kirby effectively conceded that the deal was a "quid pro quo," the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson said "I feel like I need to ask the sort of question a defense attorney would ask at this point." Robinson's point was that some had criticized the Obama admin for not obtaining the release of the hostages as part of the Iran nuclear deal. But no one ever suggested that the US pay ransom for the hostages, as President Obama untruthfully denied doing. The notion was that the US should not agree to the deal unless the hostages were released. But that didn't stop Robinson from going all Perry Mason on behalf of the president.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on August 18, 2016 15 Comments
Tell us, Carol: the leaders of which Black Lives Matter chant would you suggest Donald Trump "reach out" to: "pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon," or "what do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!" On her CNN show this morning, Carol Costello suggested to Trump supporter Scottie Nell Hughes that Trump should be "reaching out" to Black Lives Matter. When Hughes replied that the Trump campaign has reached out to the black community, Costello interrupted incredulously "to Black Lives Matter?" Perhaps someone can do the research and find the last time Costello suggested to a Hillary supporter that Clinton should be "reaching out" to the KKK or Stormfront.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on August 17, 2016 7 Comments
Imagine that a Republican state attorney general had been forced to resign after being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Now imagine how the story would have been played on MSNBC. Fair to assume that the word "Republican" would have featured in the story's first sentence? But in a stand-alone segment on today's Hardball on the forced resignation of Kathleen Kane, the Pennsylvania AG who was convicted on nine charges, host Chris Matthews failed to ever mention, and the screen graphics never revealed, that Kane is a Democrat. Kane had illegally leaked secret grand jury documents to harm a rival prosecutor, then lied about it under oath.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on August 16, 2016 9 Comments
As a casual observer of German and European media, regular display of anti-Israel bias doesn’t surprise me anymore. But the report aired Sunday by Germany’s state-run broadcaster Tagesschau (ARD) during prime time was disturbingly biased -- even by usual European standards. A video report titled “Dry Faucets in West Bank” was broadcasted on Germany’s most watched news show. The video clip accused Israel of ‘rationing the water supply’ of the Palestinian and diverting water resources to the neighbouring ‘Israeli settlements’. The report narrated by ARD’s Israel correspondent Markus Rosch talks to a resident of a small Arab town of Salfit, who says, “We need water to live. Now there isn’t any. How can this go on like this?” The camera then switches to his little daughter who says she can’t go the holiday camps anymore due to water scarcity.

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 06, 2016 21 Comments
Hillary Clinton gave her first press conference since December of 2015 on Friday which was open only to journalists of color. While she did get at least one question about her ongoing email troubles, the event devolved unsurprisingly into a campaign rally. NewsBusters reported:
Reporters Raucously Applaud Hillary, Softball Questions to Her at Their Own Conference Showing how much the liberal media is in the tank for Hillary Clinton in this election, reporters at the joint conference of National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists on Friday afternoon wildly applauded Clinton’s far-left answers to a slew of softball questions about immigration, the electorate, and even whether she has any black friends.

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 04, 2016 23 Comments
In addition to ignoring as many of Hillary's negatives as possible, another form of media bias is happening in this election cycle. The media is rehabilitating Bill and Hillary's marriage. It's easier to see the Clintons back in the White House if they're perceived as a happy and normal couple, not the scandal plagued, loveless pair who stayed together for purely political purposes. To aid in their image makeover, we're seeing pieces like this one from CNN:
The surprising secret to Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage Tuesday night, Bill Clinton took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to make the case for another Clinton: the former U.S. Secretary of State-- and his former First Lady -- Hillary Clinton, as the next President of the United States.

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."
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