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Media Bias Tag

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on April 03, 2017 21 Comments
Kibitzing about Donald Trump's mental health is a favorite MSM parlor game. But Morning Joe took it to a new level today, devoting its long, opening segment to the matter. Donny Deutsch and Joe Scarborough were the ringleaders, playing Drs. Freud and Jung, respectively. Excerpts:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 31, 2017 21 Comments
The Washington Post ran a story last night continuing the media effort to brand everyone in the Trump administration to be incompetent at best, and creepy to boot. This time the target was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. In the article, based entirely on supposed anonymous sources, WaPo asserted that Tillerson is so weird he doesn't even let career diplomats make eye contact with him, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spends his first weeks isolated from an anxious bureaucracy (emphasis added):

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on March 31, 2017 17 Comments
On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough argued that the MSM is failing to cover the story of the Obama admin "unmasking"and leaking the names of Trump campaign people caught up in the intercepts of Russians. According to Scarborough, 95% of the story is the attempt by the Russians to influence the election. But that still leaves the 5% that the MSM is ignoring because the people unmasked were disliked, and in the case of Michael Flynn, "loathed" by the media. In contrast, said Scarborough, the improper activity was "by people who, let's face it, most of the people in the media like and admire."

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 29, 2017 19 Comments
Late Tuesday night, California's Attorney General charged David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt with a whopping fifteen felonies. Daleiden and Merritt, by way of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), released several horrifying undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood officials negotiating the price of aborted baby parts. California is a two-party consent state, meaning both parties in any recording must consent to be recorded. 14 of the 15 charges are for recording confidential conversations without consent. The last is for conspiracy to commit a felony by recording private conversations at a conference. Placing the two-party consent nonsense on hold for a moment, Daleiden and Merritt made two errors through the course of their investigation, one of which was omitted from the charges levied against them.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on March 25, 2017 14 Comments
John Harwood is the CNBC journalist who advised Hillary's campaign on how to handle Ben Carson and later bragged to Hillary campaign chairman John Podesta about the rude questions he posed to Donald Trump during a debate. Harwood's attacks on Republican candidates as a moderator of a Republican primary debate were met with near universal mockery. Legal Insurrection's persistent exposure of Harwood eventually led Harwood to block Legal Insurrection on Twitter. Harwood resumed his routine on Joy Reid's MSNBC show this morning. Harwood claimed that Republicans are "radically opposed to government itself" and asserted that "governing is about taking action to solve people's problems."

Posted by David Gerstman on March 19, 2017 14 Comments
Last week the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), a group comprised entirely of Arab countries, issued a report accusing Israel of practicing apartheid against the Palestinians. Having a U.N. group make such an accusation was considered a major propaganda win for the anti-Israel movement. As discussed below, the report was authored by people with longstanding anti-Israel records. The report was so disgraceful in content and so obviously political in motive that by Friday the Secretary General of the UN had first disassociated himself from the report and then asked that it removed from the ESCWA's website. Also on Friday, Rima Khalaf, the Jordanian head of ESCWA resigned. Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., is credited by many as working to negate this anti-Israel move. This may be a sign of a new U.S. assertiveness at the U.N.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on March 18, 2017 9 Comments
The internet exploded this week with the "news" that President Trump's budget proposal included cutting and/or completely eliminating the Meals on Wheels program.  The headlines were outrageous clickbait that had little to do with the actual budget proposal. For example, New York Magazine has an article entitled, "White House Says Cutting Meals on Wheels is 'Compassionate'," Rolling Stone has one entitled "Meals on Wheels Seniors Respond to Trump: Cut Something Else," the BBC writes that "Meals on Wheels cut back prompts backlash," and Slate declares that "Trump's budget director says Meals on Wheels sounds great but doesn't work." The problem with these and the many other such headlines is that Trump is not cutting, and is certainly not eliminating, Meals on Wheels.

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 18, 2017 31 Comments
Has there ever been someone with so few real life accomplishments who got handed such great opportunities as Chelsea Clinton? You may recall her six-figure gig at NBC a few years ago. Now she's moving on to another green pasture, this time at Expedia. CNN reports:
Expedia names Chelsea Clinton to board of directors In a public filing posted Friday, the travel site said it named Clinton -- the daughter of Hillary Clinton -- as a member of its board on Thursday.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 16, 2017 23 Comments
Over the years, we've cataloged numerous instances of bias-driven reporting from just about every major news outlet our country has to offer. The AP is not immune. More concerning about creeping bias in AP reporting is that most major publications, channels, and stations in the U.S. have subscriptions to the Associated Press wire stories. Last month, there was this gem, published about the dust-up between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Mitch McConnell during Jeff Sessions' confirmation hearings:

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on March 15, 2017 13 Comments
You might think that—given the chance to chide the star of a competing network—CNN would have called out MSNBC's Rachel Maddow over her failed, overhyped "scoop" on Donald Trump's taxes. But nary a discouraging word about Maddow could be heard on CNN this morning.  Liberal media solidarity more important than beating the competition? Instead, commenting this morning on the release of Donald Trump's 2005 tax return, CNN's Chris Cuomo described the Alternative Minimum Tax [AMT] he paid as a "benefit" to Trump. It was just the opposite. The AMT Alternative Minimum Tax is designed to prevent people with large incomes from using deductions to reduce their tax liability beyond a certain amount. No matter how little a taxpayer would normally pay, the AMT imposes a higher minimum.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on March 13, 2017 14 Comments
CNN's 7 a.m. ET hour today began with a news montage. Have a look, and see if you don't agree that the hit parade of horribles for the Trump administration could just about as easily have been put together by the DNC as by CNN. Here's what was included:
  • McCain calls out Trump to provide evidence of wiretapping.
  • Dem Rep. Adam Schiff saying there'd be an open hearing; an unidentified voice saying "we're going to ask, is there any truth to this."
  • Kellyanne saying "the president has asked for the investigation into surveillance to be included."

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on March 12, 2017 33 Comments
Looks like Rachel Maddow's feminist solidarity doesn't extend to Melania Trump . . . Appearing on Al Sharpton's MSNBC show this morning, did Maddow express outrage over a newspaper report on the possibility that Melania Trump had in the past worked as an "escort?" Not at all. To the contrary, Maddow described Melania's lawsuit against the newspaper involved as part of an "attack" and "assault" on the media. Maddow fretted that the media lacked the resources to "fight back."

Posted by Anne Segal on March 11, 2017 42 Comments
What allegedly happened at a routine White House briefing yesterday may be the latest skirmish in the larger conflict between the D.C. insider class and outsider challengers. Tensions between legacy Washington, D.C., media and new-entrant reporters who have been granted access under the Trump Administration came to a head Friday in an alleged attack leveled at Gateway Pundit's Lucian Wintrich by Fox News Radio reporter Jon Decker. As reporters entered Friday's White House press briefing, witnesses reported that Decker loudly, and allegedly physically, accosted Wintrich personally, calling him a "Nazi," and saying of the site, "they hate blacks, Jews, and Hispanics."

Posted by David Gerstman on March 05, 2017 4 Comments
Last week Gen. (ret.) Michael Herzog (brother of Israel's opposition leader Isaac Herzog) wrote a remarkable article (.pdf) in The American Interest. Herzog, who has been involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since 1993 didn't write his article to place blame (though he does) for the failure of the 2013-2014 talks overseen by then-Secretary of State John Kerry but "it is my sincere hope that this analysis will inform a meaningful policy debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." But if you Google Herzog's name for the past week, precisely one news organization covered the article: The Times of Israel. Some blogs such as The Tower and Yaacov Lozowick have written about it too. One would think that an insider's view of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians would draw a lot of attention, but it didn't. Presumably that is because Herzog didn't blame Bibi first.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 05, 2017 20 Comments
Donald Trump's accusation that the Obama administration "wiretapped" his phones and/or Trump Tower, continues to reverberate. The accusations have refocused the argument over Trump's alleged Russia ties, which amount at this point only to innuendo, into a discussion of Obama surveillance practices. As discussed in my prior post, which is getting a lot of attention, the focus on the term "wiretap" and whether Obama "ordered" surveillance under FISA, may be a distraction, Some curious language in both Trump’s “wiretap” accusation and Obama’s defense. The media, however, is being dragged into another direction, one focusing on Obama administration surveillance practices. This morning Donald Trump, through Sean Spicer, called for a congressional investigation of Obama administration election surveillance.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 04, 2017 17 Comments
We spend a lot of our time correcting misreporting, slopping reporting, and reporting presented as objective when it clearly is not. Increasingly, it's apparent the attempt to oust newly-minted Attorney General Sessions was a good, old-fashioned media hit job. Who was behind it, we don't know. These things seldom happen on their own, especially in the age of a completely incurious press. The good folks over at the Media Research Center studied media coverage of the Sessions incident and compared it with the amount of coverage previous Attorney General Eric Holder received when he was in contempt of Congress. The results? Well, they're pretty much exactly what you'd expect them to be, sadly.
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