NewsBusters Time Machine

25 years ago, the U.S. Senate voted to acquit President Bill Clinton at his impeachment trial. At the time, journalists sneered that the trial of was a pointless waste of the Senate’s valuable time, while viewers heard it was an attempted “coup,” something “Stalinist” that evoked memories of Nazi Germany. Republicans were like KKK “night riders,” motivated by racism in their vendetta against a…

Instead of respectfully permitting conservatives to honor a cherished leader, media liberals felt compelled to unleash a nasty stream of rhetoric tarring Rush Limbaugh as a bigot, a “racist,” and a “misogynist” mere hours after he disclosed what would turn out to be a fatal cancer diagnosis.

Sixteen years ago, so-called reporters giddily celebrated the confluence of the ultra-liberal Kennedy family (a.k.a., “Camelot”) and the hard-left Obama campaign.

Since 2008, the NewsBusters archives shows the intensive political coverage surrounding the New Hampshire primary has been a chance for journalists to take gratuitous potshots at conservative candidates, while liberals (often referred to as “moderates”) are treated to rock-star treatment.

In coverage of past Iowa caucuses, the media elite have mocked religious conservatives like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz, yet always seem to be thrilled by their Democratic choices, spinning radicals as “moderates.”

The sweeping conservative victory in the 1994 midterms shocked liberals, but within weeks the media elite were fully engaged in disparaging the new Republican majority as mean-spirited, racist, dumb and dangerous.

It’s hardly a secret that large swaths of the public have soured on the news media as reliable communicators of factual information. A series of new polls released in 2023 showed the public’s distrust of the media elite has gotten worse, not better.

It was 32 years ago — on Christmas Day, December 25, 1991 — that the world rejoiced at the final dissolution of the Soviet Union. But some in the media refused to blame the communist system for its failures, even as they treated Gorbachev, the last communist, better than his Western counterparts and his anti-communist successors.

Nine years ago this week, President Barack Obama chose to establish formal relations with the Communist dictatorship in Cuba. Instead of worrying that Obama was handing a much-needed and undeserved lifeline to the decades-long Castro dictatorship, the liberal media applauded the “historic” decision.

Fourteen years ago tomorrow (December 10), liberals were ecstatic as President Barack Obama accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Obama had been president for a mere 11 days before the window for nominations closed on January 31, but his media fan club nonetheless celebrated the “towering honor” bestowed upon their hero.

Five years ago this week, former President George H. W. Bush passed away at the age of 94. The media’s 2018 retrospectives of Bush and his presidency are an example of how liberal journalists can be like prehistoric bugs stuck in amber, frozen in biased poses struck decades earlier, regardless of how thoroughly they’ve been debunked.

Twenty-three years ago, November 2000, the liberal media unleashed their full fury on Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, for following the election laws of her state as well as various court rulings to certify George W. Bush as the winner of her state’s electoral votes in the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Six years ago, the networks had a chance to properly report on Senator Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) alleged corruption during an earlier federal trial, and they blew it. NewsBusters documented how ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN buried the embarrassing (for Democrats) trial detailing how Menendez accepted extravagant gifts and travel, in exchange for federal favors.

Twenty years ago, CBS faced a firestorm after a leaked script to the New York Times showed the network’s upcoming mini-series, The Reagans, was an inaccurate and unfair portrayal of the 40th President, then in the final months of his battle with Alzheimer’s disease.