NewsBusters Time Machine

Six years ago today, November 26, 2016, news broke of the death of Fidel Castro, the former communist dictator of Cuba. His death was an opportunity for journalists to salute the prison state’s advances in health care, and to mindlessly babble about how Cubans supposedly preferred donkey carts to modern automobiles.

Twenty years ago, Democrats lost a midterm election they had expected to win. But instead of blaming “candidate quality” or a party message that was out of synch with voters, liberal pundits whined that the real problem was that the media were too slanted towards conservatives for liberals to get a fair shake. That’s right, a pro-conservative press.

With Republicans forecast to win a slim majority of seats in the House of Representatives, GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is the odds-on favorite to be the next Speaker of the House. But unlike the overwhelmingly favorable coverage that Democrat Nancy Pelosi enjoyed in 2006 as incoming Speaker in that election year, the liberal media have been mauling McCarthy — and the GOP caucus he leads — with…

An exceptionally repulsive feature of journalism these days is when media figures use tragedies to smear their political adversaries as dangerous threats. That’s clearly happening now, and it happened in 2011, when irresponsible journalists wrongly blamed the conservative Tea Party for inciting the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords and murder of six other citizens.

Decades before the media’s embarrassing love affair with Barack Obama, or their open warfare against Donald Trump, there was the 1992 presidential campaign, when liberal journalists shamelessly promoted Bill Clinton’s candidacy and showed their contempt for George H. W. Bush.

Four years ago, Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke enjoyed a starring role in the liberal media’s coverage of the 2018 midterm elections. This year, Beto’s trying again, taking on Texas Governor Greg Abbott, but on TV news he’s gone from a rock star to the invisible man.

One of the more distasteful habits of liberal journalists has always been the tendency to flatter and fawn over brutal dictators. Reporters, who are supposed to speak truth to power, often fail when it comes to charismatic communists. That’s exactly what happened when ABC's Barbara Walters interviewed Fidel Castro almost 19 years ago.

The networks found their 2022 October Surprise, a Republican candidate to pounce on and work to destroy the GOP’s chances in the midterms. In less than a week, ABC, CBS and NBC have devoted over 27 minutes to the Herschel Walker story and whether the Georgia Republican senatorial candidate paid for an abortion in 2009. 

This week, the residents of Florida endured the wrath of Hurricane Ian moving up through the state. At this time, the damage isn’t totally known, but certainly looks very worrying. In this case, the governor of Florida is Ron DeSantis, a man running in a contentious 2022 midterm election, as well as being a possible 2024 presidential contender.

It was 35 years ago this September that Joe Biden’s first of three presidential campaigns was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal, one that would torpedo the bid in controversy. While journalists and late night hosts in 2022 don’t seem interested in mocking now-President Biden, it’s worth remembering that Johnny Carson had no problem joking about the Democrat in 1987. 

Given the collapse of CNN+, the jettisoning of anchors like Brian Stelter, it’s clear that CNN itself is the middle of an identity crisis. It’s not the first time the network has gone through cringe-inducing moments. It was 17 years ago this coming Monday that CNN founder Ted Turner embarrassed himself by insisting that despotic North Koran dictator Kim Jong Il “didn’t look evil.”

Joe Biden’s Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, this week tried to spin away the fact that she was an election denier, insisting that Donald Trump wasn’t elected President, that Brian Kemp wasn’t elected governor in Georgia. A look back at Jean-Pierre’s time on MSNBC shows a tendency to lash out with vulgar attacks on Republicans. On October 21, 2017, Jean-Pierre, then a spokeswoman for the…

As of Saturday, Joe Biden has gone 203 days without giving a sit-down interview to a journalist. What’s even more incredible about this gap is that, when he does them, the President is almost always greeted with softballs. In that way, he’s no…

Given what we now know about Matt Lauer and his creepy office with an automatic door lock, his  August 21, 2000 Today interview with Al Gore looks weirder in retrospect. It was 22 years ago this week that the now-disgraced ex-NBC host obsessed over “the kiss” between the then-Vice President and his then-wife Tipper Gore at the 2000 Democratic National Convention: “You really planted…