Government shutdown

On Monday, MSNBC was already working hard to make sure Republicans would be solely to blame for any possible government shutdown at the end of the week and proclaiming that Democrats “fed up” with the GOP were ready to “draw a line” on maintaining the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

During their appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Mary Bruce and Cecilia Vega, the network’s Congressional and White House correspondents respectively, built narratives using Democratic talking points designed to place the blame for a failed immigration deal and possible government shutdown solely on the Republicans.

You don’t see that very often. The journalists at CBS This Morning on Thursday grilled socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, hitting the progressive over hypocrisy relating to a possible government shutdown. On the issue of Sanders and Al Franken, the co-hosts called him out on his flip flopping.  

Where would we be without the efforts of government spending? At least $20 trillion less in debt, but that never seems to occur to the more left-leaning politicians. Meanwhile, CBS’s Madam Secretary takes the time to remind the viewers about how necessary everyone and everything employed by the government can be.

It’s always fascinating to see media outlets give completely opposite takes on the exact same issue, depending on who’s in the Oval Office. The New York Times did just that today in another display of hypocrisy, typical of the left-wing paper. Like the networks, The Times is blaming the looming government shutdown on President Trump, but in 2013 when President Obama was in office and facing a…

Who can forget when the media spent endless days of outrage hyperventilating that Republicans would “shutdown the government” in 2013? Well the media had quite the opposite reaction Monday when Democrats threatened to do the same thing, not even two months into Trump’s presidency.    

Print, broadcast or web, the media sure aren’t Nostradamus. In spite of their best attempts, the news media have gotten it wrong prediction after prediction on a wide range of business and economic issues in 2013. Just in the past year, reporters warned of “economic doomsday,” thought Healthcare.gov was going to be “easy” just like Amazon.com, and warned of melting polar ice, even as a new…

Leading off Thursday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams declared: "It's war. A private battle blows wide open in public as the most powerful Republican in Washington says he's had enough, coming out swinging against members of his own party." Moments later, he hailed House Speaker John Boehner's "rare outburst of candor mixed with anger and frustration" at conservatives critical of the new…

The news media worried a lot about how awful the government shutdown would be and estimated it would take a huge toll on the economy as well. Now it looks like they were wrong about the size of the damage. The networks touted a recent Standard & Poor’s (S&P) estimate that the shutdown would cost $24 billion. That figure was mentioned on the networks five times from Oct. 17 to Oct. 24. …

The October government shutdown was based on Republican opposition to ObamaCare. But ABC, CBS and NBC barely covered that issue during the 15-day shutdown – devoting on average slightly more than 1 minute on all three networks combined each day. However, after the shutdown ended leaving ObamaCare funding uncontested, the evening news shows spent 4 times as much time on the flaws of the failing…

After NBC warned viewers that the partial government shutdown that ended weeks ago may be "the Grinch that stole Christmas," on Tuesday's Today, correspondent Stephanie Gosk fretted that Thanksgiving would be ruined as well: "Macy's, the company that sponsors the Thanksgiving Day Parade, will open its doors on the holiday for the first time in 155 years....But there is a risk, the identity of one…

For almost a month the mainstream media have declared the Tea Party dead - are you listening, E.J. Dionne? - as a result of the government shutdown. However, a new Rasmussen poll finds that an equal number of Americans identify with the Tea Party's views as do Obama's:

At Yahoo News, former ABC and CBS political producer Marc Ambinder picked apart a Time magazine article by Jay Newton-Small triumphantly headlined “In Shutdown, Women are the Only Adults Left.” It was so pro-“chick” that “Several women rights' groups, like EMILY's List, picked up the story for use in fundraising.” (Newton-Small reported only two of the 20 female senators – Kelly Ayotte and Debbie…

In an interview with Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn on Wednesday's MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports, fill-in host and NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker desperately attempted to blame Republicans for the disastrous ObamaCare website rollout: "Congress repeatedly refused to authorize requests by the Obama administration for additional funding for the rollout of the health care law…