Solyndra

Ever been watching Morning Joe, and wished you could stop the steady stream of liberal blather?  Simple.  Say the magic word—Solyndra—and watch the gabby guests fall suddenly silent. Today's show offered a prime example of the phenomenon.  For the first ten minutes, the panel had a great old time cackling and crowing on the theme that the Republican presidential field is a mass of morons. …

"The Obama administration urged the now-bankrupt solar-energy firm Solyndra and its top investor to hold off announcing planned layoffs in 2010 until after the Nov. 2 elections, according to e-mails released by House Republicans on Tuesday," Amy Harder of National Journal reported this morning:

In Hawaii today, according to an Associated Press dispatch filed by Ben Feller, President Barack Obama is reported to have told supporters that, in Feller's words, "everything they worked for and that the country stands for is on the line in his 2012 re-election bid." Well, if what those donors have "worked" for is an inside track to government money, and if what the country stands for is…

It would be funny if it weren't so transparently sad. We've seen "name that party" games for a long time in the press. Today, the Associated Press played "name that company." In an unbylined report Friday evening which oddly has Dina Cappiello's Twitter address at the bottom , the identity of failed solar manufacturer Solyndra isn't revealed until the third paragraph. The item's headline…

It has now been nine weeks since stimulus-funded solar company Solyndra declared bankruptcy. Yet despite Thursday's vote by the House Energy and Commerce Committee panel to subpoena internal White House communications concerning the company, MSNBC's prime time hosts Chris Matthews, Lawrence O'Donnell, Ed Schultz, and Al Sharpton still haven't said one word about this scandal:

Thursday's World News on ABC skipped the congressional decision to subpoena White House emails related to the Solyndra solar energy company that went into bankruptcy after receiving tax dollars. The CBS Evening News gave the story 22 seconds, while the NBC Nightly News included a 31-second news brief. On CBS, anchor Scott Pelley related:

Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman testified before a congressional committee yesterday that the department was "ill-equipped to quickly distribute billions of dollars in economic stimulus funding," reported the Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe in the November 3 paper. "Friedman's testimony was meant to summarize more than 100 investigations conducted by his office into Energy's…

Appearing on Saturday's NBC Today, left-wing Washington Post opinion writer and MSNBC contributor Jonathan Capehart dismissed a congressional investigation into the Solyndra debacle as just "the GOP looking to scratch, trying to find a scandal in an administration that is remarkably free of scandal." After co-host Lester Holt noted that "Republicans have seemed to caught a whiff of scandal"…

Jonathan Alter, who spent 28 years at Newsweek, has been a columnist at Bloomberg News since early this year. Just this year, the reliably and insufferably liberal Alter, among many other things, called the Republican House's passage of Paul Ryan's budget plan in April an attempt "to throw Granny in the snow," and coldly calculated that in the wake of her shooting, Arizona Congresswoman…

Poor Steven Chu. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Obama's Energy Secretary stands "at [the] center of [the] Solyndra policy storm," where he's learning "lessons in political science" according to Washington Post staffer Steven Mufson's 45-paragraph front-page article in the October 28 paper. Although the Post has done a decent job thus far in following the Solyndra scandal and reporting…

ABC's Brian Ross on Friday investigated a $500 million government loan to a car company that is now operating in Finland. Ross highlighted how Vice President Joe Biden in 2009 claimed this would create jobs in America. Yet, the Good Morning America reporter left out a key component for the network version of the story: Fisker, the European car company involved, have ties to big Obama campaign…

Update (10:00 EDT, Oct. 20): CNBC has an update/correction on the story: <<Update: On Wednesday evening, a Department of Energy spokesman said that the press releases had been returned to their original content as a result of CNBC's inquiry about the changes. Correction: A previous headline on this article incorrectly characterized the press releases as being related to Solyndra…

In a front-page story today, Politico's Darren Samuelsohn relayed the ire of liberal think tanks and blogs "bemoaning the 'out of proportion' Solyndra coverage" in the media. We at NewsBusters are not sure what planet these folks are living on. A search of the Nexis database for Solyndra stories on ABC, CBS and NBC between September 8 -- when the FBI raided the company's headquarters -- and…

Walter Cronkite's longtime producer Leslie Midgley once wrote that "News is what an editor decides it is." News today is what TV producers decide can help President Obama. News that hurts isn't news at all. In the last week, network anchors like Brian Williams repeated endlessly that the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are "increasingly resonating." It’s the story reporters will declare "isn’t…