War on Terrorism

With still nothing definitively known about the identity of the Munich, Germany attacker or attackers early Friday night, MSNBC’s MTP Daily ushered the Brexit vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union into the conversation as an example of anti-refugee sentiment that, in their speculations, was behind the mall shooting in Germany.

In the midst of MSNBC’s rolling coverage Friday afternoon of what appeared to be an act of terrorism in Germany, breaking news anchor Brian Williams and NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel used the occasion to lament the rise of “a rightward tilt” in Europe of “intolerant” ideologies and parties against Muslims and Middle Eastern refugees. 

There’s the entertaining kind of irascible old guy (e.g., Grampa Simpson) and there’s the scary kind, which several liberal pundits thought they beheld Monday night as they watched Rudy Giuliani speak at the Republican convention. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall remarked that “ever since the late and great Molly Ivins quipped that she thought Pat Buchanan's speech at the…

Playing on long-established stereotypes of the melanin-challenged Republican Party, New York Times coverage of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday put racial controversies front and center, accusing speakers (particularly Rudy GIuliani) of lecturing and moralizing to blacks about law and order as an all-white crowd lapped it up. The paper led with Melanie Trump's speech with this…

On Wednesday's New Day, during a discussion of Chris Christie's speech at the Republican National Convention and audience reaction, CNN panel members used words like "vitriolic" and "pretty ugly" to describe the GOP gathering. Co-anchor Chris Cuomo warned that Republicans are helping Hillary Clinton by "going too far," and also worked in a rationalization of his claim from Tuesday that Clinton…

On Monday and Tuesday, CBS Evening News failed to cover the ISIS-inspired knife and ax attack by an Afghan refugee on train passengers in Germany.  Instead, the newscast ended on Tuesday with a report on the celebrities who condemned Donald Trump for walking out to Queen's "We Are The Champions" at the Republican National Convention on Monday. NBC Nightly News covered the Islamist terrorism with…

Adam Ragusea, writing at Slate.com, believes that the word "terrorist" has become "uselessly arbitrary and loaded," because it "has acquired a powerful religious—and specifically Islamic—connotation" that "is substantively consequential." As a result, Ragusea believes that the Associated Press, whose Stylebook sadly exerts nearly ironclad control over language used in U.S. establishment press…

In a rather action packed interview during CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, host Jake Tapper grilled Secretary of State John Kerry about the extent of the ISIS threat and the government’s response. “They are shrinking … they are on the run,” Kerry claimed. But in a show of force Tapper countered hard, “Well, with all due respect, sir, I'm not sure that it looks that way to the public,…

UPDATE, July 17: The Enquirer corrected the error by removing the related sentence and placing the following "correction" below the article's boilerplate describing the paper's three-part series — "Correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated that 220,000 were murdered last year. The total was since Sept. 11, 2001." A Cincinnati Enquirer reporter and her editors thoroughly embarrassed…

On Thursday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, during a discussion of the terrorist attack in Nice, France, self-described liberal Republican FNC analyst Geraldo Rivera seemed to be in touch with his more right-leaning side as he criticized President Barack Obama for not dealing with ISIS and depriving them of a safe haven from which to attack the West. Rivera declared that "I want to love the…

The New York Times is notorious for downplaying or ignoring links to radical Islam in the wake of terror attacks, and its response to the truck massacre in Nice, France mostly followed that pattern, with a news columnist shrugging off the idea the war on terror could ever be won and a front-page headline confidently stating the perpetrator was “A Surly Misfit With No Terror Links....” the morning…

On Friday’s Today, NBC terror analyst Michael Leiter partly blamed France for Thursday’s terrorist attack in the resort town of Nice: “The French really do have a disenfranchised Muslim population...which has become extremely isolated. And even France’s efforts to allow for the free expression of religion has, I think arguably in some cases, produced more isolation and more radicalization.”

On Friday's New Day, CNN analyst and former FBI Assistant Director Tom Fuentes played up the possibility of fatal gun violence at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland due to Ohio's open carry law: "[The] law means that you're going to see people — and some of the websites have already said for their protest groups to show up and openly carry assault rifles on the streets of Cleveland…

Appearing on MSNBC in the 11 a.m. ET hour on Friday, Daily Beast editor and NBC News contributor Christopher Dickey was confounded by the idea that the terrorist who launched Thursday’s attack on France was heavily armed: “...where the hell did he get those arms? I mean, this is not Alabama or South Carolina or Texas. You just can't go buy automatic pistols in any old store in town by showing…