David Folkenflik

On Sunday, ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos discussed the fallout from the Brian Williams controversy with two prominent media critics, both of whom agreed that NBC News had badly handled Williams’ false claim that his helicopter came under enemy fire while he was reporting from Iraq in 2003. Liz Spayd, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, insisted that NBC’s internal…

On Wednesday night, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams apologized on air for falsely claiming that while reporting from Iraq in 2003, the helicopter he was on was hit by enemy fire. Despite Williams’ attempt to walk back his past statements, numerous media critics have called out the NBC News anchor for failing to uphold the standards expected of a network news anchor. Howard Kurtz, Fox News…

It seems as though National Public Radio has joined the ranks of the liberal media championing illegal immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas following his arrest on Tuesday, July 15 for attempting to board a plane without proper documentation.  That evening, NPR’s All Things Considered did its best to promote Vargas, with co-host Audie Cornish and media correspondent David Folkenflik engaging in a…

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik arrived late to the story of former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson on Monday’s Morning Edition. He found former NBC reporter Lisa Myers to agree with Attkisson’s point about TV news in the Obama years: “Overall, the mainstream media has been less eager to hold this administration accountable than it was to hold the Bush administration accountable.” But…

Despite the fact that National Public Radio is a publicly supported network, its long-term financial struggles claimed another casualty on Tuesday: Tell Me More, a program “expressly designed to have a primary appeal for African-American listeners and other people of color” will air its last episode on Friday, August 1. The move will leave 28 people unemployed, and program host Michel Martin…

NPR named a new CEO on Friday. His name is Jarl Mohn (pronounced “Yarl Moan”), who was a founder of the cable channel E and an executive at MTV and VH-1. Leftists might worry with these corporate connections, but Mohn has been a major donor to Pasadena NPR station KPCC – as well as a major donor to Barack Obama and the DNC. For 15 years, from 1994 to 2009, he chaired the board of the ACLU of…

Leftist author Joe McGinniss drew several more warm obituaries from the national media. In Wednesday’s Washington Post, on the front of the Style section Gene Weingarten began with a gush: “Joe McGinniss, author of one of the best nonfiction books ever written, died yesterday.” NPR media reporter David Folkenflik filed an entire story on McGinniss (and it was no Harold Simmons hatchet job on…

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik was given the chance to promote his book “Murdoch’s World” in an interview for the latest edition of The Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists. He tried the usual line that Rupert Murdoch deserved a whole book on his scandals because he’s so “unique.” (Read: somewhat conservative tycoon in a liberal media.) Folkenflik said he was…

On Monday’s All Things Considered, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik drew this unintentionally hilarious sentence out of NBC executive Alexandra Wallace: “Our job is to report on what's going on in the world. We're not activists. We're observers and analysts.” Folkenflik’s story pressed on NBC News from the left, that they must campaign against Russian repression before, during, and after…

As much as people on the left in this country and others rage against Rupert Murdoch and his many creations it is rather remarkable how most American conservatives, even professional political junkies, know or care very little about the man. Beyond missing out on understanding how Murdoch’s life is a textbook case of the power and influence of media on policy, people on the right who aren’t…

Former New York Times editor Bill Keller on Sunday perfectly demonstrated liberal media hypocrisy. Moments after claiming on CNN's Reliable Sources that people who "deny climate change" shouldn't be given "equal time," he said "be wary of the guy who says he's got the absolute truth" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Left-wingers like to imagine Rupert Murdoch as some sort of James Bond villain – a global media mogul who ruins the international socialist agenda with feisty tabloids and right-wing TV hacks. No one imagines that more than National Public Radio, which fired Juan Williams for daring to associate with “The O’Reilly Factor.” NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has obsessed over Murdoch…

As NewsBusters reported several times last week, CNN's Piers Morgan refused to retract his repeated claim Monday that Aaron Alexis, the shooter at the Washington Navy Yard, used an AR-15 during the massacre. On CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday, guest host David Folkenflik of NPR did a six-minute segment addressing the mistake several in the media made concerning this issue without once…

When Gary Knell became the chief executive officer of National Public Radio in December of 2011, his goal was to “calm the waters” after the publicly funded network had endured two high-profile scandals: the firing of Juan Williams and the video of a fund-raising executive slamming the Republican Party as “seriously racist, racist people” while accepting donations from a group that was…