James Taranto

“Writers have been bowing to the ‘fact checkers’ as submissively as Barack Obama upon meeting some anti-American dictator,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto quipped in a devastating take-down of the rise of the news media’s so-called “fact checkers.” In “The Pinocchio Press: The bizarre rise of ‘fact checking’ propagandists” posted on Tuesday, the author of the daily “Best of the Web…

New York Times reporter turned columnist Frank Bruni is on a nasty streak. He devoted his long Sunday Review column, "Rethinking His Religion," to a former classmate with a pat liberal morality lesson that seemed a lot like an invasion of patient privacy, then attacked Newt Gingrich and insulted Gingrich's wife. James Taranto at Best of the Web explained: New York Times columnist Frank Bruni…

Yesterday, Anne Gearan at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, wrote what she called a "Fact Check" piece about a political promise. Really. Two Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, are both promising to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem if they should become the nation's next president. There's literally no way to "…

In Monday's edition of his “Best of the Web” column, under the subhead "Recycling Is Garbage," Opinion Journal’s James Taranto unveiled a humorous pattern of New York Times columnists recycling a satirical headline from The Onion that made an apparently profound point about the unfair burdens accompanying Barack Obama into office: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." (Not as hard as coming up…

Elaine Quijano continued CBS's consistently glowing coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement on Wednesday's Early Show by spotlighting how two-thirds of Crosby, Stills, and Nash gave a concert for the protesters in New York City. Quijano played 12 clips from the concert and from the demonstrators, without once mentioning the growing examples of violence involving the left-leaning movement […

“The Republican Party is split right down the middle between Tea Party movement supporters and those who do not support the two-and-a-half-year-old movement, according to a new national survey,” a Thursday CNN.com “Political Ticker” post asserted in recounting the findings of a CNN/ORC poll which were cited on air by both Wolf Blitzer and John King.

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal just demolished a scare piece by Newsweek reporter Eve Conant (posted on July 4) with the overwrought headline "White Supremacist Stampede: A startling number of white-power candidates are seeking public office." If we're being warned of dangerous new wave of white racist extremists, it naturally is another product of the leftist Southern Poverty Law…

The New York Times marked Father’s Day last Sunday in its own special way -- here’s the front-page tease to a 4,000-word story by N.R. Kleinfeld: “In Brooklyn, a single mother, her son, her sperm donor and his lover are helping to redefine the concept of the American family.” At Opinion Journal, James Taranto was bothered by the Times's blithe unconcern for the child’s privacy in its rush to…

The next time someone in the media wants to blame budget cutters for premature deaths, remember James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal, who unveiled another story filed under “Great Moments in Socialized Medicine,” once again from jolly old England and the London Daily Mail: Peter Thompson, 41, was left in a corridor for ten hours before someone noticed he had passed away. In a final act of…

Just when you consider cutting the Associated Press a break for doing something right, they pull this. Most people know that in the interest of "not spiking the football," the Obama administration has decided that it will not release photos of Osama bin Laden's dead body. Shortly after the decision was announced, AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request for said photos. According to…

James Taranto could be the best columnist around.  Every day at his Best of the Web at the Wall Street Journal online, Taranto turns out an original, often unconventional, conservative take on the news, regularly managing to leaven the message with humor. Rush today rightly extolled Taranto's column of yesterday, in which he made the point that there is a vast, inherent difference between…

James Taranto, who writes the “Best of the Web” column for the Wall Street Journal online, continues to be on fire on the subject of New York Times hypocrisy over “violent” political rhetoric. His Monday column opened with another moral excoriation of the Times, based on its Saturday editorial endorsing the latest cause from Common Cause, a left-wing advocacy group. An excerpt: The New York…

Two of the conservative opinion world’s heavyweights, humorist P.J. O’Rourke and Wall Street Journal writer James Taranto, both have responded in passionate, even moral fashion to the New York Times’s often disgraceful coverage of the Tucson shootings, in which six people were killed and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured. In their view, the Times used the tragedy to play…

The Washington Post had better refrain from telling other media outlets to tone down their rhetoric, for on Sunday, one of the paper's longest running columnists asked on national television, "How much time do we have left to talk about how stupid Sarah Palin is?" Such was said by Richard Cohen, a man that has been with the Post since 1968, towards the end of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" (video…