Jim Rutenberg

After television news (and his own newspaper) spent the last eight years praising Barack Obama and defending him against GOP attacks, there’s a Republican about to take office and suddenly it’s high time for journalists to get tough on politicians. That’s the gist of New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg’s latest Mediator column “TV News Must Pull No Punches For Trump." Rutenberg praised…

We’re just a few steps away from Putin-style reign in America under the Trump regime, New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg implied in his “Mediator” column on the front of Monday’s Business Day: “From Russia Comes a Warning for Americans.” Rutenberg used Tolokonnikova, who has also attacked Trump, to make dubious parallels between the Russian media situation and America’s: “...as an…

On Monday’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough in a conversation concerning who the Trump administration would be appointing to positions of power and what policy achievements they would reach, warned his colleagues in the media not to be too quick in making negative determinations as they mistakenly did, time and time again throughout the election.

After Donald Trump’s victory shocked a media that was confidently and happily predicting a safe, historic win for Hillary Clinton, the New York Times seems to dimly recognize it has a credibility problem. Times media writer Jim Rutenberg noted in a front-page mea culpa on behalf of both his paper and his industry Thursday: “Most ominously, it came in the form of canceled subscriptions, something…

Thursday’s New York Times, the first print edition to actually deal with president-elect Donald Trump’s Wednesday morning victory, wasn’t exactly elated, judging by the banner headline: “Democrats, Students And Foreign Allies Face The Reality Of A Trump Presidency.” The headline to the day’s lead story? “Grief and Glee as an Administration Once Unthinkable Becomes Real.” Yes, it’s a liberal…

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s historic victory over Hillary Clinton in this epic election, the media descended into a state of total shock and surprise. On Wednesday’s and Thursday’s exclusive election editions of Morning Joe, the liberal commentators present conducted a series of serious self-critical discussions on doing their jobs as journalists, which at one point turned controntational…

During the New York Times rather sedate and solemn (wonder why?) live election night coverage, reporter Maggie Haberman whined that “the amount of open misogyny during this campaign has been really striking, from a lot of Trump’s supporters.” Sarah Lyall’s front-page story in Wednesday’s edition (before most of the results were in) also took a feminist angle: “Many Women Feel Echoes of History in…

As the first presidential debate looms, fact-checking Donald Trump has become a New York Times obsession. Jim Rutenberg bewailed the candidate’s falsehoods and urged debate moderators to hit him hard in his Mediator column on Monday, “A Moment of Truth For Debate Moderators.” Meanwhile, James Poniewozik reviews a PBS Frontline biography on the two major candidates and was glad to see that it…

In the weeks leading up to Monday night’s first one-on-one clash between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the liberal media have set the stage for NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt and his fellow presidential debate moderators to be rougher with the GOP nominee. Journalists from the New York Times to CNN have openly declared that Trump is so intolerably “polarizing,” “racist and sexist” that…

A few days after New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote a front-page piece about “[t]he challenge” of remaining objective when covering Donald Trump, he joined MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday morning to claim that despite Trump sucking up much of the media’s attention, the media have been able to aggressively cover Hillary Clinton and her many scandals. 

On Monday, The New York Times published a front-page editorial on the need for the media to defeat Donald Trump....and one of their heroes was an alleged “frequent critic of liberal media bias” named....Joe Scarborough. As if they hire “frequent critics of liberal media bias” at MSNBC? But Times columnist Jim Rutenberg offered Scarborough as some sort of hero for insisting Donald Trump should be…

On Monday, economist turned partisan hack Paul Krugman recycled his pompous lecture against what he calls “false equivalence," by which he means journalistic fairness toward Republicans. Every one of his examples of “false equivalence” coincidentally involves a Republican allegedly getting a free-ride in the news media -- which would come as quite a shock for NewsBusters readers -- while Hillary…

When liberal newspapers attack less liberal newspapers: Jim Rutenberg’s Mediator column, “Fair Play in a Fact-Challenged Political Landscape,” on the front of the Monday July 4 Business Day, started with a media conflict involving a pro-Donald Trump commentator but pivoted to a denunciation of supposedly misleading journalism on Brexit from conservative newspapers before the vote. (The Times…