Broadcast Television

Chalk this one up to things that make you go, “What?!?” In an interview with the BBC on Oct. 4, Virginia Ironside, a columnist for the U.K. Independent made a jaw-dropping statement – that abortion and euthanasia could somehow be considered to be acts of kindness. (h/t Scott Baker, theblaze.com) “[I] think that if I were a mother of a suffering child, I would be the first to want I mean a…

They're out of excuses. Summer's over. It's after Labor Day. The kids are back in school. People are back into their routines. The trouble for the Big 3 broadcast networks is that those routines don't include watching their early-evening newscasts. Beyond that, last week was a pivotal week in Campaign 2010, with key primaries in New York, Delaware, New Hampshire, and several other states. As…

Are the three news networks actively working to defeat the Republican candidate for Governor in Wisconsin? According to the far-left Service Employees International Union, yes, they most certainly are.SEIU spokesman John-david Morgan - also, incidentally, a former journalist - told a staffer (audio embedded below the fold) for GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker that local media affiliates…

I didn't know about what follows when I posted last night (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) on Atlantic politics editor and CBS Campaign 2010 "Chief Political Consultant" Marc Ambinder's September 15 prediction that "The media is going to help the Democratic Party's national messaging." Though drop-dead obvious, I still found it interesting that someone in Ambinder's position would admit it. It…

In a September 15 post-primary item at the Atlantic ("An Epic End to the Primaries: What It Means"), politics editor Marc Ambinder presented seven "different ways to look at the primaries of September 14, 2010." His final item reads as follows (bold is mine): 7. The media is going to help the Democratic Party's national messaging, which is that the GOP is a party full of Christine O'Donnells, a…

Dubbed as "ultra right wing extremist" and "crazy," Republican candidate Christine O'Donnell and her Tea Party supporters have been smeared by every major broadcast and cable network since she won the Delaware primary against GOP establishment candidate on Tuesday night. NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center President Brent Bozell reacts: This is mudsliging at its ugliest. Pure…

With liberals up in arms over News Corp's political contributions, here's an interesting fact worth noting: of the roughly $1.15 million network TV employees gave to political candidates in 2008, a full 88 percent of it went to Democrats.Barack Obama received almost half a million dollars from those same execs, while John McCain received just over $25,000. The discrepancy between donations to the…

They'll have all sorts of excuses (but only if asked) about why it happened: It's because they had a lot of guest anchors last week, it was hot, summer vacation season is still on (though lots of kids around in Greater Cincinnati were already back in school by last Wednesday), cable is killing us, blah-blah, etc., etc. But the Big Three networks won't be able to avoid the fact that their ongoing…

In late July, NB Contributing Editor Tom Blumer busted the Associated Press for neglecting to mention the party affiliations of scandal-plagued officials in Bell, California. The AP piece was one of hundreds of reports on the scandal. Of those hundreds, one solitary report mentioned party labels for the five officials.Can you guess which party they belong to? I'll bet you can.The only news outlet…

Editor's Note: For the list of NewsBusters T-shirt contest winners, skip to the end of this post. Click here to enter the contest.Last week we debuted the first installment of "Five for Five," a set of five top five lists comprising the best NewsBusters posts of our first five years. Last week we began on a light note with The Top Five Media Flubs Caught by NewsBusters.We continue on the lighter…

Editor's Note: For the list of NewsBusters T-shirt contest winners, skip to the end of this post.As we approach our 5th anniversary at NewsBusters, our celebration would not be complete without a recap of our best posts. It was a tough call, but we came up with the top 25, broken down evenly into five categories of five each. We call it our Five-for-Five. Each Friday through August 13 we'll…

Last week, Matt Robare at NewsBusters noted the fact that the Big 3 networks' combined year-over-year audience fell by a bit more than 1 million during the second quarter. Last week's showing appears to be to a slight pickup over the previous week, but it may have been much worse. Here, per Media Bistro, is how the the week of June 28 as reported by Nielsen compared to the week of June 21, the…

The GOP as the party of obstructionism: it's a tried and true media meme, but very often falls a tad short of the truth. Yet on occasion, even stubborn facts are not enough to dispel such accusations.Some in the media have taken President Obama's recess appointment of Donald Berwick to the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as an occasion to bash purportedly obstructionist…

At the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog (HT Instapundit), Byron York documents the results of some Lexis Nexis searching: Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the New York Times: 0. Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the Washington Post: 0. Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on NBC Nightly News: 0. Total words about the NASA…