Major Newspapers

One of the first rules of genuine comedy is that to be funny, a joke or skit needs to have some basis in truth. On that primary measurement, the cold open on "Saturday Night Live" last night failed miserably on so many fronts, it's hard to know where to begin. Its most offensive aspect is its portrayal of a Democrat inflicting violence on three Republicans to the audience's pleausre. It is…

In Chicago, incumbent Mayor and longtime Democrat fixture Rahm Emanuel floated the idea of renaming one of its airports after President Obama. After all, according to Emanuel, both of Chicago's major airports, O'Hare and Midway, are "named after battleships." No they're not, as will be seen after the jump. The Chicago Tribune's Bill Ruthhart failed to recognize Emanuel's startling gaffe until…

This had to be one of the more telling moments about the emptiness of Hillary Clinton's campaign.  When Mika Brzezinski asked Morning Joe panel members today to describe Hillary's message "in ten seconds or less," they burst into laughter.  "Why is that funny?" demanded Mika, surely knowing the answer: that Hillary stands for nothing much more than "it's my turn, dammit!" But that didn't stop…

Employing a variant of the old surgeon's joke — "The operation was a success, but the patient died" — White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, on friendly ground on MSNBC this morning, essentially told viewers that the administration still considers Yemen a success, even as its government is on the fast track to being forced into indefinite exile. Earnest told the "Morning Joe" show's Mika…

The press's reluctance to let go of a popular but debunked meme — in this case, the nonexistent "epidemic" of college campus sexual assaults — is sometimes inadvertently humorous, though still intensely annoying. Take how John Bacon and Marisol Bello at USA Today characterized the news that "Police in Charlottesville were unable to verify that an alleged sexual assault detailed in a…

Today the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Associated Press's Scott Bauer reported, "turned away a challenge to Wisconsin's voter identification law," meaning that "the state is free to impose the voter ID requirement in future elections." Bauer then focused on the impact of the state's off-year primary elections on April 7. Bauer's relatively tolerable (for him) report tagged the law as "a political…

The Associated Press's most recent story on the controversial Starbucks USA Today "Race Together" campaign came out Wednesday evening. In that story, AP Food Industry Writer Candice Choi quoted Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz at his company's annual shareholders' meeting predicting that "Some in the media will criticize Starbucks for having a political agenda," but that "Our intentions are pure."…

Coffee retailing giant Starbucks is getting an earful of outrage and ridicule over its "Race Together" campaign. Its intent, according to chain CEO Howard Schultz, in a joint interview with USA Today's Larry Kramer, is to do something about what he claims is "the divisive role unconscious bias plays in our society and the role empathy can play to bridge those divides." USAT's Kramer claims that…

On Thursday's "O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News, Dennis Miller put in an uproariously funny but also insightful appearance. On the more serious side, Miller and O'Reilly also discussed former Vice President Al Gore's expressed preference for punishing those who dare to question the conventional wisdom on "climate change." Someone needs to mention Gore's disturbing posture, as the Associated Press…

Many media myths won't die because those who should know better — and I believe in many cases do know better, and don't care — perpetuate them. One can't divine his mindset, but Politico's Michael Crowley, in his coverage of Benjamin Netanyahu's resounding Tuesday electoral victory, did his part to continue the myth that the Israeli Prime Minister's "March 3 speech to Congress (was) arranged by…

As we know - America’s media is for the most part decidedly Leftist, often befuddled and rarely right.  So when they wade into an intricate issue like President Barack Obama’s Net Neutrality Internet power grab - we can only expect even more Leftism, befuddlement and wrongness. On February 26, the Obama Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pretended to be Congress and rewrote…

Here is a clear case of media reluctance to acknowledge a drop-dead obvious fact — one even the often fact-averse New York Times has admitted. In an 8:40 p.m. report tonight, Jim Salter at the Associated Press spent eight paragraphs avoiding any mention of the race of Jeffrey Williams, the 20 year-old man arrested today and charged in connection with the shooting of two Ferguson, Missouri police…

"Anarchists?" If only! Let's stipulate that Maureen Dowd's current column is absolutely brutal about Hillary.  Riffing off the Republicans' letter to the ayatollah, Dowd deigns to send a letter from "America" explaining the Constitution to Clinton. Dowd denounces Hillary for being "willing to cite your mother's funeral to get sympathy for ill-advisedly deleting 30,000 emails," and describes her…

A review of the "Big Story" archive at the Associated Press's national site on Jesse Jackson's name returns quite a few instances where the wire service has treated the "Reverend's" self-injection into stories considered nationally important as noteworthy. In addition to the predictable plethora of stories relating to Ferguson, Missouri and "police-communities tension," Jackson's name has…