Media Scandals

On CNN Newsroom Monday, host Brianna Keilar claimed that she covered an incident or incidents involving Tea Party "people" (plural) who spit on members of Congress and hurled racial slang terms at African-American members of Congress. In the Tea Party's seven-plus years of national presence, there is only one known event involving two separate incidents when what Keilar referred to could…

The Associated Press and reporter Josh Lederman are feeling sorry for outgoing President Barack Obama. Shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, in advance of Obama's last foreign tour, the AP's headline at Lederman's dispatch read: "On last foreign tour, Obama must find a way to explain Trump." Lederman wrote that our poor, put-upon president "must pivot and reassure the U.S. and other…

On Friday, a Virginia jury determined that Rolling Stone magazine defamed former University of Virginia associate dean of students Nicole Eramo when it published, and then refused to fully retract, its 9,000-word November 2014 "A Rape on Campus" story — and that the magazine did so with malice.

Among the WikiLeaks documents recently released is a 2008 email with an attachment running to dozens of pages telling Democrats how to "maximize what we get out of our media polling." Fox & Friends covered this story Monday morning. Very few other online and broadcast outlets have. A popular excuse, which even people who should know better are swallowing, is that this advice is for candidates…

It seems that conservatives aren’t alone in the bashing of the lying, biased media. The Simpsons did a storyline on how not everything we see, read, or hear on the news can be counted as credible in the episode “Trust but Clarify.” Local news anchor Kent Brockman watches Fox News for six weeks and says “Sometimes I'd watch Bill O'Reilly and pretend it was an older, stupider version of me.”

At NewsBusters late Wednesday afternoon, Tim Graham observed that many news outlets, including the Associated Press and most of the nation’s major newspapers, had not yet covered "the Project Veritas videos exposing Democratic operatives talking about voter fraud and inciting violence at Donald Trump rallies."

In a hysterical, fever-swamp dispatch otherwise shredded nicely by John Hinderaker at Powerline, the Associated Press's Jill Colvin insinuated that Donald Trump's concerns that the election is being rigged against him — with his primary complaints justifiably directed at an establishment press which has been undeniably colluding to do that — will cause his supporters to riot if he loses.

This is a volatile election year, to say the least. The two major-party candidates are far less than perfect, routinely commit gaffes (or perceived gaffes), and have been hurt by a variety of negative disclosures and actions. Two other challengers have gained a degree of attention and apparent support not seen since Ross Perot's presidential runs in the 1990s. Meanwhile, mistrust of the…

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple grabbed a quick interview with NBC News president Andrew Lack at the first presidential debate at Hofstra University. Lack predictably talked up Brian Williams and his new show The 11th Hour as "off to a nice start." (As usual, MSNBC is getting thumped in the ratings by O'Reilly Factor reruns.) But Lack tried to claim the serial-exaggeration scandal that…

Never let it be said that the folks at the Associated Press aren't on top of the news, making sure that readers as well as subscribers who use AP copy in their radio and TV broadcasts learn the most important developments of the day. That's sarcasm, folks. Friday evening, in a story primarily about the FBI's grant of immunity to longtime Hillary Clinton assistant Cheryl Mills, the AP's Michael…

New York magazine writer Gabriel Sherman has been the liberal media’s leading investigator/prosecutor of former Fox News boss Roger Ailes and the network’s settlement with Gretchen Carlson on sexual harassment claims. Now Evan Gahr in the New York Observer reports that Sherman didn’t exactly come clean with readers about lengthy negotiations to get hired by MSNBC:

Energy & Environmental Legal Institute released new documentation showing what it called “collusion” between the Environmental Protection Agency, environmentalist groups and even reporters. FOIA-ed emails obtained by E&E Legal, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Jeb Harmon showed that the EPA’s Michael Goo used a private email account to correspond with individuals about EPA…

Friday night, yours truly detailed the latest evidence demonstrating that the Hillary Clinton campaign and a close confidant of Mrs. Clinton herself were involved in early 2008 in spreading the “birther” rumors, i.e., that then-Illinois Senator Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. Despite this news and other longstanding items, the Associated Press and others still insist that there is "no…