Media Scandals

While the liberal Democratic mayor of Los Angeles has a thing for news babes, it seems his hometown paper has a penchant for leaving out the mayor's party affiliation from reporting on his liaisons. "A Los Angeles television reporter is dating Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, about two years after his extramarital affair with another local newscaster led to the breakup of his 20-year marriage…

In his Monday “Media Notes” column, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz addressed Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democrats and explored whether the media has a double standard in covering party-switchers: “little attention was devoted to this question: Was this a betrayal of the voters who elected Specter?” Correspondent Carl Cannon, on AOL's new PoliticsDaily site, says conservatives are…

First came word of the daily secret planning session phone calls between Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and several highly placed Old Media types (Here and here) and now Politico has revealed the existence of a hush, hush web message board where denizens of the lefty media get together on a daily basis and plan how they will all cover the news for the great unwashed out there. But don't worry…

The above headline isn't even the half of it. After the attacks were known to all, James Carville told assembled Washington reporters at a hotel conference room breakfast where he and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg spoke (photo is from the May 20, 2004 Christian Science Monitor) to "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!" The assembled press apparently understood that…

On Monday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Maggie Rodriguez spoke with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, who a year ago was named in a New York Times article implying she had an affair with then presidential candidate John McCain, an accusation Iseman flatly denied: "No, I did not. And four New York Times reporters, two editors, their entire institution, 200 people that they went out and sought to try and figure…

Following the Media Research Center's ongoing call for an explanation of George Stephanopoulos's reported strategy conference calls with Democratic operatives Paul Begala and James Carville and White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel,  the MRC has released a new Profile in Bias for the "This Week" host. "[I]n his on-air role at ABC, Stephanopoulos has been a reliable mouthpiece for the…

This post follows up on last night's NewsBusters post ("They Never Learn: CNN Withdraws Apparently Faked Video of CPR Attempt on 'Dead' Palestinian Child").CNN has reposted a video it withdrew yesterday. That video purports to show the death and hasty burial of a cameraman's 12 year-old younger brother, one of two children allegedly killed on the roof of their home in rocket fire from an Israeli…

Correction (Feb. 10, 2009): Corrected from original reporting attributing AP and Getty with the photo editing. In fact it was ABCNews.com, not AP or Getty Images that overlaid the Bush photo on the Gaza rubble photo. AP and Getty Images supplied the respective photos.  Thanks to the folks at StinkyJournalism.org for pointing out the error. I guess, since flat-out fauxtography as practiced in 2006…

See Jan. 9 Follow-up -- "CNN Doubles Down: Reposts Withdrawn Video of Apparently Faked CPR Attempt on 'Dead' Palestinian Child"Not that it ever really went away, but fake news is back in Gaza, and the worldwide media is being played. Many readers will likely detect the fakery in the linked video pictured on the right on their own (HTs to Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs [LGF] and Bob…

There was no Memorex around when the brontosauri were bidding bye-bye, but I think we have a pretty good idea of what they sounded like as they were going extinct.  Just listen to Brian Williams this morning.  Appearing on Morning Joe, the NBC Nightly News anchor lamented the decline of "classically-trained" journalists in favor of guys with "an opinion and a modem."  A question from Pat Buchanan…

The humor site The Onion, the offbeat weekly The Chicago Reader, and Time Out Chicago have discovered that some of their articles have appeared in total on Arianna Huffington's mega web outlet The Huffington Post. And they are none too happy about the wholesale lifting of their material, either. Wired.com has the full story about the Huffington Post's unwelcome lifting saying that Huffington…