Media Scandals

The first news reports of House IT staffer Imran Awan's Monday arrest "for attempting to flee the country and (being) charged with bank fraud" came out on Tuesday night. The New York Times did not file a related story until Friday afternoon, roughly 72 hours later, for Saturday's print edition. Reporter Nicholas Fandos's Page A18 item is one of the most obvious and disgraceful attempts at…

On Tuesday on MSNBC, as he was being interviewed by members of the press, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham's audio suddenly and completely went away. After discussing a reported meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian "lawyer" named Natalia Veselnitskaya, Graham said: "I’m sure they (Trump officials) met with a lot of people during the campaign. I’m sure the Clinton campaign met with…

Now we know that advertisers and the public are being supplied fake ratings by the same broadcasters who so often deliver fake news. A Thursday morning Wall Street Journal dispatch by Joe Flint reports that the broadcast networks routinely inflate their reported evening news audiences. They hide low-performing evening audiences by — get this — "forgetting how to spell."

On Thursday evening, CNN.com ran a story by reporter Thomas Frank which, according to a now-posted Editor's Note, connected "Anthony Scaramucci with (congressional) investigations into the Russian Direct Investment Fund." The Editor's Note tells the network's readers: "That story did not meet CNN's editorial standards and has been retracted." Further, "Links to the story have been disabled. CNN…

There are people who appear to live in hermetically sealed bubbles, and then there's Chris Cillizza, formerly of the Washington Post but now at CNN. On the apparently safe assumption that he really thought President Donald Trump and the public would have a hard time coming up with answers, Cillizza challenged the Commander in Chief and, and in effect the Twitterverse, to "name a (news) story that…

Time Magazine's May 29 cover features a purported parody of the U.S. White House turning red and well towards being transformed into what the illustrator believes is "the Kremlin." This is supposed to show just how creative and conscientious these folks are. What it really shows is the opposite.

Calling in to Thursday’s NBC Today during a special report on the death of former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, New York magazine’s Gabe Sherman bid the media executive good riddance as he launched into an incendiary rant calling Ailes a “terrorizing figure” whose “quest for power consumed him.”

The Associated Press and reporter Julie Pace are among the last institutions and people on earth, respectively, with any credibility to harangue the public about the dangers of "a man willing to challenge - in dramatic fashion - the institutions created to hold the president accountable." But there they were on Wednesday morning, in the wake of President Donald Trump's decision to fire FBI…

Democratic Party strategist Peter Daou is among the sorest of all the sore losers having a hard time handling Hillary Clinton's November electoral loss to Donald Trump. He has been ranting for weeks on Twitter about how sexism hurt Mrs. Clinton, how "THE PLAYING FIELD ... (was) TILTED AGAINST HER" (yes, the original was in all caps), and even that the media "helped Trump win." Friday, Daou took…

In a segment on media bias on his Wednesday evening Fox News show, there was an interesting juxtaposition between host Tucker Carlson's short opening flashback to a conversation with Reuters reporter and White House Correspondents Association President Jeff Mason at Reuters and the live conversation he had with Buzzfeed Editor Ben Smith. Smith incredibly insisted that "people don't get into the…

The opening of the May 3 episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was eerily reminiscent of the actual scandal from which the episode was cribbed. Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor was exchanged for the “Coral Dragon” Chinese restaurant, but the basic story was identical. Intrepid conspiracy theorists uncovered a secret code in hacked emails that detailed a Congressional child sex ring.…

Just as it’s exceedingly tricky to know the dancer from the dance, it’s awfully hard to separate Fox News Channel’s program content from its hypermacho, litigation-generating workplace. That was the word from Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall in a Friday post. In Marshall’s words, FNC on the air and FNC in the office are “almost umbilically tied…If you’ve watched Fox for…

The hosts at The View couldn’t have been more thrilled with the news that Fox News ousted their longtime primetime personality Bill O’Reilly after multiple accusations of sexual abuse from female staffers and anchors. On the Thursday show, Whoopi excitedly told the audience that O’Reilly was “out” to loud applause, before boasting that the women at The View actually “broke with Bill” years ago,…

At this point, it seems that there is nothing the New York Times won't fabricate in the their nonstop attempt to discredit anything and everything associated with President Donald Trump. Yesterday the @NYTSports Twitter account tweeted photos supposedly comparing this year's turnout of Super Bowl champion New England Patriots players and personnel at the White House to the analogous event in 2015…