North Carolina

So let's see, a Democratic former North Carolina state House Speaker gets sentenced to prison for five years and fined $50,000 for bribery. The Associated Press covers the story and doesn't give readers his party affiliation until the 6th paragraph.But a Florida Republican state legislator is only arrested for solicitation of oral sex from an undercover male police officer, and his party…

July 11, the AP wrote that former NC state House Speaker Jim Black was sentenced to five years for “taking cash to promote chiropractors,” but the writer forgot to mention until the sixth paragraph that Black is a Democrat. We've seen the phenomena of the media forgetting to identify political parties when a Democrat is portrayed negatively and at times, when a Republican is portrayed positively…

On Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, Anthony Mason trumpeted how North Carolina Treasurer Richard Moore, who got four soundbites, withheld that state’s pension fund votes from the ExxonMobil directors who he thinks gave too great a compensation package to the retired CEO, but Mason failed to identify his Democratic affiliation (not even on-screen) or let viewers in how CBS was delivering publicity…

Staff Writer Ted Vaden of the News & Observer hits Rush Limbaugh for reading a "satirical" article about the Dick Cheney shooting. The crux of the argument is that everyone should have known that the article was satirical. Have a look at the article in question for yourself. Do you see "Satire" at the top? Is there a disclosure to note that fake news follows? Limbaugh read about half the…

If you a member of the media and you intend to snipe at a critic over the quality of localized newspaper reporting, you might want to start by not mischaracterizing what he says.Jay Rosen of PressThink takes Raleigh, NC News and Observer Executive Editor Melanie Sill to task on her blog for getting it wrong.