Salon

Here’s a new oxymoron, even for the liberal media: abortion comedy.  Opening this Friday, writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s “Obvious Child” tells the story of an aspiring young comedian, Donna Stern, who has an abortion after a one-night stand. The film, which focuses on “self-discovery and empowerment” and the “realities of independent womanhood,” garnered endorsements not only from…

This isn't a golden age for Republicans. The party is out of the White House -- in fact, it's lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections -- and it hasn't controlled the Senate since 2006. And now here comes Salon's Joan Walsh to argue that things will get even worse for GOPers once they lose their "galvanizing and unifying issue," namely "irrational, implacable…

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus wants more of a say in choosing the party's 2016 presidential nominee. Makes sense, right? Actually, it doesn't, according to Salon's Jim Newell, who argued in a Monday piece that greater RNC control over pre-primary and primary-season debates will make them boring, thereby causing the many viewers who want to see the candidates snarling and…

One of the Indiana University professors who recently found that almost four times as many journalists self-identify as Democrats than as Republicans doesn't believe that that imbalance causes biased reporting. IU's Lars Willnat remarked to Salon magazine that "we don’t think that our findings reflect a ‘liberal media bias’...Journalists’ political preferences don’t usually translate into…

Liberals seeking examples of conservative craziness often look for the wrong thing. That's the word from California writer Paul Rosenberg, who in a Thursday piece for Salon stated that "the wild-eyed kind of crazy we’ve all been led to expect" is much less common than "the button-down, conservative kind we heard in the Donald Sterling tape — or that we can hear on [Rush] Limbaugh’s radio show, or…

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw lamented how the movie depictions of Spider-Man and other superheroes are all "straight, white men" in a Tuesday item on Salon.com titled "America deserves better superheroes: Why a straight, white Spider-Man is no longer a real underdog." Baker-Whitelaw, a "fandom and Internet culture" reporter for the website The Daily Dot, zeroed in on the supposed "ramifications of…

On the Friday, April 25, PoliticsNation on MSNBC, during a discussion of FNC host Sean Hannity's reaction to racist comments by Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, MSNBC host Al Sharpton went after Hannity's decision to reiterate some of his complaints about the Obama administration on his Hannity show after condemning Bundy's racism. Guest Joan Walsh of Salon magazine ended up comparing Hannity's anti…

Lefty bloggers often use "get the popcorn" and similar phrases when they anticipate being entertained by conservative infighting. If Salon's Heather Digby Parton is right, popcorn consumption in the netroots will be sky-high a little over a year from now for a "political cage match of epic proportions" between "two grotesque phantasms": the Tea Party and the mega-rich. The prize for the winner…

Common-ground alert: Salon's Alex Pareene doesn't think much of the New York Times's opinion columnists as a group, and neither, presumably, do NewsBusters readers. As for the reasons why, well, let's just say most of Pareene's almost certainly aren't the same as yours.  Pareene blasts Maureen Dowd for "sloppiness, not to mention rote repetition of themes and jokes and incredibly lazy…

After Stephen Colbert takes over from David Letterman on CBS's "Late Show," he'll host as himself, not as a parody of a conservative pundit. That may disappoint Salon's Joan Walsh, who in a Wednesday article called Colbert "an ally to progressive causes" and lauded him for "calmly and brilliantly inhabit[ing] a persona [on 'The Colbert Report'] that puts him in the psyche of delusional,…

Digby is far from the biggest name in the left-wing blogosphere, but she's one of its most influential figures. Lefty bloggers often introduce links to posts on her site, Hullabaloo, with the phrase "what Digby said" (it's sort of their equivalent of "megadittoes").   On Monday morning, Digby published a piece in a higher-profile outlet, the liberal online magazine Salon, in which she…

Believe it or not, for the past few days liberals' fascination with conservative book publishing seems to have surpassed their fascination with righty talk radio (though neither will ever come close to matching the intensity of their obsession with Fox News). Last Friday, McKay Coppins noted on BuzzFeed that while books by a few conservative electronic-media stars like Bill O'Reilly are…

On this St. Patrick's Day weekend, if you're in the mood for a lamentation of Irish-Americans' ongoing shift to the political right, you're in luck. Andrew O'Hehir provided that and much else in a Saturday piece for the liberal online magazine Salon. While O'Hehir believes that the 1998 Northern Ireland peace deal was "unambiguously a good thing for the people of Ireland and their British…

Editorial Note/Correction: We mistakenly affixed an incorrect. NewsBusters byline earlier Our deepest apologies for the error | Edwin Lyngar was upset that many retirement-age Americans, including his father, have in their golden years run for the shadows of Fox News Channel -- so much so that this past Thursday, Lyngar published a February 27 piece in the liberal online magazine Salon in which…