USA Today

From Editor & Publisher yesterday (bold is mine):The Audit Bureau of Circulations released this morning the spring figures for the six months ending March 31, 2009, showing that the largest metros continue to shed daily and Sunday circulation -- now at a record rate.According to ABC, for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the…

News editors need to retake Journalism 101 or move to features when stories about the White House dog take precedence over a controversial veto by the President's unconfirmed appointment to Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a bill, House Substitute for SB 218, April 23 which would have placed additional restrictions on third trimester abortions and…

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Lamestream Media The media coverage of the more than 800 Taxed Enough Already (TEA) Party protests that took place in all fifty states on April 15 ranged from disdainful dismissal of their nature, significance and import, to outright hostility towards the events and individual participants, to sexual innuendo-based full-on ridicule…

Gun control policies wrought by the likes of liberal Sens. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Schumer (D-N.Y.) amount to "cruel indecency and forced victimization" argues rocker Ted Nugent in an April 20, 2009 column in U.S. News & World Report.  With the election of Barack Obama, the 10th anniversary of Columbine, the second anniversary of Virginia Tech, and the media's ongoing fixation on a faulty "90…

USA Today, which touts itself as the "The Nation's Newspaper," devoted just nine paragraphs on page 3A of the April 16 paper to the roughly 800 Tea Parties held nationwide yesterday.By contrast, on Tax Day morning, readers of April 15 USA Today, some of whom probably reading USA Today over breakfast, were greeted with a front page story that was six times longer and insisted that "Most Americans…

USA Today's Chuck Raasch has decided that President Obama is a "transformational American leader abroad" and that his America Stinks tour of Europe is a "confirming stamp of that new reality." This effluvia of over indulgent praise heaped on Obama is ubiquitous in the media, we all know, but what makes Raasch's piece egregious is the assumption of historical "truth" that posits that Obama has…

Same-sex marriage proponents have finally won a victory yesterday the old-fashioned and constitutionally legitimate way: through legislative action. On April 7, state legislators overrided a veto by Gov. Jim Douglas (R), making Vermont the fourth state with legalized same-sex marriage and the first through the consent of the governed as expressed through their legislature. It didn't take long for…

On Tuesday, both USA Today and the Associated Press highlighted guarded optimism that seemed a bit beyond the justifiable after the release of March's sales results for the auto industry. Though there is perhaps some cause for hope, both reports made more out of the industry's roughly 25% sales pickup from February to March (compared to a typical 20% in previous years) than was justified. More…

I don't know what got into MSNBC's Chris Matthews Thursday, but the "Hardball" host seemed rather annoyed by his President's recent treatment of the news media.First, he opened up a segment with guests Roger Simon of "Politico" and USA Today's Susan Page by accusing Barack Obama of behaving "like the campaign never ended" asking:[W]hat`s the president up to? Is he doing what he does well? Is he…

"Sex! Sex! Sex! Is that all church leaders talk about?" huffed the title of USA Today religion blogger Cathy Lynn Grossman's March 23 post.The "Faith & Reason" blogger lamented that "[s]ummer meeting season looms for many of the nation's leading Protestant denominations and that means the culture warriors are manning the battle stations on sexuality issues." Of course there are two sides to…

The current “money mess” is “primarily because we've spent or authorized more money on the Iraq war (its sixth anniversary is next Thursday) than we're putting into the stimulus program,” USA Today founder Al Neuharth contended in his weekly “Plain Talk” column on Friday. While “many Democrats as well as nearly all Republicans in Congress gave Bush” the authority to go to war in Iraq, “by…

Media outlets preyed upon people's emotions this week in its reporting of President Barack Obama's decision to overturn the Bush Administration ban on federally-funded embryonic stem cell research. Embryonic stem cell research is a hot topic among pro-life advocates because it involves the destruction of human embryos in order to obtain the stem cells needed. CBS' Chip Reid said of…

Be careful when channel surfing; you might get an eyeful of advertisements for pay-per-view porn. But where is the mainstream media's warning to parents and concerned customers? According to a March 9 article on adage.com, cable and satellite providers such as Comcast and DirecTV, are picking up their effort to boost sales through adult entertainment and the advertisements are expected to…