Osama bin Laden

President Bush received a short-term boost in a New York Times poll when Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003, his job approval rating rising to 58% from 50%, while the assassination of Osama bin Laden similarly benefitted President Obama in yesterday's NYT/CBS poll, 57% to 46%. Yet it was Obama who got the warmer initial greeting on the New York Times's front page. The first three…

Anchoring NBC News special report coverage of President Obama visiting Ground Zero on Thursday, Meet the Press host David Gregory used the opportunity to take a shot at critics of the administration: "...this [killing bin Laden] was the ultimate leadership moment for a commander in chief who in some ways had not been tested on this order. Who had been the target of criticism from Republicans…

In Wednesday’s “Good Feeling Gone, In Congress, Anyway,“ New York Times reporters Jennifer Steinhauer and Carl Hulse suggested it was unseemly for Republicans to not accede to President Obama on domestic issues, after the killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALS in Pakistan. The article superficially appears to be an even-handed “pox on both houses“ story, but the text provided a tableaux of…

This morning on WMAL's "Morning Majority" program, former Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis slammed liberals who were taking partisan pot-shots at former President George W. Bush in the wake of Osama bin Laden's killing on Sunday. While Davis didn't name names, he made veiled references to MSNBC and its "Last Word" host Lawrence O'Donnell. O'Donnell, you may recall, bashed former…

MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Wednesday mocked Rush Limbaugh's response to the killing of Osama bin Laden, deriding the conservative as a "walrus underwater." Matthews also made an odd grunting noise to back up this description. After playing a clip of Limbaugh asserting that the media have played up Barack Obama's role in the action, the Hardball anchor berated, "You know, I don't even know…

According to the man ABC News relies on for religious analysis, it's impossible to say whether Osama bin Laden was "evil." Father Edward Beck, the network's religion correspondent, appeared with Bill O'Reilly on Tuesday and offered moral equivalence on the subject of the terrorist's death.     When the O'Reilly Factor anchor pressed Beck on whether bin Laden truly represented malevolence,…

The New York Times quickly moved to quash suggestions that “enhanced interrogation” like waterboarding may have yielded useful intelligence in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Moving to protect the paper’s ideological investment that such methods are both brutal and ineffective was Wednesday’s front-page defense by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage, “Harsh Methods Of Questioning Debated Again.”…

Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott couldn't bring himself in a Tuesday essay to dwell on the evil of Osama bin Laden. He committed a "single morning of destruction," but he was really so much more fascinating than that. He killed a few thousand people, to be sure. But on the bright side, his actions led to the Kennedy Center's "Arabesque" festival and he was "very good for book clubs"…

A headline in The Washington Post's Wednesday Style section declared: "American Indians object to ‘Geronimo’ as code for bin Laden raid." Writer Neely Tucker goes on to lament: "In a triumphant moment for the United States, the moniker has left a sour taste among many Native Americans." Tucker explained: "It was his [Geronimo's] name that the U.S. military chose as the code for the raid, and…

If any American with a patriotic pulse listened to the Mike Malloy radio show, they would have been shocked on Monday night when Malloy outrageously suggested that Navy SEALs should have shot former president George W. Bush, and not Osama bin Laden. (MP3 audio clip here.) MIKE MALLOY: I have heard some commentators talk about the fact that, all the lives that have been lost in this war on…

ABC's World News on Tuesday continued to demonstrate the network's lack of interest in whether enhanced interrogation methods such as waterboarding played a part in the killing of Osama bin laden. The Diane Sawyer-anchored program was the only newscast to avoid the topic. In contrast, Nightly News host Brian Williams interviewed CIA director Leon Panetta, grilling, "Can you confirm that it…

Just when the media adulation of Barack Obama might have been showing signs of waning, along comes the killing of Osama Bin Laden to drive it to new sycophantic heights.  In the genre, it will be hard to outdo the schoolgirl-crushiness of Margaret Carlson. On today's Morning Joe, Carlson characterized the operation against Osama Bin Laden as the moment when "Professor Obama turned into…

When word emerged Sunday night that President Obama would be making remarks from the White House at 10:30 pm, viewers knew it must be important. When it began to leak that America had finally found and killed Osama bin Laden, there was joy from sea to shining sea. The nagging pain that this radical Islamic assassin had never received American justice was finally relieved. Crowds gathered in…

It defies explanation for a major network to avoid performing a background check on the individuals they interview for their segments.  MSNBC however, has done it not once, but twice, in a single article.  In a piece published earlier today by reporter, Kari Huus, two individuals with questionable ties are interviewed in an attempt to show that Muslim-Americans are indeed celebrating bin…