Media Bias
October 5, 2024 — John Hinderaker
In Memories of Hurricane Katrina, I contrasted press coverage and Democratic Party hysteria over Hurricane Katrina, which effectively destroyed George W. Bush’s second term and contributed to the Democrats’ 2006 election victories, with the muted (if not altogether silent) reaction to Hurricane Helene and the vastly more problematic governmental response thereto. It is a theme worth returning to. On CNN, Scott Jennings makes the point effectively: Joe Biden was at
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September 18, 2024 — John Hinderaker
National Public Radio is a Democratic Party organization, which over the years has become shameless in its dishonesty. But this really takes the cake: National Public Radio (NPR), a taxpayer-supported and supposedly nonpartisan news network, falsely accused National Review editor-in-chief of using the “n-word” during a podcast interview with Megyn Kelly this week. Under the headline, “Conservative editor-in-chief appears to use racial slur to refer to Haitian migrants,” NPR asserted
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September 13, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The film Truth (2015) is playing right now on Showtime/Paramount+. If you know anything about the “truth,” so to speak, it is an utterly infuriating film. I want to take the liberty of repeating points about the film that I have made here previously. Despite the film’s commercial failure, I think the lies of Truth matter. They are intended to rewrite the historical record and to vindicate an audacious journalistic
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September 11, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Watching the debate between President Trump and Vice President Harris last night, I thought back to Joe McGinniss’s The Selling of the President 1968 (1969). It’s been a long time since I read it. My memory might be off. I might be thinking of Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson. As I recall, McGinniss drew on Marshall McLuhan to talk about television as a “cool” medium. You didn’t want to appear
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September 10, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I almost forgot (as I’m still traveling overseas) that today is the official publication day of Against the Corporate Media: Forty-Two Ways the Press Hates You, edited by the incomparable Michael Walsh. I contributed the chapter on the great Russia Hoax of 2016 (now known as Russia Hoax 1.0, since we’ve learned recently that Russia Hoax 2.0 is in the can and ready to roll). Here’s my “nut graf,” as
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September 8, 2024 — John Hinderaker
A new report by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, now based in Jerusalem, alleges persistent anti-Israel bias on the part of the British Broadcasting Company. Asserson led a team of 20 lawyers and 20 data scientists who used artificial intelligence to analyze the BBC’s news coverage. The Telegraph reports: The BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war, a damning report has
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August 27, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Kamala Harris’s refusal to submit to questions from the press has drawn criticism, including, in a few cases, from Democratic Party sources. Now Harris has announced that she and Tim Walz–dubbed by one wag her “emotional support governor”–will sit for a joint interview. Including Walz is probably a good idea; he can come up with a lie for any occasion, and he lies with shameless abandon, whereas Harris occasionally shows
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August 22, 2024 — John Hinderaker
In this post, I asked whether Tim Walz lies constantly because of a pathological condition, or whether it is just a cynical habit born of the fact that Walz lives in a state whose press organs are so quiescent that he has had nothing to fear. This story illustrates what I meant with regard to local press organs; specifically, the Star Tribune: The Strib stealth edited the headline (no editors
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August 13, 2024 — Steven Hayward
John and Scott below provide examples of the media’s slavishness to the Democratic Party, which is now so obvious that attributing it to bias, or calling it “fake news,” doesn’t go far enough. Let’s call it for what it is: regime propaganda, worthy of the old Soviet Union, or Orwell’s no longer fictional world. John notes the Time magazine cover about Kamala Harris, for which she refused a request for
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August 12, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Time magazine, which evidently is still being published, has reached a new pinnacle of hagiography with its cover story on Kamala Harris: Her moment, indeed! The New York Post is skeptical: The Time cover story depicted Harris with her supporters in the background on the cover with the phrase, “Her Moment.” Inside, author Charlotte Alter wrote that Harris “pulled off the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history.” Reportedly, the
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August 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Here’s a heterodox thought: the slanted news media is unwittingly the Democrats’ worst frenemy. The line of reasoning to arrive at this proposition begins thus: Last month Prof. Lauren Wright of Princeton University attracted notice for a provocative article in The Atlantic on “How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students.” Wright’s thesis was simple: because conservative students are constantly challenged at our overwhelmingly left-leaning campuses, they work harder to learn
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August 7, 2024 — John Hinderaker
How badly have standards of political debate disintegrated? This badly: from this morning’s New York Times email: According to the Times, calling your opponents “weird” is a “takedown.” What is this, junior high school? Does the Times really regard Walz’s childish insults as effective political discourse? Apparently so. That is consistent, I suppose, with the Times’ status as a below-average news source. Of course, Donald Trump sometimes dishes out insults,
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August 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In case you missed your chance Monday to order my new collection of book reviews and cultural commentary After Further Review, there’s still time! But today I want to make another book announcement. Next month, Bombardier Books will be publishing Against the Corporate Media: Forty-Two Ways the Press Hates You, edited by our friend Michael Walsh. I am one of the 42 contributors, with a chapter on “The Russia Hoax
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July 26, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The legacy media’s attempt to rewrite Kamala Harris’s left-wing record is in full swing. We have written about the orchestrated effort to erase the fact that Joe Biden put Harris in charge of the southern border. Likewise, her contemporaneous ratings as the most liberal member of the Senate are being air-brushed. Then there is the fact that Harris has a pro-criminal record. During the George Floyd riots of 2020, she
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July 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Keeping up with Kamelot II appears to be more difficult than keeping up with the Kardashians, as the media-Democrat axis goes into full shape-shifting mode, performing more lifts and tucks than Beverly Hills sees in a year. Scott has already pointed out how Kamala’s portfolio as border “czar” is being re-written with invisible ink, and no one in the media seems to have any lemon juice handy. To be sure,
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July 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Latest installments in the “You may think you hate the media, but you don’t hate them enough” file. A tweet from the Washington Post: The Post has deleted the tweet, but this bit of copy is still in the Post news story it is based on. Meanwhile, CNN in fine form: Get ready for the media to turn on a dime ten seconds after Biden is removed from the ticket.
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July 15, 2024 — Steven Hayward
. . . but you can’t hate it enough, Chapter 12,186. When I first started seeing clueless mainstream media headlines pop up on Twitter Saturday afternoon I assumed most of them were fakes, attempts at bad satire, or the Babylon Bee trying to get ahead of things. But no—these are real: And we even get a “Republicans pounce” hed from Newsweek: But the winner for the most abject stupidity goes
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