ABC News reporters and commentators on all platforms seemed to make a concerted effort last week to downplay, if not completely ignore, the good news the network's own polling data revealed about Obama (i.e., a 65% job approval rating). It seemed that ABC had simply produced a poll with the...

One of the Achilles heels of conservative opinion journalism is that most participants don't actually practice journalism. It's more like propaganda under the guise of journalism. Sure, they adopt the trappings of journalism. Meaning, they write opinion pieces for the New York Post and articles for the Weekly Standard, and...

You could almost see the moment yesterday afternoon when the Fox News team lost interest (or at least lost a lot of interest) in the breaking story about the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. That moment seemed to be when it was revealed that the alleged shooter, James von Brunn,...

If Fox News is going to continue to traffic in hateful, vigilante-style rhetoric, then folks at Fox News, as well as their apologists in the GOP Noise Machine, are going to have to come up with better talking points to spin away the consequences of the right-wing madness they're so...

To chase the "racist" story, the press had to play dumb on an epic scale in order to pretend that Judge Sonia Sotomayor's "Latina woman" quote was perhaps just as damning as Newt Gingrich and company claimed it was; to pretend maybe Sotomayor did think she was better than everyone...

What a difference two terms make.

Or more specifically, what a difference they make when a Republican former vice president harshly critiques the new White House, compared with when a Democratic former VP raised policy concerns. Seriously, press double standards just don't come more pronounced than this.

Last week, when...

Two images, courtesy of Philadelphia blogger Chris Bowers, have stayed with me over the last two years as I wrote and researched my new, rise-of-the-netroots book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. To me, the impressions perfectly capture the phenomena of the liberal...

I don't mean that in the partisan sense. I mean it in the journalistic sense: How do Gingrich's daily pronouncements about the fundamental dishonesty of Democrats (Newt's favorite phrase) translate into news? Why does the press, 10 years after Gingrich was forced out of office, still treat his every partisan...

The most eye-opening event that unfolded in the wake of Specter's move was the completely new way in which the Senator got treated -- got abused, really -- by the Republican Noise Machine and how the vast array of right-wing media outlets that do the GOP's partisan bidding, laid into...

Clear Channel's fall from business grace remains epic in its proportions. Yet Clear Channel's most famous employee, Rush Limbaugh, remains oblivious to it all.

Because last July, just months before the radio economy went into free-fall, Limbaugh's bosses at Clear Channel, who enjoy deep ties to Texas Republicans and who...

The truth is, the Obama coverage has often featured a toxic combination of trivial pursuit mixed with a passion for process. The results have, at times, been gruesome, with the news media obsessing over White House iPods, and fashion "showdowns," and puppies, and soft drinks, and parking lots, and condoms,...

Writing in the WashPost, Ana Marie Cox suggests the White House press beat oughta be ditched, or at least drastically reconfigured by news orgs, because WH reporters rarely break news. Instead, they sit around and wait to repeat doled out WH info.

Facing a paucity of real news,...

Rupert Murdoch's all-news channel didn't debut in America until October 1996, but it's chilling to consider the what-ifs of how today's Fox News lineup of doomsday, anti-government prophets would have reacted to controversial and defining news events in the early 1990s -- like Waco.

Last week, I wrote...

Is there any doubt that Fox News is playing an increasingly erratic and dangerous game by embracing the type of paranoid insurrection rhetoric that people like Pittsburgh cop killer Richard Poplawski are now acting on? By stoking dark fears about the ominous ruins that await an Obama America, by ratcheting...

Coleman, of course, has the right to appeal his Minnesota election case, just as other suspicious second-place candidates have done in the past. What seems to be unique is this case, though, is how so much of the press coverage has politely refrained from suggesting that Coleman's a sore loser...

How? By suggesting Obama is becoming something of a chameleon who reinvents himself depending on the political setting. The press spent most of 2000 depicting candidate Gore as somebody who was so unsure of his own political skin that he was constantly 'reinventing' himself.

Basically, that Gore was a...

The reason CNBC remains at the center of controversy today, and the reason it's taking on water in a way that other prominent business news outlets aren't in 2009, is that its recent behavior has become so much more shameless and egregious than everybody else's.

With its constant stream...

Killing sprees just don't hold journalists' attention like they used to.

And even more telling last week in the wake of the historic Alabama bloodbath, was the way the press avoided addressing the issue of gun control. There was a virtual media ban on the topic. I could not find...

Have Limbaugh's numbers spiked in recent weeks? I'd be shocked if they hadn't given the extraordinary publicity he's received. But doubled, as the Washington Post claimed? There's simply no proof.

The Post's sloppy reporting highlighted the media's perpetual soft spot for Limbaugh's ratings. For years, we've been told 20...

We knew Cramer lived to hear himself talk, but this is getting ridiculous. Borrowing a page from Limbaugh, Cramer has penned a tedious open letter to the White House where he, in part, fantasizes that he's on the Obama Enemies List. Why? Because Cramer's name was brought up...