Florida senator Marco Rubio was grilled about his views on gun control before a stadium-sized live audience on CNN on Wednesday night. Some of the questions and comments were tough and smart; others were viciously ad hominem and stupid. But Rubio stood there and articulated why he opposed the…
C is for Crazy Children's Books. There's a new book project being hawked on Kickstarter called C is for Consent: "a board book for babies, toddlers, and thoughtful parents." Consent is important, but is this really an appropriate concept for babies and toddlers? Especially given that the term…
Every Sunday evening, the press office at the Environmental Protection Agency receives emails from the New York Times and Politico asking for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s public schedule for the coming week. The press office ignores the emails.
Broadcasting from the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, KUFW-FM offers a mix of regional Mexican and ranchera music, the sort popularized by Selena, Los Tigres del Norte, and Vicente Fernández (aka El Rey de la Canción Ranchera). And there are commercials—lots of them—advertising everything…
James O’Keefe’s undercover investigations of various liberal institutions have resulted in everything from congressional action to criminal charges filed against the conservative provocateur. His latest exposé reveals an important truth, but maybe not the one he intended.
When the rise of Donald J. Trump obliterated the norms of American politics, the norms of American journalism were demolished, as well.
Yesterday, following the news that a Republican congressmen was shot playing baseball, along with four others, in Virginia, the New York Times wrote what one conservative website is calling the "Worst Editorial In Human History." Discussion of it has dominated social media, and even a number of…
St. Paul, Minnesota
The news that former national security adviser Susan Rice was responsible for "unmasking" the identities of associates of President Trump in government surveillance reports sent shockwaves through Washington. But almost as newsworthy was the identity of the man who got the scoop: vociferous Trump…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on the state of the fourth estate in the first days of the Trump presidency.
There are some myths that just won't die, and one of those myths was perpetuated in a Washington Post article on Wednesday. In a story on GOP efforts to redirect taxpayer funding from Planned Parenthood to community health centers, the Post reports:
President-elect Trump's pick for education secretary just had her nomination hearings delayed a week, but the media aren't wasting any time lining up breathless attacks on Betsy DeVos. At Politico, there's this astonishing headline: "DeVos' donations spark questions about her stance on campus…
It's come to this. Facebook has been so bullied over the "fake news" narrative since the election that they're actively appointing a panel of censors to police speech on Facebook:
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich repeatedly ripped the media for what he said was ongoing unfair coverage of President-elect Donald Trump, calling certain news outlets "propaganda" and some members of the media "idiots."
In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Fred Barnes talks with host Eric Felten about what a President Donald Trump can learn from the missteps and miscues of Barack Obama's approach to the presidency. Andrew Ferguson stops in to diagnose what's ailing the corporate media in the age of…
Over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted "I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." As you can imagine, lots of people were outraged by this insane claim. But I don't know which is more insane: Trump's assertion of millions of fraudulent votes…
Top advocates for presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump set the table for the final stretch of the campaign Thursday with dueling, scathing messages that cut to the core of each nominee's weaknesses.
Over the last few days, the Clinton campaign's been on the defensive. The reason is James Asher, the former Washington bureau chief of McClatchy, has publicly claimed that Clinton aide and confidant was spreading the rumor that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not eligible to be…
Donald Trump used to love the polls, until the polls weren't useful anymore. Now he's is taking matters into his own hands by conducting a poll of his own. Trump's campaign emailed his supporters earlier Monday, saying that he is now facing two opponents: Hillary Clinton and the media.
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on the media's coverage of Donald Trump.
A big part of liberal media bias is the insatiable need to create drama about any intra-party Republican disagreements, while downplaying or ignoring Democratic divisions. Even the most liberal media outlets agreed that last week's CNBC debate was a flaming dirigible, but when the Republican party…
Rarely is the New York Times accused of supporting Republicans—much less being a cog in the vast right-wing conspiracy. That, however, is exactly what David Brock, one-time conservative journalist-turned-Clinton supporter and founder of Media Matters for America, claimed on Monday when he fielded…
On Wednesday, according to a report by WJLA in Washington, "Barvetta Singletary, a White House staffer, resigned today following assault charges." This dramatic news, however, received scant coverage in the major media. As of Thursday morning, only The Hill and Roll Call had covered the…
If you want a good idea of how much water the media is willing to carry for Planned Parenthood, go ahead and check out this Politico story. It seems Planned Parenthood commissioned a "forensic report" to analyze the undercover videos that have got the organization in trouble for harvesting and…
We can always count on the New York Times to remind us how complete has been conservatives’ loss in the culture wars. Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Venice that Mayor Luigi Brugnaro had to retreat from his proposed ban on books headed for the magical city’s preschool library about (1) a male dog…
Now that the presidential race is heating up, we’re getting our quadrennial lesson in the hopeless and perennial nature of media bias. Hillary Clinton is proving to be the most obviously corrupt major presidential candidate since her husband, and before that, you’d probably have to go back to Nixon…
For your further enlightenment, two news stories on page one of last Sunday’s New York Times. One begins a long report on California’s water problems, attributed to a drought rather than bureaucratic mismanagement. A list of past “catastrophes” that state has survived ends with “budgetary collapse…
Politico recently hired Timothy Noah to be the publication's Labor & Employment editor. Now Noah is a former Slate and New Republic columnist who's known for being stridently liberal, so if you are an employer or someone who generally just likes reading coverage of labor issues that isn't slanted…
Rep. Tom Cotton, the Republican nominee in the Arkansas Senate race, is running an ad highlighting his leadership in trying to fix Washington's broken farm bill legislation. The ad isn't particularly controversial ormaking false claims, in any discernible way and yet "fact checkers" at…
The fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy is nearly upon us, so one would expect America's public intellectuals are gearing up to present a series of sober and illuminating reflections about the tragedy's cultural and political legacy.
A new USA Today/Pew poll on Obamacare is out today. According to the fine print on the poll, "Three years after President Obama signed his signature health care overhaul, Americans are as negative toward it as they have ever been, and disapproval of the president on the issue has reached a new…
The Republican National Committee says it's putting its money where its mouth is by running paid ads against CNN and NBC over the networks' plans to run a documentary (CNN) and mini-series (NBC) on Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 presidential election, a spokesman for the RNC says.
Some conservatives think that the elite media are finally turning on Barack Obama and his administration.
Slowly but surely, the toxin of bias is being leached out of American culture, if incrementally and by degrees. A Catholic was elected president in 1960, and since then Catholic nominees and candidates have become commonplace. A Jew was nominated in 2000 for vice president, and was a help to his…
The Time cover story last week was headlined “The Mormon Identity.” The cover, featuring Mitt Romney in a stained-glass window, said in smaller type, “What Mitt Romney’s faith tells us about his vision and values.” Newsweek had President Obama on the cover, identifying him as “The Democrats’…
Bill Clinton’s address to the Democratic convention is widely seen as a pivotal moment in President Obama’s reelection campaign. It was an undeniably powerful speech, but particularly noteworthy were his remarks about the popular and bipartisan 1996 welfare reform Clinton himself signed into law.…
Over at Harper's, Jack Hitt has filed a report from the RNC convention, "A Troubling Chant on the Convention Floor." According to Hitt, nativist Republican delegates started chanting "USA! USA!" in response to a heavily accented speaker from Puerto Rico. Of course, racism had nothing to do with it,…
Last week, reports emerged that Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy had condemned gay marriage. It's no secret that the company is run by devout Christians, but this still caused an uproar. Boston's mayor threatened to deny the company business permits, celebrities condemned the company, and the…
Here's how the Los Angeles Times handled the Romney campaign's critique of Obama's suggestion that business owners "didn't build" their companies:
Most journalists will swear that, despite the fact they vote Democratic, they treat both sides fairly. Indeed, it is a rare event to read a news article that directly attacks the Republican party or one that praises the Democratic party.
I really don't know where the editors at Politico get off suggesting that the Washington Post and New York Times might be out to get Mitt Romney. I mean, who wouldn't knock on doors in La Jolla, California and write a politically loaded story where his neighbors sound off with quotes like this:
In case you missed it, in her column today Maureen Dowd is starting to wonder, is Obama necessary?:
This morning Politico made the worst mistake a mainstream media outlet can make—acknowledging the blindingly obvious truth there is a pronounced media bias against Republicans, specifically Mitt Romney. Predictably, there has been some circling of the wagons. Woe be unto us if the the defenseless…
Politico's Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen have a story this morning that looks at media coverage of the candidates in the election thus far, "To GOP, blatant bias in vetting":
Any hope that the media might fairly and responsibly cover the shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin was effectively doomed the moment Al Sharpton descended on Sanford, Florida, and started holding rallies with the victim’s family. Recall that Sharpton once said of Clarence Thomas’s…
John Yoo: "Obama's Contraception Mandate Won't Survive Strict Scrutiny"
ABC News: Romney's still the clear frontrunner in New Hampshire
Over the weekend, The New York Times published a book review of some new volumes on the history of the KKK. The author, Ohio State University professor Kevin Boyle, begins the review thusly:
The Washington Post has a rather loaded story this morning on page A3 about Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla. -- "Marco Rubio on national ticket could be risky bet for Republican Party":
Apparently, there was a kerfuffle earlier today because Rick Perry said the following: "If this guy [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke] prints more money between now and the election ... I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we -- we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.…
In November 2005, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, published by Harvard University and regarded by academics as one of the four top scholarly journals on economics in America, published the results of a study conducted by Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA,…
James Kirchik: "Why Islamist terror dwarfs Breivik's brand: Almost nobody supports 'Christianist' violence"
Yesterday, the Associated Press dropped what's known in journalism parlance as a "thumbsucker" on the Norway shootings. It's a piece that's awfully heavy on analysis and short on the necessary facts to justify said thumbsucking. THE WEEKLY STANDARD makes a cameo here, selectively quoted and used as…
"Reid Nixes 'Gang of Six' - Members Stunned"
After a photo of Rep. Allen West scuba diving and saluting the American flag underwater for flag day surfaced, the media and liberal blogs all wrote a flurry of items about how West is some sort of patriotic hypocrite because he's unaware that the flag code says the American flags should not touch…
The sweepstakes to see who can offer up the most ridiculous defense of Anthony Weiner is ongoing, but we have a strong late breaking entry from the Washington Post's Richard Cohen:
Well, it's something when we're on the same page as ThinkProgress, who -- to their credit -- flags this exchange from Chris Matthews' show:
From the New York Times article announcing that Jill Abramson is replacing Bill Keller as the paper's executive editor:
Today the Washington Post announced they were starting a new blog today devoted to covering think tanks. Sure, why not? It strikes me that this is a good idea. Then I read the rest of the press release:
Reading a short AP story on the new Dick Cheney book, I couldn't help but note this line:
It is difficult but often advisable to resist the temptation to comment on media bias. Any rational consumer of media, let alone those with conservative leanings, knows such bias exists. To comment on every example would amount to an exercise in necro-equine sadism. There are times, however, when…
ABC's Sunlen Miller reports:
Wisconsin Republican state senator Dan Kapanke has been the subjecte of death threats and vandalism, the LaCrosse Tribune reports:
Well, it was inevitable. Chris Christie was becoming more well-liked by the American people than any GOP politician rightfully should be. Thank goodness the Paper of Record is around to cut him down to size. We wouldn't want him to have a credible chance of running for president and defeating Obama…