Articles

2nd Aug, 2006 3:47pm
     “Well, that noise you hear may be the sound of a bubble bursting,” said NBC’s Natalie Morales on the July 21 “Today” show. Or it could be reality pricking the hyper-inflated predictions of a bubble-happy media.        Just a moment after Morales’ comment, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was shown saying, “The downturn in the housing market so far appears to be orderly.”        As the Business & Media Institute has documented, the media have been warning of a bursting housing “…
2nd Aug, 2006 2:28pm
     Raul Castro: a free enterprise-friendly Communist?        That’s how NBC’s Andrea Mitchell portrayed the 75-year old brother of Cuba dictator Fidel Castro in her report on the August 2 “Today” show. But some Cuba experts describe Raul’s concessions to capitalism as mere pragmatism meant to prop up a socialist economy otherwise doomed to failure.       “Raul has been in charge of the military and the economy,” Mitchell explained to her audience, calling him “politically hard-line but more…
2nd Aug, 2006 2:16pm
As Fidel Castro, dictator of Cuba since 1959, malingers in a shadowy state of sickness, the Times for some reason points us to the embarrassing reports filed by Times reporter (and Castro dupe) Herbert Matthews between 1957 and 1959.It's a series of Walter Duranty-style hagiographies of Castro that foreshadowed the mainstream media's later and long-standing embrace of Castro's quest for "social justice," "free" health care, and a "high literacy rate" (no matter that books and newspapers were…
1st Aug, 2006 12:37pm
     As sure as the sun rises in the east, when a heat wave engulfs the continental United States, it dawns on the media that “global warming” may be to blame. Such was the case with CBS’s Bob Orr on the July 31 “Evening News,” when the reporter consulted with Pew Center on Global Climate Change’s Jay Gulledge.        “The average global temperature is getting hotter due to global warming,” Gulledge told Orr.        “Gulledge says there’s no longer any serious debate” on climate change, Orr…
31st Jul, 2006 12:07pm
     The CBS “Evening News” may want to change its theme music to R.E.M.’s “End of the World As We Know It.”      Nearly two months into a quiet hurricane season, CBS’s Michelle Miller alarmed viewers of the July 30 broadcast with ominous warnings of a “long overdue Northeast hurricane” that “could devastate the region and cripple the U.S. economy.”      Invoking the “Long Island Express” hurricane of 1938, Miller warned that as devastating at that storm was in lives lost and property damage,…
28th Jul, 2006 2:56pm
     It’s not every day a politician calls for a 100-percent tax rate on national TV. Even the most liberal-friendly of journalists would be inclined to question such a punitive idea. But when former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich called for such a tax on the “windfall profits” of oil on the July 28 “Early Show,” CBS’s Hannah Storm didn’t even bat an eyelash.      Opening an interview segment with the liberal Rep. Kucinich (D-Ohio) and the libertarian Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor on…
27th Jul, 2006 2:38pm
     What’s next, a “Dateline NBC” sting operation to snag Toucan Sam?       Basing her story on a July 19 study by the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation, ABC’s Lisa Stark offered the audience of the July 26 “World News Tonight” a look at the “Wild West” world of food marketing on the Internet geared to kids, complete with flashy games on company Web sites.       The Kaiser report found that “more than eight out of ten (85%) of the top food brands that target children through TV advertising also…
26th Jul, 2006 1:56pm
     A new batch of real estate data gave the media a chance to pull out its recipe for half-baked reporting on the housing market.       On July 25, a housing report released by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) performed better than expected but ABC and NBC’s July 25 evening newscasts spun the story negatively, with NBC even floating talk of a housing “bubble.”        Neither network mentioned that five days earlier Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke assessed…
25th Jul, 2006 1:19pm
    OK. Who outsourced Lou Dobbs’s dictionary to China?     That has to be the only explanation for why CNN’s resident anti-free trader Lou Dobbs claimed a guest critical of the Bush administration’s trade policies was not a “protectionist.”     During his July 24 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” interview with liberal (2005 ADA rating 100 out of 100) Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) about his new book “Take This Job and Ship It,” Dobbs praised the North Dakotan and urged viewers to pick up a copy of the senator’…
24th Jul, 2006 7:28pm
      Gas prices at an “all-time high” was the attention-getting tease from the July 24 “Today” show. NBC used it to promote a segment on saving money by switching from premium gas. But it wasn’t premium coverage. Regular unleaded prices aren’t at record highs, either for the past year or when adjusted for inflation.      NBC relied upon a new report by oil analyst Trilby Lundberg to justify his “record price” assertion. Bloomberg News used similar language in a July 23 articled that reported…