The national media watch group
NBC Nightly News asked a serious question the other night–and then gave a not-so-serious answer: Why it is so cold where it should be warm, and so warm where it should be cold? What is going on with all this extreme weather?" Its answer was true as far as it went–but it didn't go any farther.
The December 30 episode of Meet the Press was, of course, devoted to discussion of the "fiscal cliff." And NBC veteran Tom Brokaw was on hand to recycle some of the most tiresome talking points about wealth and taxes.
If you were concerned that the Syria WMD stories didn't already feel enough like the Iraq WMD reports, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius had one just for you. It's not that Ignatius doesn't know that this story sounds, well, familiar–but it's important to recall more of the journalism from the Iraq invasion era.
Meet the Press's David Gregory (12/16/12) seemed really proud of how hard his show worked to try to get a pro-gun viewpoint on the air to talk about the Newtown massacre. Funny, Gregory doesn't always make that much of an effort to balance his panels.
The theatrics of WMD claims about Syria–satellite images, anonymous sources and so on–are obviously reminiscent of the lead up to the Iraq War. But media stress that this time–it's different.
Meet the Press hosted what David Gregory dubbed a "special economic roundtable" on December 2 that included "CNBC's dynamic duo," Maria Bartiromo and Jim Cramer. But Bartiromo's comments about tax increases for the wealthy needed a factcheck. She started by making a familiar conservative point about the so-called "fiscal cliff"– that the White House talks about ending tax cuts for the wealthy, but will not talk about spending cuts: And the fact is that I find it extraordinary that we are zeroing in on this discussion only about taxes, and we do not have this kind of elaborate discussion when [...]
On NBC Nightly News (11/15/12) , correspondent Martin Fletcher gives viewers a sense of the suffering on both sides of the Israel/Gaza conflict: FLETCHER: Terror in Israel. (SHOUTING) FLETCHER: "There is another one," a soldier screams. (SHOUTING) FLETCHER: More than 200 missiles fired at Israel today. And in Gaza, despair. (SHOUTING) FLETCHER: Burying an infant killed in an Israeli attack. Frightened Israeli soldiers are being terrorized. And Gazans burying a child? Something else, apparently.
Post-election lessons are everywhere in the media, as pundits either try to explain how Mitt Romney lost or what Obama must do in his second term. My favorite example of this came on the front page of USA Today (11/8/12): If you think it's somewhat odd that Obama would need to "soothe Wall Street," then you'll never make it in big media. On Sunday, NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory (11/11/12) was offering similar advice alongside CNBC host Jim Cramer (the one whose prediction of a massive Obama landslide doesn't prevent him from being a political pundit): GREGORY: Jim, [...]
There's no doubt that the sex scandal that prompted CIA director David Petraeus's sudden resignation late last week is a big story. New details–verified or not–seem to arrive almost by the hour. But the reason it seems to have shaken so many media figures is because Petraeus was uniquely beloved by many in the corporate media, who considered him both an accessible source and a war hero. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams called him (11/9/12) a "a man of such sterling reputation," and confided on the air to one guest that "it is impossible to be a member of [...]
Surveying international reaction to Barack Obama's re-election, NBC Nightly News correspondent Richard Engel declared (11/7/12): In the Middle East, there is hope that President Obama will embrace the Israeli/Palestinian peace process in second term the way he embraced the Arab Spring in his first. This would be a surprising reaction to find among people in the Middle East, given that Obama did not really "embrace" the Arab Spring. Consider Egypt, arguably the most high-profile uprising; the original White House response was to stand by dictator Hosni Mubarak. The White House continues to support the regime in Bahrain. And it's likely [...]
This passage from Meet the Press (10/14/12) says a lot about how middle-of-the-road elite journalists think about fiscal issues. Here's NBC veteran Tom Brokaw and host David Gregory: BROKAW: I was just going to say, I talked to a lot of major business leaders who want Romney to get elected, but almost to a man and a woman, they say, "But you know what, we're going to have to pay some more taxes in our category." What they want to do, however, is to benchmark them against spending cuts, so that they can get spending down to 20 percent of [...]
