Throughout the Wednesday broadcast, NBC's Today repeatedly found time to promote President Obama as funny, hip, and connecting with young voters. Touting the President's appearance on NBC's Late Night with Jimmy Fallon , co-host Matt Lauer gushed that Obama, "gave our colleague Brian Williams a run for his money when he helped Jimmy Slow Jam the News." Highlighting Obama's tour of college campuses, Lauer and fellow co-host Ann Curry conducted a four-minute live interview with a Colorado college student who met the President when her yogurt was accidentally spilled on him. Lauer teased the segment at the top of the... continue reading
MSNBC's Chris Jansing on Wednesday didn't exactly press Jimmy Carter as she interviewed the ex-President, wondering if Mitt Romney has "gone too far" with conservatism "to be trusted." Carter appeared to disagree with his former presidential speechwriter, Chris Matthews, who smeared the former Massachusetts governor as a KKK " Grand Wizard " on Monday. Carter asserted he'd be "comfortable" with a "moderate" like Romney. Not seeming to accept this, Jansing pressed, " Do you think that he has gone too far into the conservative positions and do you think that that makes him difficult to be trusted ?" Later, Jansing... continue reading
“It's hard to make fun of Obama in general because he’s a cool character,” ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, the “headliner” for this Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner , told Reuters, insisting that “outside of his ears, there’s not a whole lot” to joke about. Kimmel, of course, had no trouble coming up with anti-Republican candidate zingers. Reuters reporter Mary Milliken, in a Tuesday dispatch, relayed Kimmel’s “hope is to have a ‘nice mixture of prepared and off-the-cuff comedy’ for the black tie gala.” She passed along “a few hints of the ammunition is in his joke holster,” starting with... continue reading
Washington Post political writer Chris Cillizza definitively declared on Tuesday's Hardball that for the 2012 race, Barack Obama is "cool" and Mitt Romney is "not cool." Host Chris Matthews, trying to prove his hipness, wondered aloud, "Can you dig it?" Fellow Post writer Nia-Malika Henderson then attempted to explain what the "kids" these days are saying. After a clip of Obama on the Jimmy Fallon show, Cillizza proclaimed, "The one thing that I would point out that I think is fascinating about this race... [Obama] is cool. Mitt Romney is not cool. " Cillizza later attempted to soften his remark,... continue reading
Hosting the chair of the DNC on Tuesday's Starting Point, CNN's Soledad O'Brien could have grilled her about any number of relevant issues like gas prices, the GSA scandal, or President Obama trailing Mitt Romney in polls on the economy. Instead she simply teed her up with softball questions and left the tough questions to conservative panel member Will Cain. The method was not unlike O'Brien's April 4 interview of the liberal Van Jones, where she failed to ask Obama's former green jobs adviser about the administration's recent scandals involving green energy companies like Solyndra. The two interviews showed a... continue reading
CNN even noted it was an "election year" before giving Obama's Education Secretary a chance to share his "proudest" accomplishment from his time in office, no doubt bolstering the administration's re-election message. Host Brooke Baldwin declined to ask any tough questions of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan during a lame Tuesday afternoon interview. Baldwin topped it all off with a soft parting question "on a more personal note." "I guess my final question, on a more personal note, Secretary Duncan, is we are in this election year. I want you to just think about this. Give me one achievement, within,... continue reading
New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane promised that the Times would take " A Hard Look at the President " during the 2012 presidential campaign cycle, while admitting that "the paper basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama’s election in 2008," in his latest column for the Sunday Review. That admission is nice to hear, but in fact the paper not only celebrated Obama's election, it worked to put him in the White House in the first place, through biased coverage from the likes of Larry Rohter and Carl Hulse. Even other liberal journalists, like Mark... continue reading
Over a combined total of nine and a half hours of programming, CBS, NBC and ABC allowed a mere 72 seconds of coverage to the news, Monday, that Social Security will go bankrupt three years earlier than previously expected. ABC's World News and NBC's Nightly News skipped the subject entirely. The same networks that offered copious amounts of stories to a vague threat of future global warming disasters, found little interest in the coming problems of Social Security. Scott Pelley briefly explained on Monday's Evening News : "Medicare will run out of money in 2024. Social Security retirement benefits run... continue reading
In a news brief on Monday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams managed to twist a positive development for Mitt Romney, the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, into a negative: "Giuliani, who had been ou t spreading the word for Newt Gingrich up until right now. And so for months he'd been saying bad things about Romney like this on Morning Joe." In the sound bite that followed from the December 15, 2011 edition of the MSNBC morning program, Giuliani said of Romney: "I have never seen a guy...change his positions on so many things so fast on a dime." Williams... continue reading
Appearing on Tuesday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd warned Mitt Romney against picking Marco Rubio as a vice presidential running mate with a negative comparison to Sarah Palin: "The drawbacks – inexperience. Do you want to pick somebody who basically has the same amount of time in statewide office that a pe rson who was on the ticket last time by the name of Sarah Palin had?" Todd oddly asserted: "...he's never really been vetted. When you say vetted, his campaign for the Senate, he breezed through. He never had the rough and tumble." In what way did he... continue reading