Shortly before the new year, a number of religious organizations were given protection from the HHS abortion and contraception mandate. While social conservatives and defenders of the First Amendment cheered, numerous prominent media organizations manipulated basic scientific facts to deny that the mandate—required by federal law—forces people to fund abortion-inducing drugs. Media Matters did this at least twice, … Read more
Valentine’s Day is probably not the day most people would pick to remember the marriage of John and Jacqueline Kennedy. But on Feb. 14, CBS spent more than eight minutes recalling how it was the 50th anniversary of CBS’s “historic” TV tour of the White House with Jackie. They brought on liberal historian Doug Brinkley … Read more
Super Bowl XLVI was a good football game, marred once again by the bohemian elite at NBC. NBC could have prevented, but failed to stop, the broadcast of a female rapper “flipping the bird” at 114 million viewers during Madonna’s halftime show. It was another “fleeting expletive” of the hand-gesture variety, and somehow, despite elaborate … Read more
Late-night comedians historically have relished the opportunity to poke fun at politicians. Sometimes they savage them. In the Obama era, they haven’t been so enthusiastic about any of it. A recent study of political jokes on three late-night shows (Letterman, Leno and Jimmy Fallon) by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that Barack … Read more
Sitting through the Republican debate on Saturday night with ABCs George Stephanopoulos was just painful, from beginning to end. Some of it was just political Ambien. But when it was finally over, there was just one question: Who in the GOP in his or her right mind invites a historically shameless Democratic spin controller … Read more
The culture of Hollywood has just been beautifully defined by two awards-show decisions. The first one was Brett Ratner being dumped as the director of ABCs Oscars telecast after he said, “rehearsals are for fags.” It wasn’t long before Ratner turned himself in for “negotiations” with the gay, anti-defamation cops about doing PC penance. … Read more