Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh coined the phrase “Gorbasm” for the ecstasy that many reporters felt when covering Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev. Journalists elevated Gorbachev far above the freedom fighters, dissidents and democratic, anti-communist leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; indeed, the media assigned the Soviet party boss nearly all of the credit for ending the Cold…
While promoting a book of news photography on CBS This Morning on Saturday, Sir Harold Evans, editor at large of the Reuters news agency, called the electric chair a “monstrosity” and said seeing a picture of one was “almost as appalling, in its sense, as these barbarians who have taken the heads off journalists in the desert.”
Appearing on FNC's The Kelly File on September 5, MRC President Brent Bozell reacted to a fumbled news briefing delivered by State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki, and how her colleague, Marie Harf, called FNC host Bill O'Reilly "sexist" for saying Psaki seemed to lack gravitas.
On the August 23 edition of MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson astonishingly likened Barack Obama to Jesus in urging the President to visit Ferguson, Missouri: “You know, I’m a Christian preacher, and God finally said, ‘Look, I can’t send nobody else. I got to go myself.’ And I ain’t saying that Obama is Jesus, but for many of his followers he is.”
Appearing on FNC's The Kelly File on August 22, MRC President Brent Bozell denounced the hundreds of hours of coverage of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown "a travesty" where the guilt of the police officer is already presumed.
On the August 1 edition of MSNBC's The Daily Rundown, NBC's Chuck Todd suggested GOP steps to confront Obama might doom them in the 2014 midterm elections: “If November comes and goes and Democrats hold the Senate and break even in the House, I think we’re going to look back at the month of July as the month Republicans lost their shot at the Senate.”
On the July 25 edition of his HBO show Real Time, host Bill Maher claimed: “I always hear that the moon landing was the last great thing that America did. I think the last great thing America did was giving health care to 30 million people. [applause] I find that to be so much more of a significant achievement than landing on the moon.”
Host Charlie Rose set up an interview with Hillary Clinton on his July 17 PBS program by reading to her a poem written as tribute to the former First Lady — hardly a signal that tough questions were on the way:
“Maya Angelou, the late Maya Angelou, wrote a poem about her during the 2008 presidential campaign. It contains these lines: ‘There is a world of difference between being a woman and a…
On the June 29 edition of FNC's MediaBuzz, Sirius-XM Press Pass radio host Julie Mason, a former White House correspondent for the Houston Chronicle, Washington Examiner and Politico, told host Howie Kurtz that journalists would "love" to be covering an Obama scandal, if only some "proof" existed:
“All these hearings, all these investigations — where’s the proof of the crime? Howie, this…
On the June 27 edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, graphic novelist, cartoonist and former Saturday Night Live writer Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, likened America's Tea Party to the Nazis who came to power in Germany in the 1920s and 30s:
“This [the rise of the Tea Party] has happened before in history. In Germany in the ’20s and ’30s, there was this right-wing reactionary element…