(Image via Reuters) You might be surprised to learn that I've always kinda' liked former RNC chairman and current MSNBC analyst Michael Steele. He's a Never-Trumper and a seemingly reasonable guy regardless of his former political affiliations... To continue reading this ...read more
Fox News is many things, but “Fair and Balanced” has never been one of them. I used to find it bewildering that a cable news channel that so obviously plays the role of Republican mouthpiece had the gall to pretend to be unbiased - and that viewers bought it. Eventually I ...read more
These are trying times, and political discourse isn’t making the world any better. Rather than nuanced and complex discussions about policy and leadership, we find a lot of debate over painfully partisan talking points and 140 character tweets. The end of last week proved no ...read more
For some reason there's been a rather fierce debate raging the past few days on the question of whether the media bears some or even all responsibility for the rise of Donald Trump. This isn't a surprise when you consider two things about the press. The first is that it loves ...read more
You might not have heard about it, but Health and Human Services (HHS) released new enrollment numbers for the Affordable Care Act yesterday (pdf). From October 1 through November 30, more than 3.6 million Americans applied for health coverage under the ACA while just over ...read more
Mediaite is reporting that Shepard Smith's role at Fox News is changing drastically: Fox News anchor Shepard Smith will expand his role at the network, overseeing a newly-established breaking news division, taking on the role as its managing editor, and continuing his position ...read more
There are a lot of things HBO's The Newsroom gets right about national TV news production. It's rare that one show does all of its own research and general digging for facts, as the fictional "Newsnight" seems to do, since you have to keep in mind that you've got the ...read more
By Jeff Cohen I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV – at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to ...read more
As a guy who's been married and divorced three times I obviously have no problem admitting when I'm wrong. And I was certainly wrong about what Chris Hayes's new MSNBC show, All In, would look like. When I wrote about the audacious, revealing choice MS was making by casting ...read more
Welcome to this week's edition of The Daily Banter Mailbag! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss the fiscal cliff, banning pundits and our predictions for 2013! The questions: 1) A lot of liberals are urging the president to just allow the fiscal cliff to happen, but wouldn’t that ...read more
By Bob Cesca: Glenn Greenwald wrote a response to the Michael Calderone Huffington Post article from last week about MSNBC's so-called "pro-Obama bias." (My response to the Calderone piece is located here, and here's Ben Cohen's excellent response to the Greenwald piece.) ...read more
By Bob Cesca: Last week, Michael Calderone of The Huffington Postpublished an extensive item on MSNBC's alleged pro-Obama, pro-Democratic Party bias, as well as network president Phil Griffin's defensiveness about the conventional wisdom's perception of his programming. I ...read more
Welcome to this week's edition of The Daily Banter Mailbag! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss our dream match-ups for the 2016 election, the controversial world of cable news graphics packages and a reader's bizarre sex dream featuring Mitt Romney. The questions: What's the ...read more
By Chez Pazienza: Several years ago, Rolling Stone politics-and-finances writer and national treasure Matt Taibbi, who at the time was a columnist for the New York Press, put together a list of the men and women he dubbed the biggest hacks in the world of political journalism. ...read more
By Chez Pazienza: A while back, I wrote a column for this site that pondered whether Aaron Sorkin's HBO series The Newsroom had the potential to actually change TV news for the better. While certainly not perfect, or occasionally even all that great, the show presents a ...read more
By Chez Pazienza: In case you haven't seen this yet, it's pretty much guaranteed to make your day. Or give you a brain hemorrhage. Or possibly both. Yesterday morning on CNN's Starting Point, Soledad O'Brien got into a contentious on-air back-and-forth with Mitt Romney ...read more
By Robert Parry: The hacks in the campaign press corps love nothing more than to frame their stories about bad behavior by politicians with a world-weary “both sides do it” sneer – even if both sides don’t do it or at least don’t do it in anything like equal proportions. Still, ...read more
By Chez Pazienza: I happened to stumble across the very good 1994 movie Quiz Show on cable the other day. For those who haven't seen it or don't know much about it, the film dramatizes the television quiz show scandal of the late 1950s, in which Twenty-One and other popular TV ...read more
By Chez Pazienza: Here's a little something just about everyone in the television business knows: Once you become a high-powered executive, it's almost impossible to fuck yourself and your reputation so badly that you'll never work again. Let's say you're some poor mid-level ...read more
