The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill's online news publication, makes no bones about its contempt for the Democratic Party. Stocked with writers critical of the party's dominant centrist wing, the publication has become a thorn in its side, as its articles emphasize ...read more
Nobody had a worse day yesterday than Sam Nunberg, the former Trump aide who, in a series of interviews on the three major news networks, grew increasingly unhinged as he announced his intention to violate both Robert Mueller's subpoena to provide emails between him and Trump ...read more
Well, I guess we’re going at it again, folks. The circular firing squad of the Democratic primary has restarted with an astonishingly dishonest excerpt from interim DNC chair Donna Brazile’s new book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump ...read more
One of the things that drives me nuts about the Left is that, more often than not, we allow GOP operatives to run roughshod over us with their stupid, unsourced arguments and talking points. Back in January, Chuck Todd (not a liberal but a good example of the phenomena) got ...read more
The Banter Long Read: ...in reporting on this new development, the Post's rival newspaper, the New York Times, has been caught lying about its relevance. Worse, their lies could undermine the legitimacy of the Russia investigation in the minds of the American public and even ...read more
In March 2016, Susan Sarandon went on All In with Chris Hayes to voice her support for her primary candidate of choice, Bernie Sanders, against frontrunner Hillary Clinton. The interview was filled with anti-Hillary talking points, but it was this exchange that made her a ...read more
One of the best commentators today, MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid is not afraid to tell the truth to the people who think that Democrats will win if they just offer white working class voters single-payer healthcare. In her appearance on The Daily Show this week, she explained to Trevor ...read more
Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle invited 'Donald Trump for President' advisory board member Brad Thomas onto their MSNBC show today and gave the hapless business man one of the most savage dressing downs I've ever seen on live television. Thomas appeared to think that he could ...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
Let’s play a game. Imagine just for a moment what the front pages of newspapers or home pages of websites would look like if we removed articles about the hacking of emails in the 2016 election. Now go even further and imagine how a cable news hour and its line up of stories ...read more
Edward R. Murrow spoke truth to power when, in 1954, he attacked Senator Joe McCarthy on his program, See It Now. For too long, McCarthy had gone unchecked by the media as he attacked the foundations of our democracy. Murrow is rightly lionized for his crusade against the ...read more
After someone in the military authorized the deployment of America's largest non-nuclear weapon without telling the president about it, the frat boys at Fox News were frantically masturbating with an American flag while humming the Star Spangled Banner. It's the same kind of ...read more
Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist whose self-obsession is so profound and unrelenting that he can tell lie after lie without even knowing he's doing it. It's entirely possible he truly believes the bullshit that regularly comes out of his mouth. Kellyanne Conway is a ...read more
Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) has a long history of saying incredibly offensive things. He once said that for every immigrant who is a valedictorian, there are a hundred more who have "calves the size of cantaloupes" because they carry drugs across the desert. He has also ...read more
On Wednesday evening, during a MSNBC Town Hall meeting hosted by Chris Matthews, Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson was asked to name his favorite foreign leader and he couldn't name a single one. The candidate began stuttering after the question was asked and ...read more
No matter how many times this point is articulated by smart, reasonable people, the media in America will not accept that Donald Trump is infinitely worse than Hillary Clinton and is bent on making this is a two horse race at any cost. Sure, there are outliers who are aware of ...read more
Well, that was unfortunate: Here's what they were trying to play: Missed it by that much. ...read more
No sooner had MSNBC begun to brag about how right-wing their "talent" roster has gotten than they spent a week demonstrating just how badly they've lost their GOT-damned minds. It's been a long time coming, but here are six examples just from the last week. 1. Hillary’s ...read more
If you're a regular listener to the podcast I do with fellow Banter-ite Bob Cesca, cleverly titled "The Bob & Chez Show," you know that as far as I'm concerned there's no one on the planet who more richly deserves a righteous ass-kicking than Fox News ambush reporter and ...read more
Picture for just a moment, say, Jake Tapper. He’s a fantastic political journalist and a seemingly decent guy, someone who’s always above-board and who tends to call it like he sees it, minus any of the usual ass-kissing or side-taking we see in a lot of others of his ilk. You ...read more
You could write a Harry Potter-sized book series on how the media has been screwing the pooch lately, and devote several volumes just to the handling of the Donald Trump campaign, but for the sake of space, please just answer me this: why would a news network devote almost an ...read more
Here's full video of the Farook family attorneys' bizarre press conference Friday afternoon: ...read more
Just when you think cable news' insatiable desire to fill every second of its 24 hours has hit bottom, they find a new low. On Friday afternoon, the landlord of the apartment that San Bernardino shooters Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik lived in with their 6-month-old baby opened ...read more
Keith Olbermann is a nightmare to deal with. He's reportedly been a toxic presence in almost every one of the shops in which he's worked, his arrogance, tendency toward self-indulgence and general neuroses always making like a living hell for both his superiors and his peers. ...read more
(Photo: Seth Wenig/AP) The word "exclusive" is one of those things that probably once meant something in television news. Now, though, all it really means is that a TV network or station is doing a very specific thing at a very specific point in time in a very specific way that ...read more
The important thing to remember about MSNBC is that since its debut in 1996 it's been a mess more often than it hasn't. It's easy to look at its current state and imagine that the network has somehow gone downhill, given that the place's ratings over the past couple of years ...read more
Many of the people who avoid Fox News because they think the network peddles deceptive, slanted reporting opt to watch MSNBC instead, but those viewers got a dose of that bad medicine Wednesday morning just the same. Yes, it happened during Morning Joe, but the actual ...read more
There's no semi-regular occurrence in television news that infuriates the hell out of me more than a prank phone call winding up on the air. When you understand the processes that are in place to stop that kind of thing from happening, especially at the network level, to see the ...read more
As the war rages on between Bill O'Reilly and reality (or 'guttersnipes' and 'far left zealots' as O'Reilly likes to call them), the American news media is coming under greater scrutiny for its role in informing the public. Can we trust the media? Do they have an agenda, and is ...read more
If Bill O'Reilly had a modicum of shame, he would have kept himself well away from the Brian Williams saga. But then he is the Fox News network's major star, and you don't get on Fox by having any shame. Comically, O'Reilly laid into Williams after the news broke that he had ...read more
This is the world we live in, post-midterms. Democrats got their asses beat like rented donkeys by running away from President Obama, and are now convinced that they can rescue Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) from the same fate by overruling the president on the Keystone XL Pipeline. ...read more
Joe Concha over at Mediaite has a source inside MSNBC telling him that the network will soon be ridding itself of smooth jazz DJ Ronan Farrow's afternoon show. This source could very well be the guy who works dayside checkout at the NBC commissary, given it's that obvious to ...read more
If you've watched any cable news at all this week, you've seen a YouTube clip of apparent Libyan militia members diving into a pool from a second floor balcony, probably accompanied by some sort of dire, poignant commentary about the state of the region, and if you paid any ...read more
Casual Pepper Spray Guy has met his match, in the form of the dude from MSNBC's Gaza conflict B-roll, which played over Chris Hayes' brief commentary on the newest ceasefire in the most recent Israel-Palestine flareup. While everyone else in this clip is hitting the deck behind ...read more
Fresh off his weeks-long stint flacking for Paul Ryan's poverty plan, Vox publisher and All In fill-in host Ezra Klein further dabbled in Beltway view-from-nowhere dumbshittery Wednesday night when he declared, to MSNBC viewers, that President Obama broke politics. He promised ...read more
'The shocking killing of Eric Garner at the hands of police has become the sort of national story that reveals a lot about the people who talk about it. Differences in life experience and point of view become evident in the types of coverage and commentary that are granted the ...read more
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) threw a hissy fit on MSNBC's The Cycle Wednesday afternoon over coverage of his 2010 remarks about the Civil Rights Act, and the inflammation was still raging hours later when he spoke to a group of young libertarians about how the "cranks and hacks" at ...read more
A Malaysia Airlines flight has crashed over eastern Ukraine and may have been shot down by Soviet-era anti-aircraft equipment (though nothing is confirmed as yet). All 296 people on board are dead, and the possibility remains that this is a terrorist attack. In other words, the ...read more
As the GOP continues to fail miserably at reaching out to women (or anyone else who is not an old white man), Todd Akin continues to helpfully make the rounds talking about "legitimate rape," as he did in an interview on MSNBC Thursday morning. In case you missed it, ...read more
If you want to know who has the edge right now in the unofficial race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, just take a look at who's being attacked by other presumptive candidates and party establishment types. Right now, that whipping boy is Rand Paul, who's not ...read more
If this week is any indication, MSNBC viewers no longer need to get up at 6 am to get a taste of what it feels like to watch Fox News. So far this week, viewers of Steve Kornacki's programs have learned that it is super-duper important news that pissy white people hate Obama, ...read more
Legendary sportscaster and political lightning rod Bob Costas has apparenly tired of only getting hate mail from right-wingers, because on Saturday morning's Up with Steve Kornacki, he blew a big wet kiss to all of the conservatives who think that MSNBC hosts are the real ...read more
On Wednesday, we explained why a Quinnipiac poll that deemed President Obama the Worst President Since World War II was five kinds of complete horseshit, and why cable news giant CNN were assholes for reporting so credulously on it, but as it turns out, someone at MSNBC missed ...read more
Right now, HBO is using a show called The Leftovers to fill the hole in our hearts where Game of Thrones should be, and while it remains to be seen how successful it will be at that particular mission, the show's premise raises the question (spoiler alert): How would the ...read more
Lawrence O'Donnell returned to the air last night after 75 days and he brought with him the harrowing and emotional impact of the car crash that nearly killed him. In the final monologue of his show, O'Donnell let down his guard and spoke poignantly about the night the van he ...read more
Rachel Maddow is a national treasure -- and last night she proved why. While we spent a good part of yesterday either dissecting Dick Cheney's almost unimaginably audacious op-ed on Iraq or simply suggesting that he take his thoughts on the matter and shove them up his ass, ...read more
The rule is three strikes and you're out. last I heard, and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough whiffed again Tuesday morning in covering UCSB mass killer Elliot Rodger. For a third time in less than two years, the self-professed autism "awareness" activist falsely linked mass ...read more
Morning shows are a tough needle to thread in the news business. On the one hand you're expected to present important information to the public and to adhere to the editorial standards set forth by the news department; on the other hand you're usually told to keep it light and ...read more
I've said more than once that if there's any rule to live by in television news, it's that management always has your back -- right up until the second they put their hand against it and shove you out the door. David Gregory would be wise to keep this in mind right about now. ...read more
"He sort of stinks on TV. He hasn’t turned out to be the superstar they were hoping for." -- An anonymous inside source to the New York Daily News on the supposed impending cancellation of Ronan Farrow Daily There are two things that need to be kept in mind when reading this, ...read more
