TV News LIES

A veteran Illinois political reporter quit his job at the Chicago Sun-Times on Wednesday and accused the newspaper of bowing to pressure from Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner by removing him from the campaign beat.

Dave McKinney, a 19-year veteran of the paper who covered the state capital, said in his resignation letter that the paper reassigned him after the Rauner campaign accused him of a conflict of interest, which he denies.

The People's Climate March on Sunday was perhaps the largest climate change protest in history. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of New York City. Celebrities and high-profile politicians were among the marchers. The protest was a huge topic on social media.

All in all, it was a perfect opportunity for some of America's biggest news organizations to cover the topic of climate change, something that usually gets either ignored or badly handled. For Sunday talk show hosts, there was even a nice political hook, since the march was pegged to a UN summit that President Obama will be attending.

USA Today laid off at least 60 staffers on Wednesday in an effort to cut back on costs, with the majority of layoffs taking place in the editorial department, sources at the newspaper confirmed.

The layoffs, first reported by Poynter, come in the wake of Gannett's recent announcement that it will spin off its print division, which includes USA Today and 81 daily local and regional newspapers.

Kent Conrad’s phone hasn’t been ringing very much over the past few weeks, as Iraq, and the debate over America's future in the country, has once again dominated the news.

The architects of the Iraq war are back in TV studios and on op-ed pages, as are journalists and pundits who promoted the Bush administration’s ultimately bogus case for invading. But Conrad, a former senator who was one of only 23 to vote against authorizing the war in October 2002, hasn’t heard from CNN, MSNBC or any other TV outlet. "Not once," he said, when asked if anyone in the press had reached out regarding the current crisis in Iraq.

The Seattle Times sports editor announced Thursday that he will ban use of the word 'Redskins' in the paper and online, making the Times the latest publication to stop using the controversial name of Washington's NFL team.

"The most controversial name in sports won’t appear again in The Seattle Times’ print edition or on the seattletimes.com home pages as long as I am sports editor," the Times' Don Shelton wrote. "It’s time to ban the use of 'Redskins,' the absurd, offensive and outdated name of the NFL team in Washington, D.C. ... Past time, actually."

The Washington Post has just published an op-ed entitled "One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married" (the paper later changed the headline). To that, I say: Washington Post: Stop Posting Bullshit And Set Yourself On Fire.

Less than 48 hours after posting an atrocious column by George Will, wherein the venerable conservative thought leader who has made a career out of being smugly wrong about everything called being a rape victim a "coveted status" and then dismissed the college sexual assault crisis as just another made up thing in Obama's America (TM), the Washington Post has outdone itself with a column by conservative think tank denizens W. Bradford Wilcox, (the director of the National Marriage Project) and Robin Fretwell Wilson (who endlessly beat the BUT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY!!! drum after New York legalized gay marriage in 2011) that claims — seriously, as far as I can gather — that the best way for women to avoid violence is to stop slutting around with "baby daddies" and get married. It's truly breathtaking in its idiocy. I'm sorry for subjecting all of you to this, but, here we go.