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President Donald Trump's press conference on Thursday was the "harshest and most sustained attack on the media by a president of the United States in history," according to Howard Kurtz. During the question-and-answer session, Trump repeatedly criticized CNN and tussled with its reporter, Jim Acosta, and was terse with MSNBC correspondent Kristen Welker. "You couldn't turn away," Kurtz said on "Special Report" tonight. {..snip..}

From the Monday broadcast of FOX News Channel's Kelly File with host Megyn Kelly: MEGYN KELLY, KELLY FILE: Since announcing his candidacy in June of 2015, Donald Trump morphed into a national phenomenon, captivating the country, dominating news cycles day in and day out and creating a white hot debate about our national media like nothing we have seen in a long, long time. Tonight we have a candid conversation with some of best known reporters and media critics in the country. Here to reflect on the media's highs, its lows and what lies ahead. Beginning tonight with MediaBuzz host...

Until the last couple of weeks, the conventional wisdom was that a Trump nomination would all but assure a second Clinton presidency. After all, she’s the former senator and secretary of State with an awesome political machine, and he’s the untested billionaire with a penchant for divisive rhetoric. Plus, Democrats have an Electoral College edge and have won the popular vote in five of the last six campaigns. But some commentators see troubling signs in Clinton’s performance so far and wonder how she would withstand a Trump onslaught. The Donald has high negatives, to be sure, but Hillary does as...

Fox News Media Analyst Howard Kurtz slammed CNBC’s GOP debate as “an absolute trainwreck for CNBC” and “a disaster for all of us in the news business” on Wednesday’s “Kelly File.” Kurtz said, “Megyn, this was an absolute trainwreck for CNBC. Many of the moderators’ questions seemed to me to be snide, hostile, condescending, borderline insulting. And, let me just make clear, I’m totally in favor of tough and provocative questions. … But a lot of these questions were not drilling down on facts, or record, or policy. When John Harwood says Trump, comic book campaign, or does he have...

After Jon Stewart went after Fox News media reporter Howard Kurtz for blowing up the story about the comedian’s “secretive” visits with President Barack Obama, the Fox Newser responded Sunday on his show, with the help of an even more indignant guest. Baltimore Sun TV critic and frequent Fox MediaBuzz guest David Zurawik came out swinging, telling Kurtz that “Since President Obama came in, [Stewart]’s become more and more and more a tool, really, of the Obama administration.”And he wasn’t done there. “Look, I don’t care if you’re an actor, a writer, a poet, songwriter, if you serve a politician’s...

Fox News Media Analyst Howard Kurtz dismissed James Carville’s defense of Hillary Clinton as “farcical” on Monday’s “Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel. Kurtz began by criticizing Clinton saying silent while sending out her “attack dog” James Carville, then stated “the [argument] that the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media are carrying the Republicans’ water here is just farcical. Now, the story may have started with a leak from Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi Committee, but what journalists do is they check out leads and tips, and they try to confirm it. Everything the Times reported about Hillary Clinton using...

Fox News Media Analyst Howard Kurtz predicted that Hillary Clinton’s reported strategy of waiting for the media to abandon the story on her e-mails wouldn’t work on Friday’s “Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel. “If Hillary thinks that stalling and stonewalling is going to make the media just yawn and move on, she is in serious denial. If she thinks the whole — her whole defense for the next month is going to be a single tweet, that reinforces the journalistic suspicion that she’s got something to hide. And there’s nothing, Megyn, that drives a story more than a whole...

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani lambasted the media on Sunday for what he says is its failure to investigate allegations of corruption leveled against former Vice President Joe Biden and his family. Calling Biden the media’s “honey boy,” a fiery Giuliani accused news outlets of not only failing to investigate the former vice president’s dealings in places like Ukraine, China and Romania, but of purposely ignoring the allegations. “The Washington press corps has been covering this up for the last three years,” Giuliani told Fox News' Howard Kurtz of "Media Buzz.” “I’m trying to investigate a massive corruption scandal...

Violent assault on Andy Ngo in Portland, Oregon was an attack on free speech, says Fox News media anlyst Howard Kurtz host of 'Media Buzz.' ...

In an appearance on FNC's "MediaBuzz," pollster Frank Luntz shares his finding that the term "capitalism" no longer polls well with the American people and predicts that Senator Bernie Sanders is the most likely to win the Democratic nomination for president with a message of democratic socialism. "It is not that principles are dead, in fact, the principles of economic freedom are alive and well," Luntz explained. "But capitalism itself has been so demonized by media that... if you want to oppose socialism you oppose it by talking about freedom, not capitalism." HOWARD KURTZ, FOX NEWS: An exclusive first look...

The brother of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' girlfriend, former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez, criticized the tech billionaire's decision to try to preempt the National Enquirer's scoop on their affair. Michael Sanchez told Fox News' "MediaBuzz" Sunday that he had been negotiating with the Enquirer's parent company, American Media Inc., to soften a forthcoming story on the couple's extramarital affair when Bezos' longtime security adviser Gavin de Becker "launched World War III against AMI" by advising Bezos to undermine the scoop with what Sanchez called a "misleading" tweet about Bezos' divorce from wife MacKenzie. "Everything that Gavin has advised...

EXCLUSIVE – President Trump has canceled the White House holiday party for the media, making the decades-old tradition a victim of his increasingly contentious relationship with major news organizations. The annual Christmas-season gathering was a significant perk for those covering the White House, as well as other Washington reporters, anchors and commentators, and New York media executives would regularly fly in for the occasion. At its peak, the invitation-only soirees grew so large that there were two back-to-back events, one for broadcast outlets and one for print organizations.Journalists who attended the events, which featured a catered buffet of lamb chops,...

For Trump to speak of eliminating the practice where illegal immigrants can arrange to have babies in this country, and they automatically become American citizens, is very much part of his eleventh-hour push on immigration. At a time when he has been pounding away at the Central American caravan — at least until that narrative was interrupted by terror attacks — birthright citizenship is shrewdly targeted to his base. "It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don't," Trump told Axios. When pressed, he said that "you can definitely do it with an...

Conditions reached DEFCON-1 over at CNN on Thursday afternoon following a tense White House press briefing filled with questions about the administration’s credibility. These frenzied inquiries were sparked by Rudy Giuliani's stunning admission that the President reimbursed Michael Cohen for the Stormy Daniels hush payment.  CNN political director David Chalian and senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson went ballistic over Sanders having "lost credibility with the American people” and bolstered the lewd claims about Sanders made by Michelle Wolf at Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner.   CNN Goes Nuclear on Sanders After WH Briefing; ‘She Has Lost Credibility’ with the Country This...

The White House’s suspicions over the motives of besieged FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe go back at least to the first months of President Trump’s presidency. The doubts revolved around a since-debunked February 2017 New York Times story that reported that U.S. intelligence owned numerous intercepts and phone records of Trump campaign officials communicating with Russian intelligence. As recounted in his new book, “Media Madness,” Fox News reporter Howard Kurtz wrote that then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was conducting an intelligence meeting when Mr. McCabe called him aside.

A new book on the media’s relationship with the Trump White House has revealed a FBI operation to specifically set up a senior member of the Trump administration in a move that eventually led to the original claims of obstruction of justice against the president.According to the book, “Media Madness,” by Howard Kurtz, then deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe called White House chief of staff Reince Priebus shortly after the release of a fake news report in the New York Times to ask to speak to him privately, telling him that “everything” in the article was “bullsh*t” and not to...

The FBI’s top brass initiated conversations with a White House official that were quickly leaked to CNN, according to a new book. Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe asked to speak privately with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus following a February 2017 intelligence briefing. The scene is described in “Media Madness,” Howard Kurtz’s new book on the press and its relationship with the Trump administration. McCabe said he asked for the meeting to tell Priebus that “everything” in a New York Times story ... was “bullsh-t.” ... McCabe claimed to want Priebus to know the FBI’s perspective that this...

Fox News analyst Howard Kurtz argues that press misjudgment has upended coverage of the White House and boosted the president's agenda in this exclusive excerpt from his new book, 'Media Madness.' On Jan. 8, 2017, days before Donald Trump was to assume the crushing burdens of the presidency, he faced a very different kind of problem: Meryl Streep. The iconic actress slammed him in her speech accepting the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes, attacking him for, among other things, having allegedly mocked a disabled New York Times reporter during the campaign. The next morning, Hope Hicks,...

I have sensed for weeks now that some in the media were on the verge of rolling out a contrary take on President Trump’s first year in office. And in the wake of yesterday’s final passage of massive tax cuts, that moment has arrived. The dominant media narrative, of course, is that Trump hasn’t gotten much done, that he’s in over his head, that he doesn’t understand government, that he keeps picking petty fights rather than winning big battles. But the thing about the pundits is that they get tired of pushing the same line, week after week, month after...