What's the difference?
Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz struggled during a recent news appearance to offer the difference between a Democrat and a socialist. So college news outlet Campus Reform decided to let students in Washington, D.C., have a shot at differentiating between the two terms.
"What do you think the difference is between a Democrat and a socialist?" was the the straightforward question asked by a pair of reporters.
The answer stumped the millennials, who are usually reliable Democratic voters.
"Umm," replied one.
"That's a hard question," a second one posited.
Others honestly admitted they had no idea how the two were different.
"I don't know what's the difference," a man said.
With Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a self-proclaimed socialist, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton trying to keep up with Sanders on the left side of the political spectrum, another young person came closest to the truth when he said it's "pretty difficult" to tell the difference between the two.
"I don't think in this country you can really separate them that easily," he said. "Not right now."
Here's your thanks
Just a day before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Cuba to reopen the United States embassy as part of the countries' restoration of diplomatic relations last week, longtime communist Premier Fidel Castro said the U.S. owes Cuba "many millions of dollars" because of its longtime trade embargo.
Castro, who ceded his dictatorship to his brother, Raul, in 2006, marked his 89th birthday with the anti-U.S. rhetoric in an essay published in Havana media.
"Cuba is owed compensation equivalent to damages, which total many millions of dollars," he said, "as our country has stated with irrefutable arguments and data in all of its speeches at the United Nations."
Castro, who presided over the murders of thousands of people during his dictatorship that began in 1959, is nevertheless still celebrated in the socialist country.
U.S. President Barack Obama announced eight months ago his plans to restore relations with Cuba.
Your bias is showing
Planned Parenthood has been in the news a good bit lately, right? Well, not where the three major networks are concerned. Nothing to see here, said ABC, CBS and NBC.
The three supposedly unbiased networks combined showed only one minute and 13 seconds of the footage released by the Center for Medical Progress, according to Newsbusters. That footage, of course, showed the government-supported organization callously discussing the sale of body parts of aborted babies and the disposition of other fetal tissue.
Think the networks have a policy against airing undercover videos? Nope. They spent a combined 88 minutes in three days in September 2012 showing undercover footage of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's "47 percent" remarks.
In totality (including the undercover footage), according to Newsbusters, CBS has given the Planned Parenthood story 14 minutes, 59 seconds of coverage since the first video was released on July 14. NBC thought the story was worth 6 minutes, 52 seconds of time, and ABC virtually ignored it with 1 minute, 41 seconds of time.
During that period, by the way, there was a combined total of 243 hours, 30 minutes of morning and evening news programming on the three networks.
Liberal guys
Funny that you often hear of the hosts and news readers at Fox News being conservative, but you rarely hear of their counterparts at CNN being liberal. But leave it to Dr. Sanjay Gupta to spill the beans.
In the on-air doctor's recent interview with Playboy, the cable network's chief medical correspondent discussed Obamacare, Hillary Clinton's health care record and even fellow TV physician Dr. Oz, but he also let the cat out of the bag concerning his politics and those of his supposedly unbiased coworkers.
"I'm a pretty liberal guy," he said. "Being journalists, we work our whole careers predicated on freedom of speech. I value humanitarian causes that are liberal, so I probably lean more liberal, though not as liberal as all my colleagues within CNN."
Freedom of speech and humanitarian causes, of course, are not bastions only of the political left, and anyone who pays attention understands that news bias is not isolated to one network.