Business Coverage

The next time I plan to escape reality for an extended time, I won't go to the trouble of forwarding the phones to voicemail and swearing off the Internet and TV for a few days. I'll just take whatever the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger must be consuming. Crutsinger's 11:45 report this morning claims that "The better-than-expected retail sales report is the second strong signal on the…

The recent decision by Standard & Poor's to downgrade the U.S. credit rating to AA+ from AAA upset many on the left, especially those within the Obama administration. The White House lashed out at S&P and some in the news media did too. So Business & Media Institute decided to look back at six years of network (ABC,CBS and NBC) coverage of S&P. BMI found out that bulk of…

If we're to believe Associated Press reporter Daniel Wagner, this morning's report from the Department of Labor on unemployment claims revealing that initial claims during the week ended August 6 fell to 395,000, was "good news." Why, according to Wagner, that drop, all by itself, it was "enough to catapult stocks," pushing the Dow up by 423 points in Thursday's trading. Uh, not exactly,…

On August 2 on the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that the economy under George W. Bush lost eight million jobs. PolitiFact, which occasionally seems to engage in verbal gymnastics to give Democrats and leftists the benefit of the doubt, was more than a little annoyed with Reid's claim, giving it a rating of "Pants on Fire." As will be demonstrated later, virtually no…

The past three weeks in the stock market have gone as follows: Week ended July 22 -- Pretty good; week ended July 29 -- Really bad; week just ended -- Absolutely awful. After I received a remarkably vague e-mail from CNN just after 4 p.m. today, I thought I'd go back and see how it handled its closing-bell emails during the previous two weeks. It was quite revealing. The three emails follow…

If we're to believe Paul Wiseman and David K. Randall at the Associated Press in their Wednesday afternoon report on the economy, all of the alleged solutions which might shake the U.S. economy out of its weakness either aren't available or no one has the will to try them: stimulus, infrastructure projects, jobs programs, or another round of quantitative easing. Oh, and governments are damaging…

I don't normally get emails from CNN when the markets go from negative territory to positive, or vice-versa. But I did today, as the Dow and the S&P 500 oh-so-temporarily showed plus signs? So why did CNN send the email? Could it be that the markets' plunge is getting more widely known, and the network feels the need to tamp down the spreading pessimism? The CNN email, along with a…

Did you know that car buyers in July took "worries" over the debt-ceiling debate in Washington into account when they decided to buy -- or apparently decided not to buy? Neither did I. But Dee-Ann Durbin and Tom Krisher rolled out that excuse this evening as one factor explaining why July's car sales were "disappointing," and then appeared to stuff those words into the mouth of the spokesman…

Better late than never, perhaps, but in Sunday’s paper the Times noted that “Lowering Nation’s Credit Rating May Have Little Effect, Economists Suggest.” The article, by Binyamin Appelbaum article, was buried on page A14 (emphasis mine):

The AP's coverage of the U.S. economy late Friday focused on high gas prices as the dominant, uh, driver of this year's anemic growth both visually and in its text. As will be seen after the jump, the graphic at the AP's national site is of a gas price sign. The final sentence in the caption of the full-size version reads "High gas prices and scant income gains forced Americans to sharply…

This afternoon's report at Time.com's misnamed Curious Capitalist blog by Roya Wolverson ("GDP Report: What It Tells Us About the Debt") is an embarrassing hash of omissions, errors, and gratuitous political points. Ms. Wolverson's most obvious omission is her failure to mention the government's breathtaking downward revision to first quarter gross domestic product growth from the annualized…

"Millionaires and billionaires," President Obama says derisively, must make more "sacrifices" and live by the same rules the rest of America lives by. But there are seven little words that will never appear on the White House teleprompter: "And that means you, too, George Soros." For all his (and his wife's) bashing of greedy Wall Street hedge-fund managers, Obama has shown nothing but love…

This morning, Christopher Rugaber's coverage of the news from Uncle Sam's Bureau of Economic Analysis about the growth in the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the Associated Press appropriately characterized it as indicative of a "sharp slowdown" and "extremely bad" (via a quoted economist). Today's report carried an advance estimate of second-quarter growth of an annualized 1.3%. As…

Two "alert" emails hit my inbox this morning concerning the Department of Labor's just-released unemployment claims report. The one I expected came from CNNMoney.com, which read: "Initial unemployment claims fall below 400,000 for the first time in more than 3 months, dropping 24,000 to 398,000 in latest week." The other one came from USAToday.com, which does not ordinarily issue alerts when…