Business Coverage

On December 8, Susan Gustafson at MLive.com proclaimed that "GM's announcement of no more layoffs is good news after years of hemorrhaging jobs": General Motors' announcement this morning that it plans no further layoffs in the immediate future is huge news for both the automaker and Michigan as a whole after years of steady erosion in the ranks of hourly and salaried workers..... the company…

In an item time-stamped at 1:16 p.m. today (in case updated, here is a graphic capture of the first six paragraphs as they then appeared) covered by yours truly a short time ago (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa discounted today's weaker than expected economic growth report from Uncle Sam showing that gross domestic product only grew by an annualized 2.2%…

Uncle Sam's Bureau of Economic Analysis today revised economic growth in the third quarter downward a second time. After originally estimating annualized growth of 3.5% in October and then reducing it to 2.8% in November, the bureau's "third estimate" issued today came in at 2.2%. If that "third estimate" term seems odd, it's because this is only the second quarter the BEA has labeled its…

What politicians say to get elected can come back to haunt them and vilifying the lobbyist profession to score campaign points is going to do that to President Barack Obama, according to MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-anchor Joe Scarborough. Scarborough appeared on BBC Radio 4's Dec. 20 broadcast of "Americana" with host Matt Frei and explained how Obama's 2007 pledge to not hire lobbyists isn't…

If you believe polls, current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke favorability has been slipping. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll indicates that only 21 percent of Americans favor his reappointment as the Fed chair. And this hasn't gone unnoticed by some members of the Senate, where Bernanke's fate lies. Bernanke's reconfirmation passed through the Senate Banking Committee by a 16-to-7 vote…

In his 1981 inaugural address, former President Ronald Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem." Nearly 29 years later, that still holds true according to CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Both Cramer and Greenspan were guests on NBC's Dec. 13 "Meet the Press" and although neither was making a vain…

Has anyone else noticed how chilling it has been during the past few days? Not chilly (though it's been that too). Chilling. On Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared, in the Associated Press's words, that "greenhouse gas emissions are a danger and must be regulated." The AP, in the item just linked, and many other news outlets carried U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and…

While the wizards of smart are convening in Copenhagen, attempting to solve what they perceive to be the biggest global societal ill - anthropogenic climate change, one of the things that likely won't be discussed is the possibility of the opposite occurring, global cooling. But AccuWeather's chief hurricane forecaster, Joe Bastardi warns it is a bigger threat than global warming. He says the…

There has been a lot of media focus dedicated to the alleged Tiger Woods scandal - even so much that when examined quantitatively, it overshadows more serious issues. So what will the net result of this media scrutiny be for Tiger? CNBC's sports reporter, Darren Rovell, took a crack at answering that on the Dec. 10 broadcast of "Squawk Box." "It's 12 straight days in the [New York] Post right…

This is the fifth year I have looked into how the establishment media treats these two topics: The use of "Christmas shopping season" vs. "holiday shopping season" (the AP photo at right uses "holiday" and not "shopping," even though there is a C-C-, Chr-Chr-Christmas tree in the picture). The frequency of Christmas and holiday layoff references. I have done three sets of simple Google News…

Despite teasing the segment as NASA's "ClimateGate of its own," CNN's "American Morning" did its best to present global warming as the problem and discredit skeptics by misreporting their funding on Dec. 10. Correspondent Jim Acosta reported that NASA's climate data "shows the earth is getting hotter and changing fast" and quoted NASA scientist Thorsten Markus, who claimed rising temperatures…

In their report on Ford's November sales results, the Associated Press's Tom Krisher and Dee-Ann Durbin seemed to downplay the company's pretty decent month, and definitely downplayed the company's better near-term prospects compared to its principal rivals. Additionally, despite the report's Wednesday time stamp, the pair didn't update the item's content to compare Ford's performance to its…

Maybe President Barack Obama's administration is just trying to trying to get some George Soros funding. Why else would Obama's people be playing the media criticism game again? In the latest of a series of White House - media head-on confrontations, Jared Bernstein, the chief economist and economic policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, took on the Wall Street Journal in a Dec. 1 post on…