Business Coverage

It's the kind of socialist attitude that would make Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez proud. Unfortunately, it's coming from a New York Times columnist making recommendations for the U.S. financial system. Times' columnist Paul Krugman appeared on MSNBC's Oct. 6 "Rachel Maddow Show" and made the prediction that the federal government would have to take over the American financial system after…

Old Media's coverage of the recently-lifted executive and congressional bans on offshore exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas largely overlooked an important element that should have been very relevant to the discussion. Supporters of lifting the bans surely share much of the blame for only rarely citing it. Though they have frequently noted the hundreds of billions of dollars a years…

So what "dangerous" product should you not give your children now? Cough syrup, if you were watching the October 3 "Early Show." "They're safe if they're used properly, but so often they're not and so I consider them to be dangerous," said Dr. Alanna Levine, a pediatrician based in Englewood Hospital in New York. The CBS segment focused on new regulations of over-the-counter cough and cold…

As I write this on Monday afternoon, the People's House has rejected "the $700 billion bailout." You won't believe, unless you're a very experienced cynic, where that $700 billion figure came from. The answer appears to be "out of nowhere." With no basis. I'm not kidding. Here's the evidence, carried six whole days ago at Forbes (HT LAT's Top of the Ticket Blog via BizzyBlog commenter Dan Scott…

If you don't give me money, I won't bail you out! Conservative opposition to a federal bailout of financial institutions is over campaign donations, not a desire to uphold sound market principles, according to CNBC. CNBC's chief Washington correspondent John Harwood said Sept. 25 on "Squawk Box" that he had a conversation with "a top Republican member of congress last night" who told him…

Private CEOs? Yes. Government-sponsored CEOs? No. In a September 19 "Good Morning America" preview of a report scheduled to appear on the same day's edition of ABC's "20/20," chief investigative reporter Brian Ross took a few jabs at the rich who had fallen. Ross called it "the end of a shameful chapter of American history," and although top executives on Wall Street had been hit hard in…

It's come to this . . . Barack Obama became a candidate for president on the wings of his 2004 Dem convention keynote speech in which he famously said "there is not a Black America and a White America a Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America."  But as Rush Limbaugh has described in the Wall Street Journal today, Obama is now relying on deceptive ads for the…

In light of their reporting on the failure of investment firm Bear Stearns Companies Inc. (NYSE: BSC), it seems CNBC reporters aren't "tip-toeing around on eggshells" when reporting about problems at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (NYSE: LEH). On CNBC's "Squawk Box," reporter Charlie Gasparino told co-host Joe Kernen, "I will say this about the Bear Stearns thing when you compare that [Lehman]…

What if you could download a program that would scan, magically, any article written anywhere and expose the spin, bias, and misinformation? Would that interest you?This is what a new program--SpinSpotter--coming to you from Seattle, WA, purports to do. Business Week reports:The application's algorithms work off six key tenets of spin and bias, which the company derived from both the guidelines…

It's an oldie, but a goodie for the broadcast media - attacking bottled water, a legitimate product that produces billions of dollars in sales annually. The September 10 "CBS Evening News" went after the bottled water industry, suggesting that a lack of regulations for purification and testing meant bottled water is unsafe. "The marketing campaigns say it all - bottled water is a pure healthy…

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" September 8, Jim Cramer took a shot at owner of The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, in the midst of talking about the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac takeover: I read The Wall Street Journal, sorry, The Fox Street Journal. When is Murdoch going to put his positive right wing implant on left wing journalists? ... When is Murdoch going to broom the Spartacus workers…

Sex sells, even during a presidential election. But that doesn't mean journalists have to be happy about it. CNBC's "Squawk Box" co-host Joe Kernen took a moment during a panel discussion September 2 to take a shot at the onslaught of coverage over presumptive vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy. You know as a member of the media I'm just kind of embarrassed with…

Mercantilism [emphasis added]: An economic doctrine that flourished in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Mercantilists held that a nation's wealth consisted primarily in the amount of gold and silver in its treasury. Accordingly, mercantilist governments imposed extensive restrictions on their economies to ensure a surplus of exports over imports. In the eighteenth century,…