Business Coverage

Two years ago, Old Media, particularly the New York Times, and quite a few chronic sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome (but I repeat myself), attempted to hijack the Sago Mine tragedy in West Virginia before the wakes for the 12 dead miners were even held. They wanted to pin the catastrophe, totally without foundation, on the idea that the administration had created the conditions for the…

Are you a little skeptical when an economist or a financial strategist appears in the MSM, warning for the worst? A look back at the Dec. 25, 2006, “Where to Invest” issue of BusinessWeek gave us a measuring stick to see how frequently cited “experts” shaped up in 2007 – including New York Times regular Ian Shepherdson, Moody’s Economy.com economist Mark Zandi and Standard & Poor’s Chief…

The media are always trying to find a way to report the bad side of economic news, so it's shouldn't come as a terrible surprise to anyone that they managed to make positive holiday sales growth a bad thing.According to MasterCard SpendingPulse, retail sales were up 3.6 percent during the holiday season - 2.4 percent excluding gas prices. But because it's not as big an increase as recent years…

Does the New York Times let bias creep into its post-Christmas reports on the shopping season just completed? Smart-aleck answer: Is Maureen Dowd obsessed with Dick Cheney? (His name appears in 295 of her columns, all but four appearing during the last seven-plus years. That would be almost 40 Cheney inclusions per year, probably close to half the number of columns she has written during that…

Business & Media Institute Director Dan Gainor appeared on the Fox Business Network December 21, 2007, to discuss the media's coverage of the economy. Full of Christmas spirit, Gainor had kind words for two mainstream reporters."Even in the mainstream media there are people who get it. Looking back this year one of the big stars whose improvement was surprising is CNN's Ali Velshi who…

In 2005, I sensed that journalists in general prefer to call this time of the year in commerce that of "holiday shopping" instead of "Christmas shopping," but that when it came to people losing their jobs, they preferred to describe layoffs as relating to "Christmas."My instincts were proven correct that year and in 2006, so I chose to track the same items this year to look for any noticeable…

Since the stock and credit market turbulence began in July, NewsBusters has been informing readers that media continually predict recessions that never happen.On the sad flipside, bearishness in the press can become so pervasive that an economic downturn ends up being an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy.NewsBusters affiliate the Business and Media Institute made this very point in a late-…

When Larry Summers suggested in early 2005 that, as paraphrased by Slate's William Saletan, "innate differences between the sexes might help explain why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers," the outcry was immediate, furious, and went to saturation level virtually overnight. The controversy ultimately led to his resignation a year later as Harvard President. On…

You know all that nonsense the media have been spewing that the Bush tax cuts caused the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer? Well, the Internal Revenue Service and the Congressional Budget Office have published tax and income numbers for 2005, and the press couldn't be any more wrong. In fact, it's almost as if the media get their data from Democrat presidential candidates, and…

If you watched the news in the last 24 hours, you'd think women's clothing sales were the barometer for the economy. All three major networks reported a 6-percent decrease in women's apparel sales this holiday season, calling the figure "ominous," "worrisome" and "a big deal." The only problem is that the corporation reporting the figures, Mastercard, didn't say it was that big of a deal. In fact…

You'd hardly expect the chief Washington correspondent of business channel CNBC to negatively stereotype economic conservatives. But appearing on today's Morning Joe, the urbane John Harwood did just that.View video here.JOE SCARBOROUGH: [Huckabee is] a different type of evangelical. It's not the evangelical in American politics that's traditionally been very conservative economically. Obviously…

What is it with Hollywood liberals and their penchant for messing with my childhood heroes by making them shills for liberal storylines. First "GI Joe." Then "Knight Rider." What's next, "The A-Team"? Maybe. (h/t Perez Hilton)Variety reported yesterday that John Singleton is on board to direct a silver screen adaptation of the 1980s TV action drama "The A-Team." This time it sounds like oil…