Business Coverage

The Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is hard at work putting a brave face on a shaky economy. Just one example: On Thursday, after February consumer spending fell sharply for the third straight month, the wire service's Christopher Rugaber reported that "Freezing temperatures and snowstorms likely weighed on sales in February," and that "steep drops in gas prices dragged down…

Less than five hours after its release, the government's news that retail sales fell by 0.6 percent in February — compared to a 0.3 percent increase expected by economists and analysts — is buried way down (about 6-8 screens, depending on your computer) on the home page of Bloomberg News, where the focus is supposed to be on developments in business and the economy. Instead, the web site's main…

It has been eleven months since the firestorm over Mozilla co-founder and just-promoted CEO Brendan Eich ended in his resignation. Eich's "offense" had nothing to do with how he planned to run the business. What led to his departure shortly after he was named CEO was that six years earlier he had given $1,000 to those who supported the California Proposition 8 ballot measure prohibiting same-sex…

Stocks took a beating yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 279 points. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ each declined by over one percent. The subject line of a USA Today email I received shortly after the closing bell crystallized the establishment press "wisdom": "Dow plunges nearly 280 points as strong jobs data raises Fed rate hike fears." The problem is that even though the…

The front page of Friday’s Washington Post wasn’t at all objective about the FCC’s imposition of a “net neutrality” regime. The headline was “FCC makes Internet history: PROVIDERS DEEMED PUBLIC UTILITIES / New regulations aim to keep Web fair and open.” The same thing happened on the cover of the Post’s Express tabloid, where liberal HBO host John Oliver was honored. “Net hero: The FCC’s ruling…

After yesterday's government report on economic growth reduced the fourth quarter's originally estimated increase in gross domestic product from an annualized 2.6 percent to 2.2 percent, you just knew that the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, would try to ride to the rescue. Late Friday afternoon, the AP's Martin Crutsinger gamely tried to concoct five reasons why we shouldn't…

“Show me the money,” Jerry Maguire famously shouted in the 1996 film. Hollywood wants everyone to show it the money. Hollywood wouldn’t have glitz and glamour if people weren’t plunking down their credit cards at the local theater or watching their home DVRs or streaming new episodes to other devices. Ironically, for a multibillion industry, TV and film frequently depict the individuals and…

On Friday, Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, seemed to enjoy President Barack Obama's rant against Republicans and others grossly dissatisfied with the economy's performance on his watch. He described Obama as "taunting Republicans" in his speech at the Democratic Party's winter meeting in Washington. The wire service itself seems less enamored of Kuhnhenn's…

Thursday on his Your World show, host Neil Cavuto went after the Obama administration's near obsession with the coverage it gets on Fox News. While Team Obama can count on the Big Three triumvirate of ABC, CBS and NBC to toe the line, promoting its points while generally avoiding damning information, Fox has generally remained fair and balanced, an approach which has clearly gotten under their…

On February 12, in a report on inventories, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger referred to an economist who believed, in Crutsinger's words, "that the economy expanded at a 2 percent annual rate in the final three months of the year (2014)." That result would be a fairly significant downward revision to the 2.6 percent rate the government estimated in late January. The next day,…

In an interview with BuzzFeed on Tuesday, President Obama attacked office supply chain Staples over accusations that the company was cutting back on worker hours to avoid the ObamaCare health insurance coverage mandate for their employees: "...when I hear large corporations that make billions of dollars in profits trying to blame our interest in providing health insurance as an excuse for cutting…

The federal government today reported a $17.5 billion budget deficit for January. That brings this fiscal year's shortfall through four months to $194.2 billion, up from $182.8 billion during the same period last year. As usual, the Associated Press's coverage, this time delivered by Martin Crutsinger, named the nation's "Worst Economic Writer" by National Review's Kevin Williamson two years ago…

Yesterday, in a column at his organization's web site, the head of the nation's leading polling organization called the government's official unemployment rate, currently at 5.6 percent, a "big lie." Rest assured that if Gallup Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton had written this column during a Republican or conservative administration, his words would have been picked up by the Associated Press…

On Friday, the government reported that the nation's economy, as measured in its real gross domestic product, grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent during last year's final quarter, sharply trailing analysts' consensus predictions ranging from 3.0 percent to 3.6 percent. As is the case after the first version of every GDP report, economy watchers have been trying to estimate the effect other…