Business Coverage

An unbylined "Q&A" column at the Associated Press yesterday began with the following false declaration: "The $4 trillion experiment is over." That just isn't so. Maybe the Federal Reserve is done building up its debt holdings — that is by no means certain — but the "experiment" known as "quantitative easing," or "QE," won't be over until the Fed fully unwinds those balances. In the meantime…

Carol Costello's liberal bias emerged yet again on Tuesday's CNN Newsroom, as she covered the catastrophic failure of the Antares rocket during a launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Costello wondered, "Can NASA really trust private companies to do its business?" The anchor later pressed on with her skepticism of private business: "Well, you know, it's a concern, because NASA also plans to…

Under Barack Obama, the Federal Communications Commission has walked away from any sense of enforcing traditional broadcast decency, a dramatic change from the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” drama of 2004. Two years ago, the courts consented to the broadcast networks’ demands that indecency is an outdated notion. (Liberals want to redefine broadcast obscenity as words like "Redskins.") But…

In a sign that the historical revisionists and Barack Obama legacy builders at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, may have shifted their operation into high gear for the final weeks of the midterm election campaign, Andrew Taylor has written that "Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." The occasion for Taylor's tripe is the…

The dictionary tells us that "a few" is "a small number of persons or things." Though there is some ambiguity in the guidance I have reviewed, it's fair to say that "Generally a few is more than 2." Not at the Associated Press, where "a few" can apparently be two, at least when it comes to "fact-checking" President Obama's grandiose claims in his Thursday speech at Northwestern University.…

Yesterday's news that the economy added 248,000 payroll jobs, while the official unemployment rate dropped to 5.9 percent, generated the expected hosannahs from much of the establishment press. One utterly predictable such writeup came from the Associated Press. The headline at Christopher Rugaber's report, "SURGE OF HIRING CUTS US JOBLESS RATE TO 5.9 PCT," utterly ignored the fact that much of…

In a report for Tuesday's CBS Evening News, correspondent John Blackstone touted California passing a law to ban plastic bags from grocery stores as "a victory for those who've declared the single-use plastic bag an environmental enemy." Leading off a similar segment on Wednesday's CBS This Morning, he declared: "You see them everywhere, plastic bags by the road, by the water, in landfills. But…

The Census Bureau reported earlier today that seasonally adjusted housing starts and homebuilding permits fell by 14.4 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, in August. The detail wasn't any better, as the two categories within each statistic — single-family and multiple-dwelling homes — also fell. You can tell that the news wasn't seen as good at the Associated Press, because Josh Boak's…

As been its habit since Barack Obama took office in 2009, the Associated Press has, whenever possible, considered the impact of news developments on the President and his party as far more important than what's actually happening in the lives of real people. The latest example is the wire service's coverage of Tuesday's Census Bureau report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage in the…

In today’s Biased Headlines department, see today’s Reid Wilson report on the Washington Post website from Wednesday: “Nevada is about to pass the biggest corporate tax giveaway in its history.” But has the Post recently described welfare programs or food stamps as a "giveaway"? It doesn't look like it.

The press is good at putting the most positive spin possible on the monthly job-market news. But at the same time, many of its members still claim that food stamp enrollment remains as high as it is because of the lingering effects of the (Bush did it) recession. On Friday, following the release of August's employment numbers, Obama administration Labor Secretary Tom Perez celebrated how "…

The Obama administration-prepared koolaid delivered to the Associated Press's economics writers on Monday must have been extraordinarily concentrated. How else can you explain how the AP's Christopher Rugaber could have written the following — "The U.S. job market has steadily improved by pretty much every gauge except ... Pay" — without doubling over with laughter? No, Chris. The reason pay…

In a Wednesday report on the Congressional Budget Office's downward revision of this year's predicted gross domestic product growth to a dismal 1.5 percent, the Associated Press's Andrew Taylor acted as if the Obama administration's prediction of 2.6 percent still has a realistic chance of occurring. While one never wants to absolutely say never, the administration's higher prediction would…

As news broke on Tuesday of Burger King buying Tim Hortons and moving its corporate headquarters to Canada, the broadcast networks quickly adopted the liberal talking point that the fast food chain was being unpatriotic by avoiding high U.S. tax rates. On Tuesday's ABC World News, anchor Diane Sawyer proclaimed: "Burger King, home of the Whopper, accused of doing something a lot of Americans…