Government Agencies

All you need to know about the Associated Press's interest in accurately reporting current developments in the investigations into 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server is this: A search at its national site on "Hillary crime" (not in quotes) returns nothing. Ken Thomas's coverage of the former Secretary of State's "forceful defense" last night in "a…

Carrying water for the left as their pet programs implode while pretending to be an objective reporter is a daunting task. The Associated Press's Stephen Ohlemacher was not up to that task Thursday afternoon. Twice, in relatively early paragraphs of his 31-paragraph writeup, the AP reporter claimed that the Social Security system has "money." He then separately quoted a Democratic congressperson…

Records are made to be broken, but apparently government spending records are not meant to be reported. The Monthly Treasury Statement released today showed that the federal government spent a mind-boggling $374.86 billion in July. That's an all-time single-month record, surpassing the previous high of $369.39 billion "achieved" in August 2012. Yes, there was a calendar "quirk" which caused this…

A coalition of 53 press and open government organizations has “once again” urged President Barack Obama and the people in his administration “to stop practices in federal agencies that prevent important information from getting to the public.” According to an open letter sent to the Democratic occupant of the White House on Monday and released to the public the following day, groups ranging from…

Two wire service dispatches covering the government's June Wholesale Sales and Inventories release either glossed over or completely ignored what others are saying about the report's impact on near-term economic growth. The final sentence of an unbylined Reuters report vaguely referred to future impact by indicating that current inventory balances, which are bloated by historical standards, "…

The Associated Press has been in Ferguson covering the anniversary of Michael Brown's death and the George Soros-funded out-of-towners leading the "festivities." I'll leave it to others to dissect the wire service's on-the-street reporting during the past several days. What also concerns me is how AP's reports continue to bitterly cling to half-truths and distortions about how Brown died and the…

On Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency committed an act which would have likely become instant national news if a private entity had done the same thing. On Friday, John Merline at Investors' Business Daily succinctly noted that the EPA "dumped a million gallons of mine waste into Animas River in Colorado, turning it into what looked like Tang, forcing the sheriff's office to…

The Associated Press has demonstrated a double standard in covering developments in various states in the wake of the gruesome Planned Parenthood videos posted by the Center for Medical Progress. Bad news for Planned Parenthood gets only local coverage. Exculpatory news, even if artificially concocted, gets national exposure. In Florida, a statewide review of the state’s 16 Planned Parenthood…

On Thursday, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three networks and the two leading Spanish-language networks ignored the latest developments in the now 813 day-old IRS targeting scandal. As usual, only Fox News covered a congressional hearing on, in Fox's words, "the lack of accountability following the IRS targeting of tea party and other groups" as well as a federal judge's threat "…

Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press and the "expert" he quoted in his writeup on the government's awful Employment Cost Index report seemed to be taking their cues from Steven Wright's deadpan comedy act. The problem, of course, is that they were writing and saying isn't funny at all. Rugaber, with his "expert" help, assembled an impressive array of understatements and misstatements in…

The bar-lowering in the business press continues. In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":

The news out of Venezuela has apparently become so grim that the arguably Chavista-sympathetic press barely bothers to report it in any kind of sutstantive fashion. Inflation has gone wild, the level of violent crime has become frightening, and the government has taken to jailing citizens who dare to tweet their dissatisfaction with the regime of Nicolas Makuro (note that the linked report was…

Yet another important economic statistic confidently predicted to rise has fallen — hard. This time it was June's pending sales of existing homes. Just in time for summer, they were predicted to increase by a seasonally adjusted 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent. Instead they fell by 1.8 percent, the steepest drop since December 2013. Additionally, May's original 0.9 percent increase was revised down…

I guess the slogan of labor has changed from "Look for the union label" to "Look for the union waiver." The Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story early this morning on an issue some people thought disappeared after its initial exposure two months ago. The issue is whether union workers should be exempt from minimum wage laws, especially the sky-high minimums being enacted in some U…