Government Agencies

On Saturday, Erika Rawes at USA Today's Wall Street Cheat Sheet engaged in some impressive gymnastics as she discussed the middle class and identified seven things its members "can't afford anymore" (the headline) or that "a larger percentage of people have trouble paying for" (the content). It's a sloppy list. One of the items — debt — isn't a "thing" at all, but rather the result of buying too…

Tuesday's CBS This Morning show was an especially disgraceful display of media bias. Late yesterday morning, NewsBusters' Jeffrey Meyer noted how the show's Nora O'Donnell admitted to throwing "a softball of a question" at Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. The question: “What's going to happen if Republicans take control (of the Senate)?” NB's Scott Whitlock additionally…

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…

Imagine the pile-on that would be occurring from other members of the nation's establishment press if a Republican or conservative U.S. Senate candidate went after an individual member of the press as Alison Grimes just has against NBC/MSNBC reporter Chuck Todd. The "How dare you?" cries would be everywhere. It's hard to see how employing such a tactic works to get votes, but Grimes, the…

On Wednesday night, comedian Jimmy Kimmel used Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) annual Wastebook as an opportunity to mock the federal government’s continued waste of taxpayer dollars. The ABC late night host hilariously asked his audience if they could “tell the difference between a real government expenditure from Wastebook and an idea a stoner came up with on his own.” 

Sandwiched in between two domestic terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in Canada during the past three days, USA Today ran a Tuesday op-ed which appeared in Wednesday's print edition by Mary Zeiss Stange called "Beware the Christian Extremists." With all due respect, ma'am, we've got bigger worries. But in Ms. Stange's world, Christian "religious extremism taken to potentially lethal ends"…

On Wednesday, Today co-host Matt Lauer began an interview with Bill O'Reilly by citing liberal New York Times columnist Frank Bruni actually criticizing the Obama administration's handling of the Ebola crisis: "One dimension of the disease's toll is clear. It's ravaging Americans' already tenuous  faith in the competence of our government and its bureaucracies." O'Reilly agreed with Bruni's "…

Josh Lederman's report this morning at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, treats President Barack Obama's return to Chicago as a trip down memory lane: "Obama got glimpses of a simpler time when his life was for the most part, normal: the unpaid bills on his desk, the volunteers who pitched in on his first Senate campaign, the day he marched in seven Fourth of July parades."…

The White House is apparently feeling pretty full of itself over the fiscal 2014 federal budget result it has just reported. Reacting to the news that this year's deficit was "only" $483.4 billion, White House budget director Shaun Donovan crowed that "This is a return to fiscal normalcy." The press, of course including Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press, has accepted all of this with little…

On October 8, Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press wrote that "(President Barack) Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." In a NewsBusters post later that day, I pegged Obama's true inheritance at roughly $245 billion as of when he was first sworn into office, and at about $600 billion if projected over the full fiscal year. The actual deficit for fiscal…

In an all too typical unskeptical report, Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, allowed President Barack Obama to claim, in Kuhnhenn's words, that "health and security experts continue to tell him that the screening measures already in place for travelers are more effective" than "restricting travel to the U.S. from the three Ebola-stricken West African nations."…

Appearing on Friday's CBS This Morning, Republican pollster Frank Luntz reacted to the latest CBS News poll showing Americans having a "crisis of confidence" in government institutions: "The problem is that the institutions that have the greatest impact on us, the CDC, the FDA, the EPA, those that are responsible for our health and safety, are the ones that have had the biggest collapse. In fact…

On Thursday's Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN's Tom Foreman zeroed in on representatives on "both sides of the aisle...[who] are also clearly frustrated by what they see as a lack of answers and accountability from the CDC." Foreman highlighted that "CDC Director Tom Frieden dodged even basic questions – like how did two hospital workers get the disease" at a congressional hearing on the federal…

For years, government watchdog groups have chronicled numerous instances of waste and abuse — at the very least — at the Centers for Disease Control and its National Institutes for Health. An establishment press corps doing its job, upon hearing the director of the National Institutes for Health claim that "if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have…