Unemployment

The news in two government reports on the economy today was not good. One showed that initial unemployment claims last week rose to a seasonally adjusted 348,000; raw (not seasonally adjusted) claims were virtually identical to last year's comparable week. To avoid the dreaded U-word ("unexpectedly"), a pair of Bloomberg News reporters described the result as "exceeding all forecasts." In the…

While all three broadcast networks happily promoted President Obama's crusade to hike the minimum wage following his State of the Union address, NBC's Today and ABC's Good Morning America only managed to provide a scant 42 seconds of coverage on Wednesday to a new Congressional Budget Office study showing such a move would cause 500,000 people to lose their jobs. Wednesday's CBS This Morning…

The folks at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, are really having a hard time processing the UAW's failure to gain the ability to represent Volkswagen's Chattanooga, Tennessee workers in an election held last week. AP journalists, who themselves are members of the News Media Guild, are exhibiting characterstics of still partially being in Stage 1 (Denial) but mostly Stage 2 (…

In yet another example of revisionist history, MSNBC.com’s Suzy Khimm conveniently blamed the GOP for Congress’s failure to extend unemployment benefits, leaving out how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has repeatedly prevented votes on GOP amendments to offset unemployment benefit spending with cuts elsewhere. Khimm lamented how "With a major snowstorm approaching the East Coast,…

It isn't at all difficult to spot the absurdity in Josh Boak's 9:45 a.m. Associated Press report today on retail sales, which declined 0.4 percent from December on a seasonally adjusted basis. His first paragraph claims that "consumer spending at the end of 2013" had "momentum," while his second shows that the there was none (bolds are mine):

Ken Shepherd at NewsBusters made reference Tuesday to an Associated Press story headline ("Modest drop in full-time work seen from health law") indicating that the outfit I prefer to call the Administration's Press is furiously spinning in reaction to Tuesday's report from the Congressional Budget Office projecting that Obamacare will reduce full-time-equivalent employment from what it would…

Following White House talking points to the letter on Wednesday's The Daily Rundown on MSNBC, host Chuck Todd bemoaned how "Republicans immediately seized on" the Congressional Budget Office report on ObamaCare costing the economy over 2 million jobs "and spun it the way they want to spin it." He fretted that Democrats would have a tough time defending ObamaCare "in the world of sound bites and…

While both CBS This Morning and ABC's Good Morning America both managed some air time on Wednesday to cover a new Congressional Budget Office report showing ObamaCare will cost the American economy about 2.5 million jobs, NBC's Today couldn't be bothered to mention the troubling news. The NBC morning show did have time to provide a three-minute report on the latest bad behavior by pop star…

Give Sam Stein credit for being an honest liberal.  Confronted with the CBO's findings about the disastrous job-killing effects of Obamacare, Stein didn't try to spin the unspinnable. On today's Morning Joe, Donnie Deutsch invited Stein to play a game of Mad Men.  Deutsch first sketched out a 30-second ad making the case against Obamacare--that contrary to what President Obama had said, you…

Liberals have become obsessed with raising the mandated minimum wage, the better to divert attention from the minimal competence of the Obama administration. Appearing yesterday on Ed Schultz's radio show, Ruth Conniff, political editor of the Progressive magazine, apparently forgot that her remarks would be broadcast over the airwaves when the two were discussing the left's most recent…

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report this morning projecting among other things, that 2.5 million Americans will drop out of full-time work thanks to ObamaCare. We will, of course, track how the broadcast networks cover this story, but if the news websites for ABC, CBS, and NBC are any indication, they will downplay and/or heavily spin this development. For its part,…

Today, President Obama is going to ask a group of private-sector companies to help him try to solve a problem his administration's policies have seriously worsened, namely long-term unemployment. Of course, that's not how Josh Lederman at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, framed the situation. All he would concede is that "long-term joblessness in the U.S. remains a major…

You really have to listen to Mika Brzezinski's voice rising as if in a question as she pronounces the very last word in an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal column—and watch the expression on her face—to appreciate how utterly baffled, befuddled and bewildered she seems by the simple notion that increasing the cost of hiring motivates employers to automate their operations. The column, "The…

In May 2009, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, announced that it would be "launching an index that will provide monthly, multi-format updates on the economic stress of the United States down to the county level." Not a bad idea, especially if you were concerned that evidence of an economic recovery under Barack Obama would not otherwise be convincing. The AP likely…