Agence France-Presse

It’s well known that the mainstream media loves to vilify the State of Israel for their ongoing defensive struggle against terrorist groups residing in Gaza and the West Bank. This weekend they sunk to a new low when Yahoo! News ran a report from the Agence France-Presse with the headline “Israel army kills West Bank Palestinian.” The article then began with  “Israeli soldiers killed a…

The competition is fierce, but perhaps the most consistent area of outright and arguably deliberate U.S. and worldwide press distortion is found in their coverage of the Catholic Church and its pontiff. Last week, the major international wires and several U.S. outlets once again demonstrated that readers, listeners and viewers can never trust that they will get an accurate story relating to…

During a pair of interviews with people from Vox.com -- which is described as a "general interest news site for the 21st Century" -- president Barack Obama on Monday described the roles of news sources in a variety of unflattering ways. In the first discussion, editor-in-chief Ezra Klein asked Obama to respond to the fact that “you are the most polarizing president really since we began polling…

At roughly 8 a.m. Eastern Time Tuesday morning, the wire service AFP (Agence France-Presse) had a story entitled "Fighting nears Baghdad as UN warns crisis 'life-threatening.'" AFP reported that "Militants pushed a weeklong offensive that has overrun swathes of Iraq to within 60 kilometres (37 miles) of Baghdad Tuesday." A Skynet video found at Gateway Pundit tells us that "ISIS Terrorists…

Did you ever notice how the liberal media can obsess for days over a Koran-burning stunt, but ignore feminist groups that have a serious hatred problem with the Catholic Church? Via Chicks on the Right, we learned that the bratty anti-Catholic leftists of FEMEN have pulled their latest stunt. A woman with the message “I AM GOD” painted on her body jumped up on the altar and screamed in the…

On October 3, the National Retail Federation projected that "sales in the months of November and December" will "marginally increase 3.9 percent to $602.1 billion, over 2012’s actual 3.5 percent holiday season sales growth." But on October 16, it warned that "the average holiday shopper will spend $737.95 on gifts, décor, greeting cards and more, two percent less than the $752.24 they actually…

It must be nice to be a political leader preferred by news agencies because you can count on them to pull unflattering photos. Such was the case with both Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Reuters when they pulled a bizarre photo of French President Francois Hollade in which he appears to have a clueless smiling clown expression on his face. The UK Guardian describes the controversy: Two…

Today, as the wire service AFP reported in a story carried at Yahoo.com, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in the question and answer exchange after his prepared testimony, told the House Financial Services Committee that "If we were to tighten (monetary) policy, the economy would tank." That assessment of the economy's fragility qualifies as news, especially given the Obama…

An unbylined Agence France-Presse report Wednesday opens by telling readers that Japanese researchers "have succeeded in growing human kidney tissue from stem cells for the first time, in a potential first step towards helping millions who depend on dialysis." Another version of the report at another website identifies the reporter as Harumi Ozawa; an accompanying picture caption describes the…

It's hard to find a benchmark against which to compare remarks delivered by Vice President Joe Biden, but here's one from a past administration. In June 2004, Bush 43 Vice President Dick Cheney was greeted on the Senate Floor at the annual Senate photo op by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. Leahy had previously been flogging the left's phantasm over alleged "profiteering" by Halliburton, the…

The Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters all eagerly told readers today that the seasonally adjusted annualized level of single-family home sales in September of 389,000 was the highest in 2-1/2 years and really, really good news for the housing market, the economy as a whole, or both. What they all "somehow" failed to mention was the fact that sales are still far below where they were…

Gosh, those were the good old days. Or so Meghan Barr at the Associated Press apparently believes. As what's left of the Occupy Wall Street mobs from last year staged a pathetic anniversary protest in New York on Monday, Barr, in one of the most embarrassing reports I've seen emanate from the self-described "essential global news network," described them as "celebrating" and "giddy." At the…

First, the bad news from a media coverage standpoint. All three major wire services covering today's report from the Department of Labor on initial unemployment claims characterized the seasonally adjusted result of 374,000 as "unchanged" from last week, but failed to note the 98%-plus probability based on the last 75 weeks of history (only one exception during that time) that the number will…

Yet another episode being reported from the totalitarian nightmare that is North Korea is getting short shrift in most of the world's press, namely "criticism sessions" (i.e., rat out your neighbor, coworker, etc.) identifying North Koreans who allegedly weren't sufficiently grief-stricken over the December death of Kim Jong Il (pictured at right), weren't sufficiently demonstrative about it,…