Associated Press

On Wednesday, Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press was tasked with covering ADP's morning report on January private-sector payrolls. At 8:15 a.m., the payroll and benefits giant estimated that the economy added 205,000 seasonally adjusted private-sector jobs last month. Rugaber also attended the 8:30 a.m. conference call which followed the report's release. It's clear that he was on it…

One of the economy's more important bellwethers has been on a steep year-long decline which shows no signs of abating this year. It's barely news, and much of the sparse reporting seen has been incomplete and sloppy. Truckinginfo.com reported today that "January was a tough month for truck manufacturers as Class 8 truck orders were down 35% compared to the previous month, according to a…

A great deal was made of Facebook's announcement last week that it would ban private gun sales on both its flagship website and Instagram. Readers who only followed establishment press accounts can be forgiven if they came away from most reports thinking that the firm has some kind of algorithm or recognition system for enforcing the ban. That's not so.

A Sunday morning report by Associated Press political writer John O'Connor acts as if the the sordid history of fiscal irresponsibility in the State of Illinois is a new development brought on by a stubborn Republican governor in just the past seven months. What hogwash. The state has had a large backlog of delinquent unpaid bills for a decade, if not longer. Five years ago, a Democratic…

As has been its habit during the Obama administration when the economy turns in a poor performance, the press's coverage of yesterday's report on U.S. economic growth focused on how much better next quarter's news will supposedly be. Especially in this instance, the beat reporters and pundits should have looked at whether or not yesterday's initial result will hold up, or whether it's likely to…

Friday morning, the government reported that the economy grew at a pathetic annual rate of 0.7 percent in last year's final quarter. As it did in covering the disappointing Christmas shopping season, the business press partially blamed yesterday's awful result on the weather, i.e., warm weather.

This afternoon, Catherine Herridge at Fox News reported that "the intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails 'too damaging' to national security to release under any circumstances." This eighth "smoking gun" — on top of the seven an Investor's Business Daily editorial identified last week — wasn't enough to move the Associated Press Bradley Klapper from the AP's default…

The Associated Press may be down to one person in the whole wide world who will tell its economics reporters what they want to hear when the federal government releases economic data. That's what you almost have to conclude after reading the wire service's reports on two of Thursday's major releases, namely last week's initial unemployment claims and December's durable goods orders and shipments…

The hype machine was in overdrive at the Associated Press on Wednesday as economics reporter Josh Boak covered the government's mid-morning release on new-home sales. Boak opened by writing that "Americans rushed to buy new homes in December at the strongest pace in 10 months." Good heavens, we're talking about only 38,000 individuals or families, or about 0.031 percent of the nation's roughly…

Critics who warned in 2010 that the odious Dodd-Frank law's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would become a rogue agency which would become a largely unaccountable behemoth on a mission to create problems where none exist could not have been more correct. Sadly, searches on terms relevant to one of the agency's latest controversies involving the distribution of funds in a two year-old auto-…

Barely making the Associated Press's top 10 U.S. stories list shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern Time is a story about the arrest and indictment of Samy Mohamed Hamzeh in Milwaukee. With informants posting as co-conspirators, Hamzeh intended to carry out a massacre of "at least 30 people" at "a Masonic temple in Milwaukee," intending to kill "everyone they saw," and to then "walk away from the scene…

Over the past several months, economics reporters at the Associated Press have told us time and time and time again that the U.S. economy is "largely insulated" from adverse economic developments overseas. So why is the AP's Martin Crutsinger going along with the now-shifting conventional "wisdom" that Janet Yellen's Federal Reserve may have to defer implementing additional interest-rate…

Tiny actor-director Danny DeVito can make a big charge of American racism on the controversy over the all-white acting nominations for the Academy Awards. “It’s unfortunate that the entire country is a racist country. So it’s an example of the fact that even though some great people have given some great performances in movies, they weren’t even thought about. We are living in a country that…

On January 26, 2006, former Vice President, current climate alarmist and centimillionaire Al Gore told the Associated Press's David Germain that "unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return." Tuesday, as DC and much of the Northeast finishes digging out from a serious and possibly historic weekend snowstorm,…