Major Newspapers

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":

On his Tuesday night show, with the help of Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News described how the "Black Lives Matter" movement sustains itself. The rest of the press wants readers, listeners and viewers to presume that it is a self-sustaining, grass-roots movement. It isn't. O'Reilly also noted that megastars Jay-Z and Beyoncé, numbers 28 and 29, respectively, on…

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank is obsessed with tearing Wisconsin Governor and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker down, and is clearly not above distorting the facts to make his pathetic points. Milbank's latest tirade is about how Walker is allegedly "so dangerous" because he doesn't like unions. That's based on quite a bit of direct experience, which has included death threats…

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…

Veteran journalist John Harwood, according to his Twitter home page, covers "Washington and national politics for CNBC and the New York Times." Saturday morning, despite all of his experience, Harwood tweeted a question (HT Twitchy) so naive that a freshman journalism student would have been embarrassed to ask it:

In a speech at a Republican Lincoln Day dinner in West Virginia earlier this week, Murray Energy Corp. founder and CEO Robert Murray decried the Obama administration's determination to, as described at the financial news site SNL.com (to be clear, no relation to Saturday Night Live), "bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U…

In June, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley unveiled a "climate change plan." The press loved it. Glowing articles appeared in many place, including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill and the Huffington Post, whose Kate Sheppard wrote that the former Maryland Governor had "Just Set An Extremely High Bar ... For 2016 Democratic Contenders." Well, if they're so wired into…

The company officially known as the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. has filed for bankruptcy for the second time in five years. This time around, the storied "A&P" name may completely disappear. Coverage at USA Today by Nathan Bomey notes that "About 93% (of its workers) are represented by one of 12 different unions, and many of them have bumping rights that the company has described as…

Nicholas Confessore and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times studiously avoided talking about Hillary Clinton's campaign spending in their front-page print edition story Thursday ("Hillary Clinton Lags in Engaging Grass-Roots Donors"). Mrs. Clinton hauled in $48.7 million, but she spent a stunning $18.7 million. As seen in a table accompanying the Times story, that's more than triple that of…

The media instinct to trash all that is inspiring and noble was unmistakable in Monday morning's Today report on the new novel (Go Set a Watchman) by Harper Lee, the author of the widely celebrated, best-selling To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960. Debate has raged over whether Lee, who is in very poor health and whose mental competence has been questioned, ever wanted her manuscript…

Here is an object lesson in how the perceptions of low-information voters are shaped to the disadvantage of Republican and conservative candidates. In the daily email I receive from Eonline.com (subscribing to the web site’s missives is a necessary evil), the fifth item listed read: “Scott Walker Announces 2016 Presidential Run.” (Curiously, the web version of that email no longer links to the…

Aamer Madhani at USA Today took the easy way out on Friday in covering the sharp increases in murders in many U.S. cities during the first half of this year. He quoted Milwaukee's police chief bemoaning "absurdly weak" gun laws. He noted that "the increased violence is disproportionately impacting poor and predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods." He found a university prof to…

Apparently nothing is ever the government's fault during the Obama era — even a clear failure by authorities to prevent an alleged mass-murderer from acquiring a gun, and their failure to retrieve it once he obtained it. Earlier today, before it went down the paper's frequently used memory hole, reporter Michael S. Schmidt wrote in his second paragraph that alleged mass murderer Dylann Roof got…

One would think that a presidential candidate falsely claiming that she never was subpoenaed would be bigger news story than people in the opposing party criticizing that candidate after the fact for her obviously false statement. As Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted late this afternoon, that's not the case. This post contains several more examples. At CNN, the network's own Brianna Keilar, who…