Christopher Rugaber

Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press and the "expert" he quoted in his writeup on the government's awful Employment Cost Index report seemed to be taking their cues from Steven Wright's deadpan comedy act. The problem, of course, is that they were writing and saying isn't funny at all. Rugaber, with his "expert" help, assembled an impressive array of understatements and misstatements in…

The National Association of Business Economics released its quarterly survey of its members' take on the state of the current and future economy today. Given that the survey only had 112 responses, it's probably not a good idea to generalize too much about its results. That didn't stop The Hill from headlining Vicki Needham's writeup by far too optimistically declaring that "Business leaders…

The serious sales slumps combined with inventory buildups in manufacturing and wholesale industries, documented in previous NewsBusters posts, continues. So does the establishment press's determination to ignore them. At the Associated Press today, Christopher Rugaber was tasked to cover the Federal Reserve's June release on Industrial Production. The good news is that the Fed report showed an…

As seen in two previous posts at NewsBusters, once the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber didn't get the job market "nearing full health" he expected and briefly thought he got in Thursday's jobs report, he quickly downgraded it to "painting a mixed picture," and took it further down to "a bleaker picture" about eight hours later. That still left the problem, six years after the recession's…

The Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber had a very bad day on Thursday as he covered the government's June jobs report, but it was all self-inflicted. I noted much of the problem in a NewsBusters post yesterday, citing how the AP economics writer got badly burned while engaging in the wire service's usual practice of analyzing expected and reported economic results instead of concentrating on…

This post will document what transpired at the Associated Press on Thursday before and just after the release of the government's employment report. It should be a humiliating lesson to its business and economics writers. One would hope that they might learn to concentrate solely on discerning and accurately reporting the relevant facts, and to leave the analysis to others. (I know; fat chance…

Though the Associated Press is now basically admitting it, we all knew it. Obamacare's 30-hours-per-week definition of a "full-time employee" for employer health insurance coverage purposes has been responsible for one of the fundamentally negative changes in the American workforce — a noticeable move away from full-time to part-time employment. In a report with a current Saturday morning time…

Yesterday, the government revised the economy's first-quarter contraction from the annualized 0.7 percent it reported in May to 0.2 percent. In covering that news, the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber spent most of his report speculating about the second quarter's impending "rebound" as if its existence is absolutely certain, citing only the items which would cause readers to believe that'…

On May 1, the Associated Press's Paul Wiseman was pleased to tell the wire service's readers and subscribing outlets that "The University of Michigan's sentiment index rose to 95.9 from 93 in March," reaching "its second-highest level since 2007." Among other things, the survey's chief economist said that the result reflected "improving prospects for jobs and incomes." What a difference two…

Tuesday evening, I wrote that there appears to be a need for an intervention among the economics writers at the Associated Press. At the time, I was referring to how the wire service's Christopher Rugaber, in his dispatch on a trade group's upbeat business sentiment survey appearing about an hour after Martin Crutsinger's writeup on the horrible March trade imbalance, failed to report Crutsinger…

It appears that someone might need to schedule an intervention with the Associated Press's economics writers. In his dispatch published a half-hour after the government's March release on international trade at 8:30 this morning, the wire service's Martin Crutsinger quoted a normally upbeat economist who was singing the blues about the result's effect on previously reported first-quarter…

In all the hoopla over the Federal Reserve's Wednesday's signals over its intentions to raise interest rates, its significant downgrades to expected growth of the U.S. economy during the next several years have mostly been ignored. The Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, has played a part in that. Both of the wire service's reports following the Fed's actions and predictions on…

The Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is hard at work putting a brave face on a shaky economy. Just one example: On Thursday, after February consumer spending fell sharply for the third straight month, the wire service's Christopher Rugaber reported that "Freezing temperatures and snowstorms likely weighed on sales in February," and that "steep drops in gas prices dragged down…

Friday's Employment Situation Summary contained one strong element: In November, the economy added 321,000 seasonally adjusted payroll jobs. That's not insignificant, but that news, especially in the report's full context, certainly didn't justify the level of elation seen in much of the press. Predictably, the Associated Press found a specious reason to characterize the government's report as…