Latest Posts

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Yahoo News political columnist Matt Bai brought up 1960s era segregationist Alabama Democratic governor and former presidential candidate George Wallace during a discussion of Donald Trump's popularity: "There is a very dissatisfied conservative piece of the electorate, you know. It goes back really as far as George Wallace."

The left and entertainment press have had a field day whining about how much more Harrison Ford was paid for his role in The Force Awakens compared to costars and series newcomers John Boyega and Daisy Ridley.

“Harrison Ford Was Paid Over 50x More Than ‘Star Wars’ Co-Stars” Variety’s headline blared. (SPOILERS AHEAD)

Headline atop the page two “Voices” column in Tuesday's USA Today by Trevor Hughes, the Denver-based correspondent for the newspaper: “How I came to decide to buy a gun.” “After months of soul-searching, I’ve decided to buy a handgun,” Hughes began, later making an obvious point so many journalists would prefer to avoid: “You don’t see terror attacks in this country on areas where there’s lots of armed men and women. Instead, it’s those soft targets that get hit.”

Yesterday, CNBC's Krystina Gustafson opened her article about the state of the Christmas shopping season by reporting that "procrastinators around the U.S. provided a much-needed boost to retailers" last weekend, but that "the lift was likely too little too late to salvage a slow start to the holiday shopping season." The story's headline: "Retailers cut too deep to save the holiday season."

Readers who go to the link will not see that headline now. Instead, the headline, contradicting Gustafson's contention that it was probably already too late, now reads: "Can last-minute shoppers save the holiday season?" As seen after the jump, the original downbeat headline remains at Google (which lists original headlines, and as best I can tell doesn't change them if the linked story's headline changes) and Yahoo Finance:

According to Fusion writer Charles Pulliam-Moore, there might be an undercurrent of gay love in the new Star Wars movie.

On Tuesday, NBC’s Today devoted two full reports to President Obama appearing on Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The first report came late in the 7 a.m. ET hour, with co-host Carson Daly proclaiming: “President Obama and Jerry Seinfeld take a little spin on the South Lawn in a 1963 Corvette before they sit down for a candid conversation about life in the White House....[which] focuses more on the ‘lighter side of the presidency’...an opportunity to ‘pull back the curtain.’”

The business press worships at the altar of seasonally adjusted data. Most journalists covering the economy don't even bother looking at raw, not seasonally adjusted data, which in layman's terms is best understood as "what actually happened." As I have shown for nearly a decade, this is often a big mistake.

On the rare occasions when reporters take the initiative to look at the raw data, they usually ignor it, or fail to grasp its meaning. A perfect example of that phenomenon occurred today at Bloomberg News. The business press is blindly accepting a reported 10.5 percent drop in existing home sales as evidence of all kinds of problems, including — supposedly, but not really — a regulation-driven extension of closing time frames. Though Bloomberg's Victoria Stilwell was astute enough to look at the underlying data, unlike her fellow reporters at the Associated Press and Reuters, she completely ignored how doing so blew up the narrative.