Business Coverage

Not News: Coal CEO Decries EPA's 'Political Power Grab of America's Power Grid'
By Tom Blumer | July 25, 2015 | 11:48 PM EDT

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.S. EPA in charge of the nation's electric grid."

In the establishment press, Murray's speech was only covered in a single snarky paragraph by Darren Goode at the Politico titled "Don't Hold Back Now" — obviously attempting to paint Murray as unreasonable and extreme — and a writeup at the Wheeling (WV) Intelligencer. After all, what does Murray know? He's only the head of the largest company in an industry which is still responsible for fueling 39 percent of America's electrical grid, and the majority of it in many states. Who would want to give him any visibility, as if he has anything valuable to say? Well, I do.

As June New-Home Sales 'Unexpectedly' Dive, AP's Boak Says They're Just 'Not As Hot'
By Tom Blumer | July 24, 2015 | 6:48 PM EDT

Thanks to year-over-year declines in manufacturing orders, manufacturing shipments, and wholesale sales, along with bloated inventories, apologists for the current condition of the U.S. economy are down to three defenses supposedly demonstrating that all is still really well after yet another rough first quarter (once again excused away as due to supposedly historically awful winter weather).

One of the three is that the housing market, particularly for new homes, is in a genuine recovery. Effective today, we can scratch at least the new-home element of that claim. The Census Bureau told us today that seasonally adjusted new-home sales fell by 7 percent in June, after May's originally strong figure was also revised down by 5 percent. The raw data showed that the number of new homes sold in June — supposedly peak season for new home purchases — was the same as the number sold in February.

AP and The Hill Look at the Same Business Survey, Draw Up Sharply Different Reports
By Tom Blumer | July 20, 2015 | 11:32 PM EDT

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 expect strong finish to 2015." In an upset, possibly indicating that today's scheduled koolaid delivery intended for the Associated Press got misdirected to and doubled up at the Hill's offices, the wire service's Christopher Rugaber — looking at the same survey — wrote that "U.S. businesses' outlook on sales in the coming months has darkened."

AP, Reuters Fail to Connect Latest A&P Bankruptcy to Its Unions
By Tom Blumer | July 20, 2015 | 6:54 PM EDT

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 a big barrier to reducing costs." Coverage at two of the three major business wire services, the Associated Press and Reuters, failed to mention the word "union" at all.

NY Times Public Editor Admits Paper 'Has Moved Away' From 'Just the Facts' Reporting While Chiding Story on Reddit CEO
By Clay Waters | July 19, 2015 | 4:39 PM EDT

Writing about her paper's biased, social-activist coverage of the firing of Reddit chief executive Ellen Pao, New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan let slip an unannounced editorial change by the Times, opening the floodgates even wider for reporters to inject liberal impulses into their news stories: "They want to provide 'value-added' coverage," not the "just the facts" reporting "that one can get anywhere." For the Times, "value-added" means "liberal bias."

Hiding the Decline, Again: AP's Rugaber Fails to Note Falling Shipments to Explain Flat Manufacturing Output
By Tom Blumer | July 15, 2015 | 11:44 PM EDT

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 overall increase (+0.3 percent) for the first time in three months. The bad news is that none of it came in manufacturing, which was flat as a pancake for the second straight month. The net sum of the monthly manufacturing declines so far this year is -0.3 percent. While Rugaber concentrated his attention where it belonged, i.e., on manufacturing, since it makes up 75 percent of all industrial activity, he still managed to come up with all kinds of explanations for the lack of progress — except the two most obvious (bold is mine):

AP's Crutsinger Hides Another Year-Over-Year Decline, This Time in Manufacturing and Trade Sales
By Tom Blumer | July 14, 2015 | 7:47 PM EDT

First, the good news. The Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger didn't handle his coverage of today's release of May's "Manufacturing and Trade Inventories and Sales" report by the Census Bureau as incompetently as he did the report on wholesale sales and inventories he filed on Friday. Visitors here may recall that the AP reporter referred to a key figure as "inventories" when it really represented "sales." As a result, the typical reader of Crutsinger's Friday AP dispatch could not have known that he was either ignorantly or deliberately covering up a serious 3.8 percent decline in year-over-year sales (6.8 percent before seasonal adjustment) — yet another in a string of such troubling monthly comparative decreases.

The bad news is that in covering the government's manufacturing-related report today, Crutsinger failed to report yet another serious year-over-year sales decline in an economy which we're supposed to believe is growing. Many readers will come away from Crutsinger's coverage and its accompanying headline believing that things are really all right. They're not.

At AP, Crutsinger's Too-Convenient Mislabeling Hides Steep Wholesale Sales Decline
By Tom Blumer | July 11, 2015 | 3:11 AM EDT

Martin Crutsinger has been a business and economics writer at the Associated Press for over three decades. Certain people in high places apparently hold him in high regard. In early 2014, on his 30th anniversary with the wire service, he is said to have received congratulatory letters from soon-to-be Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, soon-to-be-former chair Ben Bernanke and Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, which he clearly enjoyed as those in attendance munched on a very delicious-looking cake.

We can't know whether the congrats from those heavy hitters merely marked a career milestone, or if they included an element of "Thanks for toeing the line all these years." What I do know is that the dispatch Crutsinger wrote Friday morning on the government's gruesome May wholesale trade report contains errors and instances of ignorance which really do take the cake.

AP Pair: Sit Back and Accept the 'New Normal' Job Market: 'Smaller Workforce, Sluggish Pay'
By Tom Blumer | July 8, 2015 | 11:40 PM EDT

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 official end, of explaining away yet another disappointing job-market reading in three quite visible areas. How did Rugaber and colleague Josh Boak "fix" the problem? They decided to say that "this may be what a nearly healthy U.S. job market now looks like." In other words, this is merely the end of the sixth year of the "new normal."

AP's Rugaber Changed Jobs Report Assessment Again on Thursday, From 'Mixed' to 'Bleaker Picture'
By Tom Blumer | July 8, 2015 | 12:07 PM EDT

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 relaying the facts. But there's more.

How Convenient: AP's Rugaber Changes Post-Jobs Report Assessment of Employment Market From 'Nearing Full Health' to 'Mixed'
By Tom Blumer | July 7, 2015 | 6:11 PM EDT

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.)

As will be seen after the jump, several hours before that jobs report, the AP's Christopher Rugaber was all ready to pronounce the job market as "nearing full health," basing his bizarre assessment largely on "a surge in people looking for work" (reports referenced at this post have been saved at my host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes; bolds are mine throughout this post):

Bloomberg Reporter Bases 'Factories Making a Comeback' Story on a Survey, Ignoring Horrible Contrary Data
By Tom Blumer | July 6, 2015 | 11:55 PM EDT

As I was looking for news coverage of Thursday's horrid factory orders report from the Census Bureau late last week, I came across an incredibly optimistic Blomberg News report by Victoria Stilwell.

The headline of her story on July 1, the day before that factory orders release, read: "Factories Making a Comeback as U.S. Domestic Demand Picks Up." My reaction: On what planet? It turns out that Stilwell based her assessment on largely on a survey, namely the June Manufacturing Index published by the Institute for Supply Management earlier that day.