Tuesday’s edition of the CBS Evening News used a liberal tax group, passed off as “non-partisan,” to bash, from the left, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s tax plan. Trumpeting the “non-partisan Tax Policy Center,” chief White House correspondent Major Garrett used multiple soundbites from senior fellow Howard Gleckman to hype that “an independent analysis says Trump's plan would cost the Treasury $10 trillion over 10 years and increase the nation's $18 trillion debt.”
Covert Liberal Activists
By Matthew Balan | September 29, 2015 | 2:08 PM EDT
On Tuesday's CNN Newsroom, Carol Costello treated Planned Parenthood's own talking points about "three percent" of its services are abortions as "facts." Costello emphasized that "$500 million in federal funds goes to Planned Parenthood. None of that money...pays for abortions....Planned Parenthood says only three percent of their services are dedicated to abortion. The group says 97 percent of its services are for things like...breast exams...cancer screenings and contraception."
By Tom Blumer | September 24, 2015 | 1:48 AM EDT
The competition for the most annoying aspect of establishment press business reporting is fierce. One which immediately identifies a reporter as hopelessly biased and ignorant is any reference to "laissez faire" as a condition allegedly present in any modern economy anywhere on earth.
"Laissez faire" is an economic concept involving "an economic system in which transactions between private parties are free from government interference such as regulations, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies." There are no true "laissez faire" economies of any meaningful size, because they are all regulated to some extent. As we will see shortly, some in the press even employ the obviously absurd term "laissez faire regulation."
By Tom Blumer | September 23, 2015 | 11:16 AM EDT
Word on the street is that ESPN is planning to lay off "200 to 300" employees in the coming months.
The go-to euphemism surrounding the impending layoffs, according to Variety's Brian Steinberg, is "the changing media landscape," primarily the "cord-cutting" phenomenon. In July, the Big Lead blog, in discussing Keith Olbermann's expected departure from ESPN, explained that "millennials are eschewing expensive cable TV bills and streaming everything online." While that might explain flat viewership or even a modest decline, cord-cutting is only a minor part of the problem. Someone needs to explain why ESPN's ratings have fallen by a stunning 30 percent in the past 12 months.
By Tom Blumer | September 22, 2015 | 11:57 PM EDT
In what appears to be a mixed result in the quest for clarity, the Associated Press has announced that its reporters and those who wish to adhere to its Stylebook guidelines will henceforth refer to those who don't worship at the altar of the global warming/climate change absolutists "doubters" instead of "deniers" and "skeptics."
The specific change reads as follows: "To describe those who don’t accept climate science or dispute the world is warming from man-made forces, use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science. Avoid use of skeptics or deniers."
By Tom Blumer | September 22, 2015 | 5:38 PM EDT
The Associated Press, serving as the left's de facto Praetorian guard, came through for its abortion-supporting masters once again today.
The wire service's Alan Fram, in a sentence describing the Center for Medical Progress's Planned Parenthood videos, told readers that they show "how they sometimes send fetal tissue to medical researchers" without noting that doing so routinely generates money for the organization.
By Tom Blumer | September 20, 2015 | 6:28 PM EDT
A year ago, Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted that the New York Times was "offering 13-day tours of Iran guided by Times journalist Elaine Sciolino" at the bargain rate of $6,995 per person. Among other things, it promised "excellent insights into ... (the) life and accomplishments" of Ayatollah Khomeini, the ruthless Islamist leader who posed as a liberator, but then imposed a fundamentalist Islamic state after taking control of that country in the late 1970s. Those tours are still active, and popular.
Given that background, I suppose we really shouldn't be all that surprised that Ira Stoller at SmarterTimes.com reported a related development this morning. With the imminent lifting of Western sanctions against Iran, the ever-opportunistic International division of the Times is cohosting an October 6-7 "Oil and Money" conference in London (I promise, I'm not making this up).
By Tom Blumer | September 19, 2015 | 10:02 AM EDT
The business press is trying to convince readers, listeners, and viewers that Janet Yellen's Federal Reserve kept interest rates at zero not because of U.S. economic conditions, which supposedly "look good" with "steady economic growth." No-no. She stayed the course because of the troubled tglobal economy.
Thursday evening, Reuters wrote that the Fed failed to move "in a bow to worries about the global economy, financial market volatility and sluggish inflation at home." Bloomberg directly blamed "China growth concerns." The Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger cited "a weak global economy, persistently low inflation and unstable financial markets." None of the three noted the deteriorating situation in the U.S., and the only item I could find which cited the Fed's full set of pathetic annual U.S. growth projections was a Wall Street Journal editorial.
By Tom Blumer | September 18, 2015 | 10:53 PM EDT
In the pre-social media days, we endured "threats" from various people, mostly celebrities with far-left political views, that they would leave the country if a Republican presidential candidate won election or reelection. Late director Robert Altman, actor Alec Baldwin, actress Kim Basinger, singer Barbra Streisand, and others threatened to leave the U.S. in 2000 if George W. Bush won that year's presidential contest against Al Gore. Though Altman left us permanently in 2006, none of the luminaries just named carried through on their threats to move elsewhere when Bush won.
Now it's apparently a bit of a sport on social media to threaten to leave the country if Donald Trump wins the presidency. On Tuesday, clearly otherwise out of story ideas, Paul Singer at USA Today treated a "content analysis" firm's compilation of such desires expressed on Twitter as news. It's also comedy gold (HT Gateway Pundit; bolds are mine):
By Tom Blumer | September 17, 2015 | 2:21 PM EDT
Either Nicholas Riccardi at the Associated Press is woefully ignorant, or he set out to deliberately mislead readers about the impact of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush's tax plan. I'll report the details; readers here can decide for themselves.
Riccardi's "analysis," contained in his Sunday morning writeup covering the tax proposals of Bush, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, contained the following paragraph summarizing the Bush plan's impact (HT to longtime emailer Alfred Lemire):
By Tom Blumer | September 16, 2015 | 10:53 PM EDT
Nowhere is the anti-Israel bias of so much of the establishment press more evident than in its coverage of terror attacks and crimes committed by Palestinians.
One such example occurred almost a year ago in the Associated Press. In that instance, the story concerned a Palestinian who drove his car into a crowd and killed a three-month old baby girl. He was in turn shot and killed by the police when he tried to flee. The AP's initial headline read: "Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem." On Tuesday, the New York Times got into the act in a big way, in a headline and story by Diaa Hadid which gave rocks, which are after all inanimate objects, extraordinary powers (HT Kevin Williamson at National Review via Instapundit; bolds and numbered tags are mine):
By Tom Blumer | September 16, 2015 | 5:21 PM EDT
From its "Don't read this story, it's boring" headline to its obfuscating content, today's coverage at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, of the Census Bureau's 2014 report on income and poverty in the United States was all about ensuring that readers know as little as possible about the declining incomes and disheartening increases in officially-defined poverty seen during the Obama administration.
I'll focus on just two of the many shortcomings in Jesse J. Holland's AP report.