Ever since the White House changed hands almost seven years ago, press reports on the U.S. economy have annoyingly overaccentuated whatever positives reporters might find (or think they have found), while ignoring glaring negatives and omitting key items.

One example of such biased reporting came from the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger on Wednesday. In covering the Census Bureau's October Durable Goods report, Crutsinger praised its one-month seasonally adjusted increases in new orders and shipments. While that news was welcome, the AP reporter ignored the ugly fact that October's actual (i.e., not seasonally adjusted) year-over-year figure was lower than October 2014, marking the seventh straight month of year-over-year declines. He also didn't address shipments, which have been flat compared to to the same month last year for the past four months, at all.

You name the problem, Tom Friedman's got the answer: raise taxes on gasoline. Looks like Tom Brokaw's caught Friedman's gas-tax raising fever.

On today's Morning Joe, Brokaw proposed, as part of fighting the war on terror, raising gas taxes by five cents per gallon. Brokaw argued that it is wrong that the burden of fighting falls on just 1% of Americans, and that the result of his tax increase would be that "every time you go to the pump you have to think about what's going on elsewhere."  For liberals, any event is a good excuse to do the thing they love best: raising taxes.

Call it the triumph of the "new normal."

At Reuters today, after today's first revision of third-quarter gross domestic product showed that the economy grew by an annualized 2.1 percent, up from the late-October estimate of 1.5 percent, reporter Lucia Mutikani and Editor Paul Simao demonstrated that they have completely given in to the artificially lowered expectations of past seven miserable years. Despite the fact that annual growth in the U.S. economy averaged 3.4 percent from 1946-2007 — a period which included ten recessions — and that it has seen four-year spurts averaging over 4 percent several times in the past three decades, the Reuters pair claims that its "long-run potential" is now only 2 percent, thus making today's 2.1 percent result "respectable."

Liberals sometimes say that law enforcement’s approach to the Mafia offers a model for how to deal with jihadists, even though the latter tend not to limit their demands to protection money. This past Sunday, Egberto Willies claimed that if terrorist attacks were “treated as they should be, like organized crime, it would neuter ISIS. After all…the group is no more powerful than a large band of thugs with weapons.”

But crimefighting methods weren’t the main concern of Willies’s piece. Rather, it was his belief that “neocons” wish to exploit fear of terrorism in order to start a war which would “transfer wealth from the masses to the few owners of the defense industrial complex.” Willies also ranted that conservatives don’t take a back seat to Islamist fanatics when it comes to lethality: “America's right-wing mass killers and gang bangers have killed more people in the West than ISIS has.”

The press's reluctance to relay Obamacare-related bad news has been obvious for years. Nowhere is this more consistently the case than at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press.

Over half of the state non-profit co-ops set up under Obamacare with $2 billion-plus in taxayer funding are failing. The AP has generally treated those failures as local stories, even though they relate to the Affordable Care Act, the passage of which they still call President Barack Obama's "signature domestic achievement." Most of the other co-ops are either incurring huge losses, have become undercapitalized, or both. So watch, in context, how AP business writer Tom Murphy, in a dispatch primarily about UnitedHealth Group's announcement that "it is pulling back from its push into the Affordable Care Act's public insurance exchanges":