By Tom Blumer | August 21, 2015 | 4:16 PM EDT

The time stamp on an Associated Press report on Hillary Clinton's email "worries" ("CLINTON FACING FRESH WORRIES IN CONGRESS OVER EMAILS") by Ken Thomas and Julie Bykowicz this morning is 11:21 a.m. Eastern Time.

Despite that time stamp, the report fails to mention a bombshell report from Reuters ("Dozens of Clinton emails were classified from the start, U.S. rules suggest") originally posted at 5:17 a.m. (time stamp has since been updated). Going even further back, the AP story fails to mention a Thursday afternoon story about how "A federal judge has ordered the State Department to cooperate with the investigation into the Hillary Clinton private email scandal." The decision to ignore these developments is in all likelihood deliberate.

By Tom Blumer | August 20, 2015 | 10:26 AM EDT

Imagine if, in 1987, a Federal Reserve official could have pointed to a poorly performing economy and said, "Gee, this supply-side economics hasn't worked out very well." The press would surely have treated the story as a front-page item and ensured that it got air time on the Big Three networks' then-dominant nightly news broadcasts. Of course, there was no such credible report, because the economy under Ronald Reagan was so obviously robust.

Fast-forwarding 28 years, the author of a July Federal Reserve white paper on the Fed's Keynesian-based "quantitative easing" program contends that "There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed—inflation and real economic activity." In other words, there is no evidence that $4.5 trillion in funny money with which the economy has been saddled has accomplished anything. In the establishment press, only CNBC's Jeff Cox has covered it (bolds are mine):

By Tom Blumer | August 19, 2015 | 11:18 PM EDT

You rubes. Don't you understand that the entire problem Hillary Clinton is facing over her use of a private server to process government communications is the fault of thousands upon thousands of people who don't know how to classify documents?

That's essentially the argument Hillary Clinton's spinmeisters are now employing. This evening, Josh Gerstein at the Politico was all too ready to relay such arguments, even to the point of cleaning up what one of her defenders said to advance the cause.

By Tom Blumer | August 19, 2015 | 5:45 PM EDT

The Associated Press works very hard to ensure that its subscribing outlets and low-information voters who rely solely on its work — knowingly or unknowingly — never learn about Hillary Clinton's smart-aleck, sarcastic, condescending, reality-avoiding behavior.

Tuesday night, four AP reporters (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) — Jack Gillum and Stephen Braun in Washington, with the help of Ken Thomas and Eric Tucker in North Las Vegas — failed to report that Mrs. Clinton cut her press conference short after getting a genuine question from Fox News's Ed Henry, and that part of her answer to Henry's query about whether her hard drive was wiped was "With a cloth?"

By Tom Blumer | August 18, 2015 | 3:43 PM EDT

Yesterday, CNN.com published a attempted defense of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State by Eleni Kounalakis. An "Editor's Note" before the piece begins describes Ms. Kounalakis as the "United States ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013," the author of a book on her time there, and "a senior adviser to the Albright Stonebridge Group" (as in "Madeline Albright").

The "editor" at CNN "forgot" to mention one "little" thing, noted by John Hinderaker at Powerline: "... she was one of Hillary’s top (2008) fundraisers, a fundraiser who was paid off with an ambassadorship, and therefore hardly an objective observer of Hillary’s successes (or lack thereof) as Secretary of State."

By Tom Blumer | August 17, 2015 | 6:32 PM EDT

Several commenters at my econ-related posts during the past several months here at NewsBusters and my home blog have noted how Washington's mix of high deficits, over-regulation, and quantitative easing never seem to get any kind of blame for the economy in establishment press coverage.

One could hardly find a better example of that deliberate avoidance than Josh Boak's writeup today at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, on how "Home ownership ... is increasingly on hold for younger Americans." While he identified several symptoms which could easily be traced to Obama administration and Federal Reserve policies, Boak never tagged anyone who might be responsible, instead acting as if all these adverse conditions just sort of happened and ... oh well, here we are.

By Tim Graham | August 17, 2015 | 6:14 AM EDT

The Environmental Protection Agency may be a controversial spot right now as they’ve bungled into polluting a river and are waging a war on coal. But in The Washington Post Magazine on Sunday, EPA boss Gina McCarthy was awarded a syrupy Q&A from reporter Joe Heim titled “Creating the environment for change.”

First softball: “Okay, please finish this sentence: Anyone who doesn’t believe climate change is caused by human activity is …”

By Tom Blumer | August 17, 2015 | 12:01 AM EDT

Today on ABC's This Week, Jonathan Karl reported that "Platte River Networks, the Colorado company which set up (Hillary) Clinton's servers, told ABC News that it's highly likely that a full backup of the server was made, meaning those thousands of emails she deleted may still exist."

This from all appearances huge development has only drawn the interest of several center-right blogs and outlets, a few of which include Twitchy, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller. The establishment press to this point appears determined to ignore it. Can anyone imagine a similar level of disinterest in a highly significant story affecting a Republican or conservative presidential candidate — or, for that matter, the press standing by without pushback if the candidate exhibited the level of mocking, defiant arrogance Mrs. Clinton has consistently shown?

By Tom Blumer | August 15, 2015 | 10:49 AM EDT

All you need to know about the Associated Press's interest in accurately reporting current developments in the investigations into 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server is this: A search at its national site on "Hillary crime" (not in quotes) returns nothing.

Ken Thomas's coverage of the former Secretary of State's "forceful defense" last night in "a speech before influential Iowa Democrats" is all too typical: Mrs. Clinton gets to say that all of this is "partisan games" involving "playing politics." All I see is substance-free whining. "My opponents don't like me" is not a defense. Several paragraphs from Ken's calamity follow the jump:

By Tom Blumer | August 13, 2015 | 11:44 PM EDT

Carrying water for the left as their pet programs implode while pretending to be an objective reporter is a daunting task. The Associated Press's Stephen Ohlemacher was not up to that task Thursday afternoon. Twice, in relatively early paragraphs of his 31-paragraph writeup, the AP reporter claimed that the Social Security system has "money." He then separately quoted a Democratic congressperson who insisted that it has money, and that the mere act of correctly asserting that it doesn't "manufactures a crisis."

By Tom Blumer | August 12, 2015 | 9:44 PM EDT

Records are made to be broken, but apparently government spending records are not meant to be reported. The Monthly Treasury Statement released today showed that the federal government spent a mind-boggling $374.86 billion in July. That's an all-time single-month record, surpassing the previous high of $369.39 billion "achieved" in August 2012. Yes, there was a calendar "quirk" which caused this month's report to include five Fridays of disbursements; but that happens four times a year, and a record is a record.

By Randy Hall | August 12, 2015 | 5:25 PM EDT

A coalition of 53 press and open government organizations has “once again” urged President Barack Obama and the people in his administration “to stop practices in federal agencies that prevent important information from getting to the public.”

According to an open letter sent to the Democratic occupant of the White House on Monday and released to the public the following day, groups ranging from the American Copy Editors Society to the Virginia Professional Communicators criticized Obama for not following through on a promise he made during his presidential campaign in 2008.