By Matthew Balan | November 19, 2015 | 8:08 PM EST

Politico's Hadas Gold revealed on Thursday that CNN suspended correspondent Elise Labott for two weeks, after she decried the 289 to 137 vote on Syrian refugees by the House of Representatives: "House passes bill that could limit Syrian refugees. Statue of Liberty bows head in anguish".

By Tom Blumer | November 19, 2015 | 5:38 PM EST

Add what follows to the long list of items we should be reading about in wire service reports but instead must find in the editorial sections of the nation's two leading business newspapers.

An Islamist organization tied to the Muslim Brotherhood is involved in the screening potential Syrian refugees allegedly receive before being allowed to come to the United States. Investor's Business Daily revealed this information, which is in stark contrast what U.S. government officials are telling the nation, in a Tuesday evening editorial (bolds are mine):

By Matthew Balan | November 19, 2015 | 3:56 PM EST

CNN correspondent Elise Labott bemoaned that the House of Representatives voted to "to intensify security screenings of Syrian refugees and suspend Obama's program to admit 10,000 of them in the next year," as Reuters reported on Thursday. In a Thursday post on Twitter, Labott linked to her network's reporting on the 289 to 137 vote, and added her own over-the-top commentary: "House passes bill that could limit Syrian refugees. Statue of Liberty bows head in anguish".

By Matthew Balan | November 19, 2015 | 3:20 PM EST

On Wednesday's CNN Tonight, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and liberal analyst Rula Jebreal bewailed the latest poll that found that 53 percent are opposed to letting in 10,000 Syrian refugees. Kristof hyped that "this almost exactly matches up a poll in January 1939 of whether or not to admit 10,000 mostly Jewish children into the U.S.....in retrospect, we clearly acknowledge that was a shameful period in American history." Jebreal slammed this majority as "racist," and cried, "They're weaponizing fear! That poll reflects fear."

By Curtis Houck | November 19, 2015 | 7:02 AM EST

Roughly 30 minutes after (perhaps appropriately) ripping into the media for their labeling of ISIS terrorist Abdelhamid Abaaoud the “mastermind” of Friday’s Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris, MSNBC’s Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell struck out against Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Tex.) for engaging in “predictable, childish bluster” by responding to President Obama’s denouncement of his stance on Syrian refugees.

By Tom Blumer | November 18, 2015 | 2:46 PM EST

The catalog of wishful thinking technically classified as reports on the economy emanating from the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, grows with virtually each passing business day.

One of yesterday's additions to the mountainous pile came from the AP's Christopher Rugaber. Tasked with covering the Federal Reserve's report on October's industrial production, he devoted 10 of his 11 paragraphs in his dispatch to manufacturing. He didn't even tell readers that the Fed's release was about anything besides manufacturing until his ninth paragraph. The AP's headline writers also cooperated by only mentioning manufacturing. In an utterly amazing "coincidence" (no, not really), manufacturing is the only one of the Fed report's three major industry groups which turned in a positive performance:

By Curtis Houck | November 18, 2015 | 7:35 AM EST

As the police shootout and standoff early Wednesday morning in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis, France was in its contentious moments, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and guest Julien Theron couldn’t help but fret about how the standoff was helping to “literally stok[e] the fires of the far right, anti-immigrant, anti-immigration, xenophobic parties” in Europe.

By Tom Blumer | November 18, 2015 | 1:29 AM EST

Michael Weiss and Justin Miller at the Daily Beast are apparently really proud of themselves. They're claiming that because a passport found on one of the terrorists involved in last Friday's terrorist murder spree was a fake, it "means the (U.S.) governors’ freakout over refugees was based, at least in part, on a lie." Based on their headline ("GOP Guvs Rely on ISIS Lies to Reject Syrian Refugees"), their attack was only directed at Republican governors.

There are at least four problems with their assertion. The funniest one is that these two apparently have no business ever being trusted around a calclulator or a spreadsheet. It's either that, or Weiss and Miller really believe that 475 million Syrian refugess are spreading themselves throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world.

By Matthew Balan | November 17, 2015 | 5:37 PM EST

CNN's Dana Bash hounded Senator Ted Cruz on Tuesday's New Day over President Obama slamming the Republican presidential candidate at a press conference earlier in the day. Bash touted how "President Obama called you out...and he said it was shameful for saying that there should be, effectively, a religious test for refugees — especially since...your family benefitted from the policies of America — allowing refugees in."

By Tom Blumer | November 17, 2015 | 11:10 AM EST

The Washington Post's Erik Wemple and certain "I walked through Bedford Stuy alone" reporters are contending that, in Wemple's words, "the term 'no-go zone' is best left in retirement." No sir, it needs to be defined appropriately, then used when appropriate.

Avoiding use of the term enables a dangerous detachment from reality. There is already quite a surplus of that. Patrick J. McDonnell at the Los Angeles Times, who seems to believe that he proved something by visiting the jihadi-infested neighborhood of Molenbeek and getting out alive, demonstrated how out of touch he is by referring on Monday — three days after the Paris terror attacks and at least two days after the parties involved and their backgrounds were firmly established — to "the so-called Belgian connection in the Paris attacks." Holy moly, Patrick. What about Molenbeek being "home to two" of the Paris attack terrorists who died during their attacks and to the plots' mastermind, Salah Abdeslam, do you not comprehend?

By Tom Blumer | November 16, 2015 | 11:58 PM EST

In a Facebook post on Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz pushed back against a "ridiculous" Politifact post which labeled his true claim that the Democratic Party is shrinking as "mostly false."

Politifact's Emma Hinchliffe had to go back 11 years to a now-irrelevant time period to unsuccessfully attempt to refute Cruz's inconvenient truth, citing Gallup poll figures from 2004. Nobody cares about 2004, Emma. What Cruz said is that the party "is shrinking," and it has been for the past 6-7 years, falling from 38 percent to 29 percent as Americans have seen how a Democratic President and his party have governed and behaved when in power.

By Tom Blumer | November 16, 2015 | 10:15 PM EST

The Dartmouth calls itself "the student newspaper of Dartmouth College and the campus’s only daily," and, begun in 1799, is America's oldest college newspaper. It also appears to be a great training ground for journalists who write stories which bury and downplay the lede and cover up key facts when correctly prioritizing and presenting a story would make favored groups look bad.

The Dartmouth Review, whose website has been extraordinarily overloaded today, was founded in 1980 "to question stale academic orthodoxy and to preserve Dartmouth College’s unique liberal arts character." Its alums include several current conservative luminaries. After a Thursday Black Lives Matter rally disrupting the quiet of Dartmouth's Baker-Berry Library, The Dartmouth Review told its readers what actually happened. The Dartmouth's Briana Tang buried multiple paragraphs of pablum which danced around what had obviously taken place towards the end of her insufferably long story.