For an understanding of just how weak the business press's understanding of economic fundamentals is, look no further than Paul Wiseman's brief "coverage" at the Associated Press Wednesday of the Federal Reserve's awful Industrial Production.

The Fed reported yesterday that industrial production fell by 0.6 percent in November on top of a revised -0.4 percent (down from -0.2 percent) in October. None of the three major industrial components turned in a positive November result (Manufacturing, flat; Mining, -1.1 percent; Utilities, -4.3 percent). Additionally, industrial production in the past 12 months has fallen by 1.2 percent, an occurrence which has historically been a recessionary red flag. But that's okay, Wiseman reassured readers, because "the American economy is relatively healthy thanks to solid consumer spending."

In the middle segment of Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, the newscast promoted a new Pew Research Study that illustrated the decline of the middle class in the years since the Great Recession to the point that, as anchor Scott Pelley highlighted, “[t]he middle class is no longer the majority in America.” Of course, as the liberal media naturally does, they neglected to include any placement of blame on why the erosion has taken place and placed no blame on the Obama administration and its policies (including ObamaCare).

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."

The "fact-checking" press has become a parody of itself during the past several years.

It's not only because of their irritating penchant for putting statements by Republicans and conservatives under a twisted microscope while ignoring drop-dead obvious falsehoods delivered by Democrats and leftists. It's because, among other things, the fact-checkers often admit that a statement is true, but then proceed to essentially say, "So what?" They also take policy goals articulated by candidates, which may or may not come to pass, render an opinion that it can't be done, and then pretend that they've actually proven something. An example of each annoying habit was found in Tuesday evening's Associated Press "fact check" of statements made by Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush during the most recent Republican presidential candidates' debate.

As is so often the case with such stories, one can tell how favorable or disappointing a government report on the economy was by whether a story about it is still present at the Associated Press's "Top Business News" page several hours after its release.

Today's news from the Census Bureau on September's factory orders and shipments, released at 10 a.m., was extremely disappointing. Thus, it is utterly unsurprising that Martin Crutsinger's AP story covering that report was not at the "Top Business News" page a mere six hours after its release (it likely came off even earlier, as I didn't check the page until just after 4 p.m.). The AP economics writer's coverage, though bit of an improvement over prior months' efforts, still left important gaping holes.