Joining new Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Wednesday’s show, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) received quite the welcome as the liberal late-night host compared her to Batman and repeatedly urged her to consider running for president. Near the tail end of his opening monologue, Colbert hyped that Warren “has launched a one-woman crusade against the billionaire class” and is “like Batman, but her enemy is Bruce Wayne.”
Regulation

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."

It's not just the New York Times news pages that lean left -- conservative viewpoints are virtually shut out of the paper's opinion pages as well, especially under the regime of toxically smug liberal Andrew Rosenthal, whose hobbies include calling Republicans racist and homophobic. The Sunday Review section has long been a particularly opinionated outpost, with Rosenthal using the day of leisure to print left-wing essays. The September 20 Sunday Review was a nearly flawless compendium of economic and social liberalism.

The business press just can't understand why the Federal Reserve decided not to raise interest rates on Thursday. After all, these alleged journalists have been telling us for months bordering on years that U.S. economy is really in good shape. So it should be able to handle a rate hike, especially after over seven years of rates at essentially zero. The problem is that they now believe their own bogus blather. The U.S. economy is not in good shape, and data seen during the past several weeks show that the situation is deteriorating, not improving.
Excerpts from an early Friday report at the Associated Press by Josh Boak illustrate how out of touch the business press really is (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

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.

You wouldn't know it from reading the national coverage by the Associated Press or stories at the Los Angeles Times, but California Governor Jerry Brown and his fellow far-left Democratic Party environmentalists suffered significant setbacks last week.
How bad? So bad that the Times editorial board accused "a new crop of moderate Democratic legislators" of succumbing to "oil industry propaganda." What really happened is that enough Democrats to make a difference looked at the impact of Brown's pet pieces of legislation on the state's economy and job market and said, "No mas."
Following Vice President Joe Biden’s very publicized appearance, Late Show host Stephen Colbert also welcomed Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to the program Thursday night, but it was anything but friendly as Colbert hammered Kalanick on the effect his company has had on the taxi industry, surge pricing, the Uber Eats initiative, and driverless cars. Colbert demanded: “What is your response to Uber kills professional, good-paying jobs and it's unfair to the drivers and it's destroying the cab industry.”

CNN's Alisyn Camerota confronted New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday's New Day, after the Democrat used the shooting of his aide to advance gun control. When Cuomo admitted that "we passed a law...that is probably the most restrictive gun control law in the nation," Camerota interrupted the governor and pointed out that "opponents of more laws say the criminals are the ones who will always have the guns – and this appears to be an illustration of that. What gun law could have been on the books that would have prevented this tragedy?"

Democrats' current and potential candidates for their party's 2016 presidential nomination continue to complain about various aspects of the economy. They continue to make no connection between their complaints and the fact that Democrat Barack Obama has been in the White House for over six years. Obama has for the most part operated either under the conditions created by the 2009-2010 Congress or, when resisted, by unilaterally ruling through executive orders and arbitrary regulatory actions.
Establishment press outlets, likely recognizing the candidates' hypocrisy, mostly fail to carry their complaints — and when they do, they make no attempt to note that the candidates are citing areas the Obama administration has either failed to address, or has attempted to address counterproductively. This pattern of behavior became so obvious yesterday as a result of Vice President Joe Biden's appearance in Pittsburgh that National Review and IJ Review contributor Stephen Miller tweeted the following:

The front page of Tuesday's New York Times featured labor reporter Noam Scheiber celebrating Obama as (finally!) the champion of workers' rights, belatedly beating back the retrograde efforts by Ronald Reagan and free-market conservatives to "roll them back," with Schreiber portraying all of the administration's new regulatory burdens on emerging jobs as wholly positive developments. The online headline was celebratory: "As His Term Wanes, Obama Champions Workers’ Rights."

It doesn't seem likely that an oil company CEO would get the benefit of the doubt Apple CEO Tim Cook received from the press yesterday after he emailed well-known financial commentator and investment adviser Jim Cramer about his company's performance in China.
In an email read over the air on CNBC, Cook reported that "we have continued to experience strong growth for our business in China through July and August." The question is whether, by providing this private disclosure, Cook violated U.S. "fair disclosure" regulations requiring that "materal information" be disclosed to the public.

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.
