Just as a reality check, I asked a friend today what his reaction would be if I said with a sincere-sounding voice that he makes me want to strangle him. He said, "Almost sounds like a threat." I said, "No, it was supposed to be a joke." He said, "No it's not."

I also asked another person what her reaction would be if I earnestly called her "demented." She said, "You'd be insulting me." I asked, "What if I said I was just joking?" Response: "I'd say, 'The heck you were.'" In the past ten days, members of the press have decided that threatening language and an insult, both directed at GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, were only "jokes." There is virtually no chance that these same people would give the same treatment to threats and insults directed at Democrats and leftists.

Today's "I'm just making stuff up on the fly" award nominee is Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press.

The AP reporter, named by National Review's Kevin Williamson as America's "Worst Economics Writer" in 2013, lived down to his designation in a Tuesday report on the Census Bureau's September Monthly Trade Inventories and Sales release. He described a sales increase which didn't come close to offsetting the previous month's decline as "robust," failed to note that the reported increase in inventories will likely increase third-quarter GDP while perhaps depressing the fourth quarter, and described a "major effort to work down an overhang" in inventories not found in the report he was covering. His most important miss, though, was failing to note that trade inventories remain dangerously bloated.

On Friday's The View, as CNS News's Mark Judge reported, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar went ballistic when GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina stated that Planned Parenthood is "harvesting baby parts through late term abortion." Part of Goldberg's response as she serially talked over Fiorina: "You know that’s not true. Carly, you know no one’s harvesting baby parts." Behar chimed in: "That offends my sensibility to hear you say something like that when you know it’s not true.”

Fiorina was and remains indisputably correct, while Goldberg and Behar are both embarrassingly wrong. Yet an ABC report filed at its web site Friday afternoon by Jordyn Phelps would only characterize Fiorina's assertion of an obvious, widely-known fact as a "claim." Beyond that, Phelps characterized the candidate's citation of Planned Parenthood's announced decision to cease taking compensation for harvested body as merely being (in Fiorina's view) "proof of her point."

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.

On Thursday, the government reported that the nation's economy turned in yet another quarter of poor economic performance, estimating that its gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 1.5 percent in the third quarter.

The business press almost universally downplayed the news, and told readers that the fourth quarter will be better. No one talked about how much the tepid growth of the past six-plus years since the recession officially ended has been sacrificed in the name of misguided and dangerous Keynesian stimulus. As is so often the case, an editorial at Investor's Business Daily did that, performing a job the press has consistently refused to do.