BusinessWeek

Soros Cash, Left-Wing Talking Points Fuel ALEC Attack
By Iris Somberg | December 6, 2011 | 3:28 PM EST

A hit job on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the Dec. 5-11 Bloomberg Businessweek accepts the liberal mantra that corporations are evil and buy support through shadowy groups. The five page article, "Pssst … Wanna Buy a Law?," is thick with one-sided caricatures of conservative policies could have easily been written by a left-wing blogger.

ALEC is a non-profit that promotes limited government, free markets, and federalism. The do this "through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America's state legislators, members of the private sector, the federal government, and general public."

Bloomberg Businessweek Celebrates Adultery Website for Valentine's Day
By Julia A. Seymour | February 14, 2011 | 4:37 PM EST

Infidelity. Adultery. Those aren't exactly words that come on typical candy conversation hearts. Valentine's Day is after all a traditional holiday of love and romance, not of cheating and betrayal.

Yet, Bloomberg Businessweek used the holiday to highlight AshleyMadison.com a website that helps married people (7 out of 10 on the site are men) have affairs. The company's motto is "Life is short. Have an affair."

Like Ashley Madison, Bloomberg Businessweek must be counting on the idea that "sex sells." The magazine's offensively sexed-up cover design showed a woman's spread, fishnet-clad legs and was clearly an attempt to grab readers. On the newsstand copy those legs take up a little more than a quarter of the page, but an image on the BusinessWeek website shows a much larger image of legs taking up the entire cover.

'Cash for Clunkers' Bill a Clunker after All
By Catherine Maggio | July 10, 2009 | 2:36 PM EDT
The “Cash For Clunkers” bill that became law on June 24, “has a lot of squeaks and rattles” according to Business Week, but the main stream media has ignored these and instead praised and promoted it.

The law was meant to promote smaller, more fuel efficient cars by subsidizing dealers to buy back gas guzzlers so that drivers could buy environmentally friendly cars. It fails in practice, according to the July 13 & 20, 2009 issue of the magazine, and may even do the exact opposite of its purpose.
Last Year Tough for Print Media as Newspapers Lose $64B in Share Value
By Jeff Poor | January 2, 2009 | 3:00 PM EST

Some call it "the dead tree edition" of the news media. But as 2009 dawns, trees may not be the only casualties.

Newspaper companies as an investment are less lucrative than they once were. Alan D. Mutter, a Silicon Valley CEO, pointed out on his blog that newspaper companies took a hit in 2008 in terms of share value to the tune of $64 billion.

"In the worst year in history for publishers, newspaper shares dropped an average of 83.3% in 2008, wiping out $64.5 billion in market value in just 12 months," Mutter wrote on Jan. 1. "Although things were tough for all sorts of businesses in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s, the decline among the newspaper shares last year was more than twice as deep as the 38.5% drop suffered by the Standard and Poor's average of 500 stocks."

Media May Have Played a Role in Madoff Scandal, Says CNBC Contributor
By Jeff Poor | December 23, 2008 | 2:09 PM EST

Is it possible the financial media played a role in facilitating the alleged $50 billion Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme? An interesting theory by Jon Najarian, CNBC analyst and cofounder of optionMONSTER, contends that they very well may have unwittingly done just that. Madoff, he believes, used media publicity to lure investors to his scheme.

As Najarian explained on CNBC's Dec. 22 "Fast Money," Madoff got his reputation on Wall Street in the payment for order flow business. That's when a brokerage firm receives a payment as compensation for directing the order to the different parties that can execute the order at a lower cost.

"First of all you needed something that was very credible, because what he started off with was very credible," Najarian said. "As we both know, Dylan, he was in the payment for order flow business before anybody else. That meant folks that he was buying on the bid and selling on the offer back when the spread on NASDAQ stocks was 50 cents wide."

Worse Than Worthless: Market Negatively Values the New York Times Company's Flagship Newspaper
By Tom Blumer | November 21, 2008 | 9:49 AM EST

In other words, they would have to pay you to take what is rapidly becoming Manhattan's quaint little alternative newspaper off their hands.

Yesterday, New York Times Company stock closed at $5.72. That is, by far, its lowest close in the 22 years presented in this chart at Yahoo!:

NYT Chart

Before today's opening bell, the company is worth $822 million,

Using conservatively adjusted numbers from a hysterically titled July 25 Business Week article about the company ("How Can The New York Times Be Worth So Little?"), I will show that the market currently sees the New York Times newspaper as literally being worse than worthless.

Here are the two key paragraphs from Business Week's original "analysis":

BusinessWeek Pronounces Auto Industry 'Needs' Bailout, Says Republicans Tell Industry to 'Drop Dead'
By Warner Todd Huston | November 15, 2008 | 5:21 AM EST

Well, I guess that settles it. We don't need any political discussion or economist's studies. The auto industry officially needs a bailout. It's just a fact. After all, MSNBC and BusinessWeek have just said it. The auto industry "needs" one or it cannot survive. Oh, yeah, and MSNBC is also informing the world that Republicans have told auto workers to "drop dead." I think this is what the Old Media calls "news."

This story by David Kiley of BusinessWeek is amazing for its assumptions, pronouncements and slanted anti-capatilist rhetoric and it boggles the mind that it could be called journalism. It certainly isn't "news" because of all the personal opinions that Kiley pads this thing with, anyway.

Spinspotter: Exposing Media Bias or Reinforcing It?
By Jacob S. Lybbert | September 11, 2008 | 4:12 PM EDT

What if you could download a program that would scan, magically, any article written anywhere and expose the spin, bias, and misinformation? Would that interest you?This is what a new program--SpinSpotter--coming to you from Seattle, WA, purports to do. Business Week reports:

The application's algorithms work off six key tenets of spin and bias, which the company derived from both the guidelines of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code Of Ethics and input from an advisory board composed of journalism luminaries.
BusinessWeek 'Recession in America' Blog Goes Belly-up
By Jeff Poor | August 1, 2008 | 10:53 AM EDT

BusinessWeek Logo | NewsBusters.orgAs an attempt to find a new and innovative way to spread the doom-and-gloom news associated with the economic downturn, BusinessWeek magazine launched a recession blog on its Web site back in May to give a personalized glimpse into "recession" hardships.

"This blog is one of the places we'll tell these stories," BusinessWeek.com reporter Tim Catts wrote on the blog's first post on May 2. "Here, we'll jump into the conversation about where the economy is and where it's going. Yes, sometimes we'll look at the latest data. Sometimes we'll share observations from the road. The goal is to give readers real stories about how the downturn is affecting individuals, businesses, and communities."

However, activity on the blog has been scarce of late. Nearly three months later, there are just 22 posts. Meanwhile, the nation's Gross Domestic Product grew at a 1.9 percent pace for the second quarter of 2008, according to government estimates announced July 31.

BusinessWeek Launches 'Recession in America' Blog
By Jeff Poor | May 22, 2008 | 9:45 AM EDT

NewsBusters.org - Media Research CenterIf there were any doubt the media is trying to milk bad economic news for all that it's worth, look no further than BusinessWeek magazine.

BusinessWeek kicked off its "Recession in America" blog on May 2. It is dedicated solely to reporting on the "recession [that] is here (or will be soon)," as the headline of a May 19 post stated (h/t BMI advisor Chris Roush of Talkingbiznews.com).

"As the U.S. economy slows, the story is often told through broad statistics," the "about" section of the blog stated. "In this blog, BusinessWeek reporter Tim Catts travels the country to uncover the stories of how individuals are coping with the downturn."

Gore Responds to NewsBusters, Denies Global Warming His Meal Ticket
By Matthew Vadum | April 6, 2008 | 4:20 PM EDT
Al Gore, who famously claimed to have invented the Internet, now denies –in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary— that he is in a position to make an immense fortune from global warming-mitigation efforts.

 

Ian Wilhelm, a Chronicle of Philanthropy reporter, asked the private equity firm
The Media Ignore Al Gore's Planned Global Warming Profiteering
By Matthew Vadum | April 1, 2008 | 2:31 AM EDT

By now you've probably read about how Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection plan to drop $300 million on hard-hitting affective propaganda aimed at convincing the American viewing public to embrace the drastically reduced standard of living that carbon emission controls guarantee.

The first ad from the campaign, narrated by Oscar-nominated actor William H. Macy, shows footage of Americans taking action by storming the beaches at Normandy during World War II, marching for civil rights, and landing on the moon. Americans didn't wait to take action at these critical points in the nation's history, so "we can't wait for someone else to solve the global climate crisis. We need to act and we need to act now. Join us. Together we can solve the climate crisis..."