The press, even in the wake of yesterday's awful reported 2.9 percent annualized first-quarter contraction, continues to regale us with noise about the economy's "recovery" during the past five years.

As P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters noted yesterday, CNNMoney.com's Annalyn Kurtz, in giving readers "3 reasons not to freak out about -2.9% GDP," concluded her report by telling readers that "This recovery is underway, but it's choppy and still very slow." Actually, it may have resumed this quarter. At the Associated Press yesterday, Martin Crutsinger all too predictably wrote that "the setback is widely thought to be temporary, with growth rebounding solidly since spring." After almost five years of this nonsense, it's long past time that they start telling readers, listeners, and viewers that this economy bears more resemblance to the 1930s economy under Franklin Delano Roosevelt than it does any post-downturn economy we've seen since the end of World War II. Hard proof follows the jump.

Some facts are too convenient for the media to check, or retract. 

Earlier this week Newsbusters reported that the media hyped a statistic about school shootings that originated from Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun group “Everytown for Gun Safety.’ There have been, according to the widely reported stat, 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook. The media dutifully repeated the number until it was debunked. 

While CNN later retracted and amended their reporting of the questionable count to a much lower number, 15, NBC and ABC did not bother to correct their stories using that statistic. On last night’s ‘The Five’ Fox host Greg Gutfeld took issue with the media’s blatant blindness to the true data. Video after the jump.

Miguel Almaguer hyped on Wednesday's NBC Nightly News that "since the mass shooting in Newtown a year and a half ago, there's been at least 74 school shootings across the country – roughly one every week." However, the correspondent failed to mention that this figure came from the pro-gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, which was founded earlier in 2014 by liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg. [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]

On Tuesday, Kyle Becker of the Independent Journal Review spotlighted a series of Twitter posts from author and journalist Charles C. Johnson, which called out Bloomberg's organization for giving an "exaggerated impression of how many school shootings have taken place," as many they represent "all sorts" of different incidents involving guns in or near schools. Becker added:

According to CNN, “gender bias might actually kill you.” A new study released by the National Academy claims that “feminine-named hurricanes (vs. masculine-named hurricanes) cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to a lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness.” The liberal media was thrilled to find this supposed scientific proof of sexism.

Ed Yong of the National Geographic found that the study lacked credibility. While it looked at the death tolls of hurricanes dating back to the 1950's, when hurricanes only had female names, male names weren’t introduced (due to cries of sexism of course) until 1979. Meanwhile, Yong writes,  “hurricanes have also, on average, been getting less deadly over time.” Yong’s source, scientist Jeff Lazo, claims that the correlation may just be a statistical fluke, and “it could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male names.”

Following President Barack Obama's speech today at West Point, the UK Daily Mail reported "tepid applause and a short standing ovation from less than one-quarter of the audience upon his introduction." In a CNN video clip found at Mediaite, Jim Clancy noted that Obama did not sound like a “commander-in-chief speaking to his troops.” He further observed: “You heard the reception; it was icy."

The video posted at the White House's web site doesn't include the reception Obama received when he was introduced. There's a reason for that. The first 14 seconds of a Reuters video clip (HT Nice Deb) shows, especially for those of us who recall the enthusiastic receptions George W. Bush routinely received, that describing it as "tepid" may be an overstatement: