This category contains postings about the largest newspapers in America. For other papers, look under "Regional News" for each state.

By Tom Blumer | August 20, 2015 | 10:26 AM EDT

Imagine if, in 1987, a Federal Reserve official could have pointed to a poorly performing economy and said, "Gee, this supply-side economics hasn't worked out very well." The press would surely have treated the story as a front-page item and ensured that it got air time on the Big Three networks' then-dominant nightly news broadcasts. Of course, there was no such credible report, because the economy under Ronald Reagan was so obviously robust.

Fast-forwarding 28 years, the author of a July Federal Reserve white paper on the Fed's Keynesian-based "quantitative easing" program contends that "There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed—inflation and real economic activity." In other words, there is no evidence that $4.5 trillion in funny money with which the economy has been saddled has accomplished anything. In the establishment press, only CNBC's Jeff Cox has covered it (bolds are mine):

By Tom Blumer | August 17, 2015 | 12:01 AM EDT

Today on ABC's This Week, Jonathan Karl reported that "Platte River Networks, the Colorado company which set up (Hillary) Clinton's servers, told ABC News that it's highly likely that a full backup of the server was made, meaning those thousands of emails she deleted may still exist."

This from all appearances huge development has only drawn the interest of several center-right blogs and outlets, a few of which include Twitchy, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller. The establishment press to this point appears determined to ignore it. Can anyone imagine a similar level of disinterest in a highly significant story affecting a Republican or conservative presidential candidate — or, for that matter, the press standing by without pushback if the candidate exhibited the level of mocking, defiant arrogance Mrs. Clinton has consistently shown?

By Tom Blumer | August 14, 2015 | 11:50 PM EDT

As Spencer Raley at NewsBusters noted earlier this evening, StemExpress, "the now infamous biomedical company which allegedly bought fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood for profit, is breaking off its relationship with the nation’s leading abortion provider." Raley referenced a Politico item by Jennifer Haberkorn with a mid-afternoon Friday time stamp. As far as I can tell, it is the only establishment press outlet to note this development.

No establishment press outlet has noted a key courtroom development yesterday which may have been what really drove StemExpress to make its move — a move which, by the way, has not been announced in the "news" section at the company's web site, even though it has posted five other items during the past month relating to the Planned Parenthood fetal tissue outrages.

By Mark Finkelstein | August 13, 2015 | 8:30 AM EDT

Did Rush Limbaugh force Fox News, in the wake of the Donald Trump/Megyn Kelly dust-up, to back down and welcome Trump back on its network?  That's what New York Times reporter Nick Confessore suggested on today's Morning Joe.

Asked by Mika Brzezinski who was the most powerful person in the media today, Confessore responded: "I think Fox or Rush Limbaugh [whose last name Confessore pronounced "Lim-bow], right? In this primary, right? There were two institutions that could have put a stop to Trump, talk radio and Fox. And talk radio likes him and Fox backed down."

By Tom Blumer | August 9, 2015 | 10:25 AM EDT

On Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency committed an act which would have likely become instant national news if a private entity had done the same thing.

On Friday, John Merline at Investors' Business Daily succinctly noted that the EPA "dumped a million gallons of mine waste into Animas River in Colorado, turning it into what looked like Tang, forcing the sheriff's office to close the river to recreational users." Oh, and it "also failed to warn officials in downstream New Mexico about the spill." Yet here we are four days later, and the story has gotten very little visibility outside of center-right blogs and outlets. That's largely explained by how the wire services have handled the story. After the jump, readers will see headlines and descriptions of the stories which have appeared thus far at the web site of the New York Times:

By Tom Blumer | July 30, 2015 | 5:45 PM EDT

The bar-lowering in the business press continues.

In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":

By Tom Blumer | July 29, 2015 | 11:04 PM EDT

On his Tuesday night show, with the help of Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News described how the "Black Lives Matter" movement sustains itself. The rest of the press wants readers, listeners and viewers to presume that it is a self-sustaining, grass-roots movement. It isn't.

O'Reilly also noted that megastars Jay-Z and Beyoncé, numbers 28 and 29, respectively, on the Forbes list of top-paid celebrities, are supporting the movement, which describes itself as "grass-roots" but is really the ultimate in Astroturf. Also at the end of this post, following up on one I did on ESPN's Stephen A. Smith last week, I have posted Smith's original six-minute radio-show rant on how selective and tyrannical the movement is.

By Tom Blumer | July 28, 2015 | 5:05 PM EDT

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank is obsessed with tearing Wisconsin Governor and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker down, and is clearly not above distorting the facts to make his pathetic points.

Milbank's latest tirade is about how Walker is allegedly "so dangerous" because he doesn't like unions. That's based on quite a bit of direct experience, which has included death threats against him and his family, frequent harassment of his parents, and attempts by labor to intimidate businesses which wouldn't publicly express support for their cause.

By Tom Blumer | July 27, 2015 | 11:52 PM EDT

I guess the slogan of labor has changed from "Look for the union label" to "Look for the union waiver."

The Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story early this morning on an issue some people thought disappeared after its initial exposure two months ago. The issue is whether union workers should be exempt from minimum wage laws, especially the sky-high minimums being enacted in some U.S. cities. To those who have been unaware of the issue up until now and are thinking that all of this must be a joke — it's not. It's just that the press, which not coincidentally has a higher percentage of union members than the private sector as a whole, has barely noted it.

By Tom Blumer | July 26, 2015 | 10:00 AM EDT

Veteran journalist John Harwood, according to his Twitter home page, covers "Washington and national politics for CNBC and the New York Times."

Saturday morning, despite all of his experience, Harwood tweeted a question (HT Twitchy) so naive that a freshman journalism student would have been embarrassed to ask it:

By Tom Blumer | July 25, 2015 | 11:48 PM EDT

In a speech at a Republican Lincoln Day dinner in West Virginia earlier this week, Murray Energy Corp. founder and CEO Robert Murray decried the Obama administration's determination to, as described at the financial news site SNL.com (to be clear, no relation to Saturday Night Live), "bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U.S. EPA in charge of the nation's electric grid."

In the establishment press, Murray's speech was only covered in a single snarky paragraph by Darren Goode at the Politico titled "Don't Hold Back Now" — obviously attempting to paint Murray as unreasonable and extreme — and a writeup at the Wheeling (WV) Intelligencer. After all, what does Murray know? He's only the head of the largest company in an industry which is still responsible for fueling 39 percent of America's electrical grid, and the majority of it in many states. Who would want to give him any visibility, as if he has anything valuable to say? Well, I do.

By Tom Blumer | July 21, 2015 | 11:16 AM EDT

In June, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley unveiled a "climate change plan." The press loved it. Glowing articles appeared in many place, including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill and the Huffington Post, whose Kate Sheppard wrote that the former Maryland Governor had "Just Set An Extremely High Bar ... For 2016 Democratic Contenders."

Well, if they're so wired into climate change, why are they ignoring O'Malley's claim yesterday, in an interview with Bloomberg News, that climate change, aka the sanitized term for global warming, is largely responsibe for the rise of ISIS? Answer: Embarrassing comments by leftists are ignored until a Republican or conservative criticizes them. Then the story can be admitted into the news as a "so-and-so attacks" item.