The serious sales slumps combined with inventory buildups in manufacturing and wholesale industries, documented in previous NewsBusters posts, continues. So does the establishment press's determination to ignore them.

At the Associated Press today, Christopher Rugaber was tasked to cover the Federal Reserve's June release on Industrial Production. The good news is that the Fed report showed an overall increase (+0.3 percent) for the first time in three months. The bad news is that none of it came in manufacturing, which was flat as a pancake for the second straight month. The net sum of the monthly manufacturing declines so far this year is -0.3 percent. While Rugaber concentrated his attention where it belonged, i.e., on manufacturing, since it makes up 75 percent of all industrial activity, he still managed to come up with all kinds of explanations for the lack of progress — except the two most obvious (bold is mine):

The politically correct speech police are everywhere these days. Many members of the leftist establishment have taken it upon themselves to aid in their enforcement efforts. No one is safe — not even the person they want us to believe is destined to be the Democrats' 2016 presidential nominee.

Yesterday, at a Florissant, Missouri church only five miles from Ferguson, Hillary Clinton uttered the following words in succession: "All lives matter." NPR's Tamara Keith and Amita Kelly devoted much of their four-minute "Morning Edition" report on her appearance to what was described as a "3-Word Misstep."

Today's release from the Federal Reserve on industrial production (including mining and utilities) told us that it declined by a seasonally adjusted 0.2 percent in May. It was the sixth consecutive month showing a decline or no gain, during which time output has fallen by 1.1 percent (not annualized).

Bloomberg News, which reported that economists and analysts expected an increase of 0.2 percent, described the result as "unexpected." Reuters gave us the adverb version of the U-word: "U.S. industrial production unexpectedly fell in May." In covering the news, Associated Press reporter Josh Boak failed to note the length of the protracted slump, and even went into a light version of "Happy Days Are (Still, Probably, We Really Hope) Here Again," using a sentiment survey to argue against the hard information collected by the Fed.

Will Deener, who has been a business reporter since at least before the turn of the century, considers his most unforgettable experience on the job to be "Covering the crash of the Internet stocks and Enron in 2000-2002."

Sunday evening, the Dallas Morning News columnist moaned about how big U.S. companies engaged in real businesses are avoiding paying billions in taxes because "the nation’s largest companies stockpile billions of dollars in profits overseas." In the process, he assumed that companies would pay the highest federal income tax rate of 35 percent on all overseas profits repatratriated. That's simply wrong, and it's astonishing that someone with his experience doesn't know any better. That level of ignorance largely explains why President Barack Obama, earlier this year, was able to package what was effectively a reversal of decades of tax policy as a "one-time tax" on such earnings — whether or not they were repatriated.

This morning's April factory orders report from the Census Bureau showed yet another seasonally adjusted decline. This time, they fell 0.4 percent, seriously underperforming expectations that they would come in flat.

This naturally brought forth another sighting of the U-word ("unexpectedly"), this time at Reuters. Both Reuters and the Associated Press failed to note how steep the year-over-year declines in orders — and for that matter, shipments — have become: