Jeff Mason

Veteran Dallas Reporter Makes Rookie Mistake on Taxation of U.S. Firms' Overseas Profits
By Tom Blumer | June 10, 2015 | 9:16 PM EDT

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.

Press Morphs Obama's 'Regional Power' Assertion About Russia Into an Insult to Putin; It Wasn't Delivered That Way
By Tom Blumer | March 25, 2014 | 11:46 PM EDT

At President Barack Obama's press conference in The Hague, Netherlands today, as part of a much longer question, ABC's Jonathan Karl asked Obama whether "Mitt Romney had a point when he said that Russia is America’s biggest geopolitical foe? If not Russia, who?"

It's important to note that Obama's response to that portion of Karl's question pertained to and was directed at Romney. A video containing Karl's question and Obama's answer ("With respect to Mr. Romney’s assertion that Russia’s our number- one geopolitical foe, the truth of the matter is that, you know, America’s got a whole lot of challenges. Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors -- not out of strength, but out of weakness") shows that the President's tone at that point was generally calm with a bit of a defiant edge which seemed directed at Romney and Karl (perhaps not in that order). That didn't stop the establishment press from claiming that Obama's statement was really an insult directed at Russia (it wasn't) and that the President supposedly directed his "derisive" statement towards Russian President Vladimir Putin (he didn't).

Reuters: Bush Pulled United States Out of Kyoto
By Richard Newcomb | September 24, 2007 | 1:01 PM EDT

Journalists like to tell us about their professionalism and the many layers of editors that ensure their accuracy. However, somewhere in those layers of editors, have reporters lost the ability to perform basic research? In the case of Reuters reporter Jeff Mason, it would seem to be so. Mason wrote an article on California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Monday speech on global warming, in which he wrote,

President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto accord, saying it unfairly burdened rich countries while exempting developing countries like China and India.