In the middle segment of Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, the newscast promoted a new Pew Research Study that illustrated the decline of the middle class in the years since the Great Recession to the point that, as anchor Scott Pelley highlighted, “[t]he middle class is no longer the majority in America.” Of course, as the liberal media naturally does, they neglected to include any placement of blame on why the erosion has taken place and placed no blame on the Obama administration and its policies (including ObamaCare).

Promoting the new season of his ABC sitcom Last Man Standing, actor and Republican Tim Allen joined Thursday’s Hannity on Fox News Channel (FNC) to blast the federal government over reckless spending, the national debt, and a culture of political correctness that he tries to rebuke on the show where he plays “a very smart Archie Bunker.”

Shortly after its release this morning, Josh Boak at the Associated Press posted his coverage of the Census Bureau's August retail sales report. On a seasonally adjusted basis, August's sales came in a very mediocre 0.2 percent greater than July.

It's almost too kind to say that Boak's writeup was delusional. The AP reporter celebrated "surges" in spending, "fed ... by solid and steady job gains" that will "sustain U.S. economic growth." He missed an important clue, downplaying the significance of "a possible pullback in the housing sector's momentum" — not that there has been all that much momentum anyway.

Several commenters at my econ-related posts during the past several months here at NewsBusters and my home blog have noted how Washington's mix of high deficits, over-regulation, and quantitative easing never seem to get any kind of blame for the economy in establishment press coverage.

One could hardly find a better example of that deliberate avoidance than Josh Boak's writeup today at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, on how "Home ownership ... is increasingly on hold for younger Americans." While he identified several symptoms which could easily be traced to Obama administration and Federal Reserve policies, Boak never tagged anyone who might be responsible, instead acting as if all these adverse conditions just sort of happened and ... oh well, here we are.

The New York Times reported last weekend that one line of attack American Crossroads and other Republican-leaning groups are likely to use against Hillary Clinton is that she’s far too wealthy to relate to average Americans. Regarding such criticism, Steve Benen says, in effect: Bring it on.

Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the TRMS blog, argued in a Monday post that the rich-and-out-of-touch charge won’t stick to Hillary the way it did to Mitt Romney because “Romney was extremely wealthy while pushing a policy agenda that would benefit people like him,” whereas Hillary’s economic program would help those nowhere near as well-off as she is.