Bias by Omission

To err is human, but some errors are more obvious than others. One pretty obvious error occurred Tuesday at the Associated Press. It involved veteran economics reporter Christopher Rugaber, who somehow assumed that the August increase in home prices recorded in a well-known index published on Tuesday primarily occurred because of "solid sales." The problem is that seasonally adjusted existing…

Earlier today, Katie Yoder at NewsBusters posted and described the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress on Planned Parenthood's late-term abortion business and its related ghoulish work in harvesting fetal tissue from abortions for research. Yoder's work and that CMP video caused me to remember how the Associated Press wrote up Planned Parenthood's announcement that it would cease…

On Tuesday, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC censored from their evening newscasts any mention of the House of Representative beginning the procedures to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen on the heels of Republican Congressman and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s expected ascension to Speaker of the House.

If you're a few hours late catching up on reports on economic data at the Associated Press, one of the best ways to determine whether the news was good or disappointing is to see whether the story's headline and opening blurb are still present about four hours later among the wire service's "Top (usually 10) Business News" items. The good-news items will usually still be there; the disappointing…

Today saw yet another "unexpected" disappointing development in the U.S. economy. The Census Bureau reported that seasonally adjusted sales of new homes, an area thought to be a bright spot, declined sharply in September to an annual rate 468,000 from 529,000 in August. The bureau also revised July and August significantly downward. As bad as the as the adjusted numbers were, the raw data was…

Late Sunday evening, the United Auto Workers and General Motors reached a tentative four-year agreement shortly before the union's 11:59 p.m. strike deadline. The agreement was expected, simply because the financial and political blowback of a strike at a company bailed out by taxpayers at a cost running into tens of billion of dollars back in 2009 would have been severe. Also expected: the…

Those folks at the Associated Press sure are "clever." Those looking for information about Hillary Clinton's damning email to her daughter Chelsea indicating that Mrs. Clinton knew that a planned operation by Al Qaeda — and not an Internet video — was behind the Benghazi attacks which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others trying to save him will find nothing at all at the AP's…

The news coming out of Detroit about near-deadline negotiations between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors has been pretty quiet. As the Sunday 11:59 p.m. deadline approaches, the Associated Press only has a four-paragraph blurb indicating that the union wants to get a richer package than it just garnered in negotiations with Fiat Chrysler. A Reuters report goes into detail about GM…

The press has consumed many barrels of ink and gigs of bandwidth providing free promotion for the eminently misnamed movie Truth, thus far virtually for naught. On Thursday, the Associated Press's David Bauder did his part to generate interest by pretending, despite obviously forged documents and a virtually complete lack of anything resembling corroborating evidence, that what Dan Rather and…

ABC, CBS, and NBC's evening newscasts on Friday all failed to cover the Justice Department announcing that it would be ending its investigation into the IRS's targeting of conservative groups. The Big Three networks' news program did find time to air reporting on the top Google searches for Halloween costumes, the fewer number of turkeys available for upcoming Thanksgiving dinners, and the…

The folks at the Associated Press aren't even trying to disguise how pleased they are after Canada's most recent elections swept the Liberal Party into power after almost a decade in the wilderness. They're claiming that victorious Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems destined to ignite the second installment of "Trudeaumania," the late-1960s press anointing which accompanied his father Pierre…

Suddenly worried about government spending, the Thursday edition of ABC’s World News Tonight featured anchor David Muir complaining on three separate occasions about the cost of the House Select Committee on Benghazi while chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl observed that Republicans “really didn’t succeed” in “draw[ing] blood” from Hillary Clinton.

Analyzing Hillary Clinton’s performance before the House Benghazi Committee, CBS News political director John Dickerson stated on Thursday’s CBS Evening News that Clinton “avoid[ed]” falling into any “pitfalls” as those questioning her fought “like cats and dogs.”

On Thursday, the Washington Post's Anthony Faiola spun the latest synod of Catholic bishops at the Vatican as a "theological slugfest" between two main factions of the Catholic hierarchy: the "liberal"/"progressive" backers of "Pope Francis's vision for a more inclusive church," versus a "backlash" from "conservatives/"traditionalists." Faiola even hyped how some unnamed "moderate conservatives"…