Bias by Omission

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…

In a report on the relative infrequency of hurricanes in the U.S. during the past decade nationwide, and many decades in certain coastal areas, the Associated Press's Seth Borenstein detected a problem. The problem is that those who contend that human-caused global warming is ruining our planet believe that hurricane frequency should be increasing, but it's not. So Borenstein tried to cover his…

In case you missed it, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have requested disaster relief assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to recover costs incurred during that city's April riots. You read that right. Yvonne Wenger at the Baltimore Sun predictably buried the lede in her May 26 story's third paragraph, giving uninitiated readers the impression that…

One doesn't know what to do with the rubbish which follows beyond noting it and hoping that the ridicule which results will somehow and in some way have some kind of impact. Despite 6-1/2 years of horrid governance and dozens of acknowledged scandals, several of which a few of the credible remaining outposts of liberal thought have actually agreed are scandals, David Brooks, the New York Times's…

Facts are such inconvenient things. Especially financial facts and figures. On Tuesday, Rebecca Shabad at the Hill composed a 34-paragraph report entitled "Washington is ready to spend." Really? When have Congress or the White House not been ready to spend? Oh, I get it. She really means that they're getting ready to spend more. How much more? Readers will search in vain for anything beyond a…

On Friday's World News Tonight, ABC's David Muir avoided mentioning the critics as he reported on the Obama administration removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Instead, Muir spotlighted how "President Obama [told] us back in December his plans to restore diplomatic ties with the Cuban government," and that during a January 2015 visit to the island country, "the children of…

Friday's Morning Edition on NPR did its best to try to promote the liberal cause of expanding Medicaid in Texas. Wade Goodwyn lined up six soundbites from pro-expansion talking heads, versus only two from former Texas Governor Rick Perry, an opponent. Goodwyn played up that "in hating the Affordable Care Act, the state is leaving on the table as much as a hundred billion dollars of federal money…

Old stereotypes die hard — especially the ones which have long been false. The June 1 cover of The New Yorker Magazine depicts the Republican Party's current crop of declared and undeclared 2016 presidential candidates as an all-white-boys affair, showing seven of them in different locker-room postures, with Hillary Clinton peeping in through a window. How is this possible, you ask? Where are…

Paul J. Weber of the Associated Press made his liberal slant clear in a Wednesday article detailing how a pro-traditional marriage bill failed to pass in the Texas state legislature. Weber played up the supposedly "divisive efforts by Texas Republicans to defy the U.S. Supreme Court if same-sex marriage is legalized." He clearly labeled the proponents of the bill as conservatives, but failed to…

As noted in my previous related post, one of the authors of a late-2014 study which made the nonsensical claim that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage,” causing "a cascade of opinion change," issued a retraction last week, because the data supporting it was faked. Since it was published in Science Magazine — and because it conveniently…

The latest network blackout concerning one of the Clinton scandals came to an end on NBC Thursday as a segment on Today by correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned an AP story from two days before exposing what appears to be a shell company run by former President Bill Clinton. ABC and CBS continued their streaks of ignoring it with all three having yet to utter a word about an International…

The Big Three's morning newscasts on Wednesday and Thursday all covered the breach of an online IRS system by hackers that compromised the personal information of 100,000 taxpayers. However, none of the programs mentioned President Obama by name during their reporting, nor did they revisit any of the other problems or scandals involving the agency in recent years. CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly…

On Wednesday night, the major broadcast networks ignored a series of new regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the agency claims will better explain regulations in the Clean Water Act, but are seen by many as a power grab by the Obama administration to further control America’s waterways. While the story received zero mention on ABC, CBS, or NBC (but full stories…

The Associated Press and Stephen Braun did all they could to cover for the Clintons yesterday. First, the wire service attached the most boring headline imaginable to Braun's story about Bill Clinton's shell company shenanigans: "Bill Clinton company shows complexity of family finances." The message to subscribers, particularly the broadcast networks: "This is boring and time-consuming. Don't…