Bias by Omission

It's interesting, and more than a little frustrating, to see how inflammatory words in speeches delivered by liberal and leftist politicians that might cast them in a bad light don't seem to make much news. One such example occurred in a speech yesterday at Cincinnati's Coney Island, on the occasion of the AFL-CIO's huge annual picnic there. At that event, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland lashed out…

Obama administration Labor Secretary Hilda Solis (pictured at right with what I would guess is her ideal car of the future) shamelessly used Labor Day weekend as an opportunity to score political points. In a presentation that was more a political stump speech than an informative presentation, Solis recited a litany of alleged accomplishments. Many of them have no relationship to what her…

The news out of Government/General Motors during the past couple of days hasn't been particularly good. First, August sales results were disappointing. Second, it become known today that GM will attempt to go public on November 18, a later than originally hoped post-election date chosen to hopefully allow for another reported quarterly profit to boost investors' appetite for its shares. As so…

Yesterday the Gallup organization released a poll showing that Americans trust Republicans over Democrats on most major issues heading into the general election season. Today the same polling outfit released a poll that found a large number of Americans blame George W. Bush for the faltering economy. Guess which one Gallup partner USA Today hyped?Here's how USA Today staffer Susan Page began her…

Talk about an in-kind contribution. In a short item about a Democratic Governors Association election complaint about Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate John Kasich, the Associated Press's Julie Carr Smyth showed that she is willfully ignoring Buckeye State reality, or has been living a hermit's existence for the past few months. In describing Kasich's standing against Democratic incumbent…

How the once mighty have fallen. In the midst of covering the performance of the broadcast networks last week, David Bauder at the Associated Press noted the following (HT Kevin Alloca at Media Bistro): Meanwhile, the NBC, ABC and CBS evening newscasts combined for a dubious record last week: the average of 18.7 million people who watched one of the three shows last week was the smallest audience…

This past weekend, intrepid journalists at the New York Post and NorthJersey.com released information they unearthed about proposed Ground Zero Mosque "organizer" Sharif El-Gamal and frontman Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, respectively, that the wire services, the New York Times and the national TV networks would likely have run with by now had the items related to a major church or synagogue. But…

Defenders of controversial imam Feisal Abdul Rauf have been touting his past efforts in offering counterterrorism advice to the FBI as a way to illustrate his bridge-building intentions.  Much like other reports, they tend to gloss over the more controversial aspects of Rauf's statements.  But, as is typical with the Ground Zero mosque imam, it can be demonstrated that he is frequently speaking…

An interesting character made an appearance in a Saturday evening Associated Press report by Cristian Salazar on Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: It's not a one-time accident. The same paragraph carried at Google's version of the story has the same extra character: The question mark is actually well-placed, as the following paragraphs from Salazar's report demonstrate (bolds are mine throughout this…

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's first full day as the only person in the whole wide world with any kind of influence over what happens in the economy didn't go too badly. That's the impression one might get from consuming two Friday Associated dispatches and a related AP Video. Bernanke apparently took full charge of anything and everything having to do with the economy on Thursday evening. As…

Sometimes you just have to chuckle at the transparent motivations of business writers in the establishment press. Two Associated Press reports from this afternoon, one from Stephen Bernard and another much lengthier piece from Jeannine Aversa, attempt to set the template for Friday morning's reportage: Despite all the bad news, including a serious downward revision to second-quarter economic…

In late July, a Government Accountability Office report circulated which analyzed stimulus funding being spent by the Department of Energy.  The main gist of that report involved the cost of each job being generated by the stimulus bill - a staggering $194,000.  Tucked away in that report was a phrase that was new to most of us, a way to calculate jobs through a term called ‘lives touched'. Last…

Last week, Dr. Laura Schlessinger announced on CNN that she was hanging up her headphones at the end of the year. If she could not exercise her freedom of speech, she said, she was not interested in the job. Watchdogs on the left had pounced on a conversation she had with a black woman in which she proclaimed something that everyone with cable TV knows is true. The N-word is acceptable…

July's bad news in new home sales is even worse than it first appears. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of 276,000 units is bad enough. That is an all-time low since records have been kept and 12% lower than June's annual rate. It's also lower than what analysts predicted by about the same percentage. The lazy business press is running with those figures. But, as has been the case so many…