Economy

As yours truly noted in several posts at my home blog on Wednesday and at NewsBusters on Friday and Saturday, the torrent of pre-Thanksgiving "getaway day" economic data was largely disappointing. That didn't stop the Associated Press's Chris Rugaber from pushing the "All is well" meme late Wednesday afternoon, declaring, contrary to what anyone's eyes could see, that "the fundamentals of the U.…

The truth about this year's Thanksgiving and Black Friday store and online sales is out there. It's just that Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, wasn't interested in clearly revealing all of it. Instead, the AP economics writer told readers about the dollar amount of this year's and last year's Thursday and Friday store sales, but failed to quantify the…

On Wednesday, the Associated Press's Josh Boak added to the wire service's collection of weak "Getaway Day" business journalism by declaring that new-home sales "recovered in October." No they didn't. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of 495,000 units reported by the Census Bureau was the fourth-lowest monthly level seen this year, even well below the 521,000 and 545,000 reported in the…

Ever since the White House changed hands almost seven years ago, press reports on the U.S. economy have annoyingly overaccentuated whatever positives reporters might find (or think they have found), while ignoring glaring negatives and omitting key items. One example of such biased reporting came from the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger on Wednesday. In covering the Census Bureau's October…

Economic news on Wednesday's pre-Thanksgiving "Getaway Day" was largely dismal. The government's report on October's personal income and outlays headed up the disappointing news. While incomes increased nicely — at a rate which needs to be repeated about two dozen more times before it can be seen as genuinely impressive — spending only rose by 0.1 percent, while prior months were revised…

You name the problem, Tom Friedman's got the answer: raise taxes on gasoline. Looks like Tom Brokaw's caught Friedman's gas-tax raising fever. On today's Morning Joe, Brokaw proposed, as part of fighting the war on terror, raising gas taxes by five cents per gallon. Brokaw argued that it is wrong that the burden of fighting falls on just 1% of Americans, and that the result of his tax increase…

As we head into the Christmas shopping season, yours truly regrets to inform readers that the relative frequency of late-November media mentions of the "Christmas shopping season" is at the lowest level in all of the years I have been tracking it — probably meaning that it's at an all-time low, period. This is Year 11 of an effort which began in 2005. Each year has involved Google News searches…

Call it the triumph of the "new normal." At Reuters today, after today's first revision of third-quarter gross domestic product showed that the economy grew by an annualized 2.1 percent, up from the late-October estimate of 1.5 percent, reporter Lucia Mutikani and Editor Paul Simao demonstrated that they have completely given in to the artificially lowered expectations of past seven miserable…

There was yet another sighting of the U-word ("unexpectedly") in connection with disappointing economic news today. Bloomberg News, which most frequently employs the word, told readers that "Consumer confidence unexpectedly declined in November to the lowest level in more than a year as Americans grew less enthusiastic about the labor-market outlook." Expectations were that confidence would…

Liberals sometimes say that law enforcement’s approach to the Mafia offers a model for how to deal with jihadists, even though the latter tend not to limit their demands to protection money. This past Sunday, Egberto Willies claimed that if terrorist attacks were “treated as they should be, like organized crime, it would neuter ISIS. After all…the group is no more powerful than a large band of…

Gosh, this gets tiresome. Once again, with one noteworthy exception, the business press's virtually blind acceptance of seasonally adjusted economic data, and its accompanying refusal to look at the underlying raw data, led it to paint a deceptive picture of an important element of the economy. This time, it was existing home sales for October. The seasonally adjusted annual rate for October…

The press's reluctance to relay Obamacare-related bad news has been obvious for years. Nowhere is this more consistently the case than at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press. Over half of the state non-profit co-ops set up under Obamacare with $2 billion-plus in taxayer funding are failing. The AP has generally treated those failures as local stories, even though they relate to…

Teasing an upcoming report that amounted to Obama administration propaganda on Thursday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: “Fighting for family leave....How one mom's courageous battle for more time at home made it all the way to the White House.”