Economy

Networks Ignore Financial Times’ Criticism of Piketty 'Errors
May 27th, 2014 3:11 PM
French economist Thomas Piketty’s far-left views on wealth and income inequality are beloved ... at least by the liberal media. So it was no surprise that all three broadcast networks skipped criticism of “errors” in his work over the weekend. Some print media outlets also ignored that story.
When his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” rose to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list the…

AP's Babington IDs Benghazi, IRS Targeting As 'Old Controversies' Exce
May 26th, 2014 11:49 PM
The Associated Press's Charles Babington went so far over the top in his Monday morning dispatch on Republicans, the Obama administration's scandals, and the fall electoral landscape that it's hard to know where to begin.
The fingerprints of Obama administration operatives appear to be all over Babington's report, both in what's included and what's left out. Most notoriously, there is no…

FT's Giles Finds Piketty's 'Wealth Inequality' Work Riddled With 'Data
May 23rd, 2014 6:57 PM
French economist Thomas Piketty has become a darling of the left for allegedly "proving" that, as paraphrased by Chris Giles at the Financial Times, "wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war." The Media Research Center's Julia Seymour has described Piketty as a "'rock star' of the far-left," an accurate assessment given praises heaped upon his book…

PBS’s Ifill Fails to Ask Geithner About Admission That WH Asked Him
May 23rd, 2014 12:10 PM
On Thursday evening, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner appeared on the PBS NewsHour to discuss his new memoir. Not only did the taxpayer-subsidized anchor Gwen Ifill gently press Geithner from the left on policy matters, she failed to ask him about one of his most startling admissions – that Obama administration officials wanted him to lie during appearances on the Sunday morning TV…

AP's Raum: Almost 700 Words on Historic Growth in Temps and Contract W
May 19th, 2014 5:50 PM
In July 2013, the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber finally noticed the meteoric rise in the number of temporary help service and other non-payroll personnel working at U.S. employers — a trend which at the time was about 2-1/2 years old. Rugaber noted that "temps and to a much larger universe of freelancers, contract workers and consultants ... number nearly 17 million people who have…

NYT's David Carr: Dean Baquet Threatened to Resign If Abramson Stayed
May 19th, 2014 11:25 AM
Last night (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I pointed to the track record of Dean Baquet, who has ascended to the hallowed perch of executive editor at the New York Times, and observed that "someone who has clearly been a troubling and disruptive presence is now in charge."
Two incidents spanning seven years support my contention. The first occurred in 2006 at the Los Angeles Times, where…
The Media’s One-Side-Fits-All Approach to Net Neutrality
May 19th, 2014 8:44 AM
What at times is worse than the Jurassic Press not covering something? The Jurassic Press covering something.
The all-encompassing government-Internet-power-grab that is Network Neutrality rarely gets outside-the-Tech-World media attention. But Thursday the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted in Democrat Party-line fashion to begin its process of imposing it. This was a big…

CBS’s Schieffer Fails to Challenge Timothy Geithner’s Claim That
May 18th, 2014 12:28 PM
Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, May 18 to promote his new memoir Stress Test, yet host Bob Schieffer barely touched on the most controversial aspect, that the Obama Administration had directed him to spin negative aspects of Obama’s policies.
Schieffer briefly asked his guest “Did the administration ever try to get you to put a more…

AP Treats Obamacare Contractor's Employees in Three States Doing Almos
May 18th, 2014 12:05 AM
A search at 11:00 p.m. ET tonight at the Associated Press's national web site on "Serco," the company with a five-year, $1.25 billion contract to process paper Obamacare enrollment applications, returned no results. That's absolutely pathetic, given that St. Louis TV station KMOV, based on multiple accounts from several current and former employees and contractors, has reported that the company…

AP Blames '(Good) Weather' For April Decline in Industrial Production
May 15th, 2014 3:26 PM
It looks like the "weather" excuse the press went to repeatedly to explain weak economic results in December, and January, and February, and March still has life in April. But this time, warm weather (which most of us would find "good," at least in April) is to blame. An early afternoon report (relevant portion saved here in graphic form) on the Dow's 200-point mid-day dip by the Associated…

Press Largely Ignores GAO Finding That Sequestration Led to Just One F
May 14th, 2014 12:20 AM
According to a Government Accountability Office report released in March but inexplicably only getting attention just now, the pain resulting from last year's sequestration "cuts," which were mostly reductions in the growth of spending in comparison to the previous year, bore no resemblance to the Armageddon-like warnings which preceded their imposition. Only one federal employee was laid off.…

When Did That Happen? AP's Retail Sales Coverage Sharply Cuts Predicte
May 13th, 2014 2:58 PM
The Associated Press's unbylined coverage of the Census Bureau's April retail sales report — sales rose 0.1 percent, falling far short of consensus expectations of 0.4 percent, a result Reuters predictably called "unexpected" — slipped in a sentence that had me rubbing my eyes.
In early May, after the government announced that first-quarter gross domestic product growth came in at a barely…
Tim Geithner Admits White House Told Him to Lie to Media, Charlie Rose
May 13th, 2014 1:33 PM
Charlie Rose invited on Timothy Geithner for the entire hour on his PBS show to plug his new memoir but never once asked him about the juiciest nugget in the book - that the White House told Geithner to lie to the media.
On Monday’s edition of PBS’s Charlie Rose show, the CBS This Morning co-host never got around to asking the former Treasury Secretary about his revelation that White House…
As Usual, AP Rewrites Fiscal History in Covering the Government's Mont
May 12th, 2014 4:59 PM
The Associated Press's unbylined 2:25 p.m. report on the government's April Monthly Treasury Statement contained an unhealthy dose of the historical revisionism we've come to expect from the outfit which really should be called in the Administration's Press.
AP's tallest tale is in ascribing the four annual deficits of over $1 trillion incurred from fiscal 2009 through 2012 entirely to the "…