Economy

Imagine a movie that 1) sympathetically portrays Occupy Wall Street and 2) features songs by “Weird Al” Yankovic. If you think 1) and 2) seem incongruous, you might get an argument from writer Lynn Stuart Parramore. In a piece that ran Wednesday on Salon and originally appeared on AlterNet, Parramore claimed that Yankovic’s recent chart-topping album, Mandatory Fun, contains a “deeply moral…

Friday’s Morning Joe panel made sure to express how it was “disappointed” that a Minnesota restaurant had the audacity to put a “minimum wage fee” on its receipts after the state hiked the wage requirement. While Joe Scarborough acknowledged that “it's hard” for “small business owners running restaurants” he had no sympathy for the restaurant, which had received shocking blowback from its…

On Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie noted a restaurant in Minnesota that found "a unique way to offset the added expense" of the state hiking its minimum wage: "The Oasis Café is now including a 'minimum wage fee' on bills. You see it right there on the bill. Totals 35 cents....the cafe's owners say this wage hike is going to cost them $10,000 a year, this is their way of…

Here’s something you don’t see every day, a donor for President Obama admitting that America’s corporate tax rate is too high. Mellody Hobson appeared on CBS This Morning on Thursday, August 7 to discuss pharmacy chain Walgreens’ decision to keep its headquarters in the United States. The CBS News contributor opined that even though she agreed with the company’s decision she acknowledged that…

On Wednesday, August 6, USA Today reported that the federal website USASpending.gov which is tasked with tracking government money, can’t find $619 billion from different agency budgets.   Despite the government losing track of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, CBS This Morning was the only network morning show to cover the report on Wednesday morning. ABC’s Good Morning America and…

Released on Friday morning, the latest jobs report from the Labor Department touted a net growth of 209,000 jobs in July. On Friday evening, the report was promoted on all three of the major broadcast networks, ranging from news briefs by ABC and NBC to a full report from CBS. While there was plenty of praise and even an ounce of positive news, the networks mostly failed to note that the…

This post is not about an item in The Onion. It's about a supposedly serious establishment press story at The Hill. This morning, Amie Parnes and Peter Schroeder covered the Obama administration's apparent plan to pivot to the economy for the umpteenth time. But this time, Obama and his apparatchiks aren't doing it because they think they need to convince people that things are getting better…

In a Thursday report on why many Americans are still unimpressed with the U.S. job market, Associated Press reporters Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak made a rare admission that "Finding a steady full-time job has become harder" than it was before the recession. The AP pair then contended that "the trend might also reflect a lasting shift among restaurants and coffee shops," but found an "…

All three broadcast network evening shows reported the higher than expected 4 percent gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate for the second quarter on July 30. However, ABC and NBC evening shows previously skipped the three prior GDP announcements that showed the economy shrinking in the first quarter. ABC and NBC evening news programs ignored the Commerce Department’s announcement of…

Which is the more important statistic: A 36 percent decline in U.S. median household net worth since 2003, or a 43 percent decline in that same statistic since 2007? The average person would certainly be more concerned about the latter, which represents an annual drop of about 7 percent compared to the less than 4 percent per year seen in the past decade. But apparently if you're a reporter…

According to MSNBC, Republicans are always making things worse. On the July 25 edition of Ronan Farrow Daily, the cable host began a segment entitled “Kinder, Gentler GOP?” after playing a clip of Rand Paul at the National Urban League annual conference speaking of the “poverty problem.” Farrow asked his guests a stream of leading questions insinuating that Republicans are “catering to a…

Both ABC World News with Diane Sawyer and NBC Nightly News failed to mention a new, troubling report from the Census Bureau on Thursday night that sales of new homes decreased by 8.1% in June and that May’s originally reported double-digit increase was revised lower, from almost 19% to only 8%.  The CBS Evening News did cover this story, but it only was in the form of a 12-second news brief…

At the beginning of the July 24 edition of Fast Money, CNBC aired an exclusive interview of President Obama by the network's Steve Liesman focused primarily on taxes and tax reform, particularly the president's call to prevent large corporations from capitalizing on an "inversion" to lessen their federal tax bite. But after the interview was aired, CNBC panelists excoriated the president as "…

On Wednesday, NBC's Today offered a surprising full report on "filmmaker and liberal activist" Michael Moore tarnishing his "blue-collar, anti-capitalist image" after it was revealed during divorce proceedings that Moore and his now ex-wife lived in a Michigan mansion, "the 10,000-square-foot house, reportedly in the same neighborhood as Madonna and Bruce Willis." [Listen to the audio or watch…