Economy

Appearing on Friday's NBC Today, Meet the Press host David Gregory advised the Obama campaign on how defeat Mitt Romney: "What the President's got to do is say, 'Hey, don't forget about George W. Bush. Things got really, really bad under him.'" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Co-host Matt Lauer was skeptical: "I hear him saying that all the time....do you think that…

We at NewsBusters have been calling MSNBC's Chris Matthews a sycophant for Barack Obama since at least February 2008 when the so-called journalist bragged on the air about getting a thrill up his leg at the sound of the former junior senator from Illinois' voice. It was therefore quite pleasing to hear former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele tell the Hardball host that to…

Minutes after President Barack Obama finished speaking about the economy on Thursday afternoon, two analysts for the “forward-leaning” MSNBC cable news channel criticized the 54-minute speech by saying that it “didn't work” and he “lost his audience by the end.” MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall began the segment by asking liberal columnist Jonathan Alter what he thought of the president's address.…

If you're starting to lose Jonathan Alter, reporters at Politico, and other left-leaning outlets, you're starting to get into trouble. Double that if you can't even get Julie Pace at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, to muster more than eight paragraphs relating to a 53-minute speech pre-positioned as a "major address." Hunter Walker has compiled several less than…

Sometimes it takes a bit of exertion to disprove an assertion made by an establishment press reporter. Not this time. Today's Department of Labor report on initial unemployment claims told us that such filings "unexpectedly" (as relayed by Reuters and Bloomberg) rose to 386,000 from an upwardly revised (of course) 380,000 the previous week; expectations were for a fall to 375,000. About an hour…

Some of the responses to my column last week, titled "Immoral Beyond Redemption," prove that Americans have been hoodwinked by Congress. Some readers protested my counting Social Security among government handout programs that can be described as Congress' taking what belongs to one American and giving to another, to whom it doesn't belong — legalized theft. They argued that they worked for 45…

While CNN's Soledad O'Brien tossed softballs at Democratic Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, she was not so kind to her Republican guest during the next hour, on Thursday's Starting Point. O'Brien reported poor poll numbers for both the Romney and Obama campaigns, but went after only the Romney campaign's economic message in detail. O'Brien teed up the Democratic mayor to respond to…

Maybe the answer to eliminating much of the annoying bias in establishment press business reporting is to have the reporters involved eliminate the could-might-maybe statements which almost inevitably follow the initial relay of the primary news. Take the first paragraph of Christopher Rugaber's report Tuesday on recent increases in state tax collections (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Might the man who once said of himself "there's been nobody who's a bigger Obama supporter" vote for Mitt Romney?  Maybe.  On today's Morning Joe, Donny Deutsch—ad exec, man-about-the-Hamptons and quintessential wealthy NYC liberal—declared that his support for President Obama is "wavering." Deutsch said that it was the bad jobs numbers of a couple weeks ago that "changed everything for me…

Last week, President Obama said "the private sector is doing fine." This was not reassuring to those of us who suspect the Democrats haven't the first idea what "private sector" means. He did not help matters by becoming lachrymose over the suffering of public sector employees: "Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. ... And so, if…

President Obama continues to prove how out of touch he is with the plight of the American people under his anemic economy. No, Mr. President, the economy and the private sector are not "doing fine." Sure, Obama is pretending that he didn't mean it the way it sounded. But I am not buying that it was a gaffe. I watched the video, and he stated the point clearly and deliberately.

In an interview with Republican Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey on her Tuesday MSNBC show, host Andrea Mitchell attempted to use a new Federal Reserve report showing massive wealth loss for the American middle class to promote President Obama's agenda: "Does that, in fact, justify what the President has been saying...about the need for more help and the need for more stimulus?" Toomey…

We've gone from "hope and change" to hoping blaming Bush will work.  As Joe Scarborough said: at least Mika Brzezinski's honest about it.  Asked whether she believed that President Obama's attempt to continue to blame George W. Bush for the country's economic woes will work as a campaign strategy, a seemingly dispirited Mika Brzezinski replied: "well, I'm hopin'".  Scarborough burst into…

To illustrate how factually negligent this afternoon's report by Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press on the federal government's financial results embodied in its Monthly Treasury Statement was, let's take a look at how Pedro Nicolaci da Costa at Reuters communicated more in a four-sentence brief than the AP reporter did in 18 painful paragraphs. Here is da Costa's item, in full: