Economy

To the extent that it was there at all, there was far too little emphasis in yesterday's wire service reporting on yesterday's OMG-awful jobs report (worse than most believe, as will be shown in a later post) was far less on those who continue to be affected -- like, say, the unemployed, under-employed and discouraged, who should be the object of such news stories -- and far too much…

Is MSNBC's Chris Matthews stupid, dishonest, or both? On Friday's Hardball, the host actually said of today's report from the Department of Labor, "The unemployment rate did drop to 8.1 percent, the lowest rate since President Obama took office" (video follows with transcribe highlights and commentary):

CNN's Anderson Cooper twice nailed Democrats in the last week for falsely accusing Republicans of waging war on women's health, but the three major networks either ignored the story (ABC) or skimmed over the details without fact-checking the Democratic accusations (CBS, NBC). Cooper aired a critical "Keeping Them Honest" report on April 27 and another one on Thursday May 3, refuting…

About 45,000 fewer jobs were added in April than economists expected, and the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1 percent due to more than a half million people giving up the job search. CNN Money reacted with the headline “hiring fizzles.” University of Maryland Economist Peter Morici wrote in response the jobs report, “The economy added 115,000 jobs in April - much less than expected and not…

Well, we can all stop thinking about the presidential election, because Barack Obama's victory is assured. This morning, Paul Wiseman at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, virtually celebrated analysts' predictions that the unemployment rate will drop a whole 0.3% between now and Election Day to 7.9%. But in searching desperately for a precedent, he claimed that a public…

There's been a lot of bad economic news lately, but the folks at the Associated Press don't care. In their view - or at least in the opinion of those they surveyed - "[h]iring through the rest of 2012...will be strong enough to push the unemployment rate below 8 percent by Election Day" boosting "Obama's prospects in November":

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) had some harsh words for Barack Obama Wednesday. During an interview with Fox News's Bret Baier, Ryan said, "Everything the president says about budgets, about our numbers, we’re used to him telling things that are dramatic distortions" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

There's real paradox in romanticizing squalid, rat infested tents in one section of your publication while in another advising well-heeled readers where to buy a $5,000 Chippendale rug. But such is life at a liberal big-city newspaper. The Washington Post swooned over the Occupy Movement last year, devoting thousands of words and gallons of ink to covering the complaints of the self-…

It must be campaign season. Fact-checking gurus are rating accurate statements by the Romney campaign as "Mostly False" or "Half True" or – the best – "True but False," since they're correct but they apparently don't tell the whole story. However, when President Obama made a factually-incorrect statement last week, he did not receive a "False" rating from the website PolitiFact, but…

As NewsBusters reported Sunday, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Republican strategist Alex Castellanos got into quite a heated debate about the gender wage gap on NBC's Meet the Press. CNN's Situation Room decided to find out who was right about this controversial issue Monday, and despite going to great lengths to side with Maddow, correspondent Lisa Sylvester grudgingly admitted at the very end…

It's a given that despite the trillions of dollars in government spending, the U.S. economy is continuing to limp along instead of growing rapidly as is normally the case after bad recessions. So spending isn't the best way to stimulate a flagging economy. Besides the future debt problem, there's another one that the free-spending is causing America: the possibility that the dollar will lose…

Apple -- the world's most valuable business and an engine of economic growth and personal freedom across the United States and around the world -- is coming under fire because it had the nerve to structure its global business in such a way that saves the company on taxes. The New York Times has a very lengthy story exploring all of the ways that Apple minimizes its tax bill. The article,…

He's baaaaaack! Bestselling fiction author Stephen King took to the liberal publication the Daily Beast Monday to hurl some classically left-wing attacks, filled with some classically left-wing vulgarity, at fiscally minded conservatives such as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in a piece aptly titled "Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!" (serious vulgarity warning):

At the New York Times on Saturday (in Sunday's print edition), reporters Charles Duhigg and David Kocienewski, in a report riddled with conceptual flaws and misleading statistics, bemoaned "how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy." They focused their attention almost entirely on Apple, seemingly in…