Labor Protest and Campaign Against Toyota Get Kid Gloves from AP, Fair
In late August 2009, Toyota announced that it would close its New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) factory in Fremont, California at the end of March. The plant had been a joint venture of the company and General Motors until June, when GM withdrew. Almost six months later, in the wake of a series of Toyota product recalls, and roughly seven weeks before the plant's scheduled shutdown,…
Lowered Bar: Obama's 95K/Month Jobs Promise Would Trail Other Recoveri
Press reports about the prediction by President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers that the economy would add an average of 95,000 jobs per month during calendar 2010 weren't exactly overflowing with praise, but were lacking in something one would have expected: historical context. Philip Elliott's Associated Press report provided none. Sewell Chan's New York Times coverage at least pointed…
ABC, CBS, NBC Cite Stimulus Supporters Nearly Three Times as Often as
President Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan was the most expensive bill in history. Still, it received strong media support - blazing the way for the controversial bill to pass. Network journalists didn't just back the bill during that debate. Once it had passed, ABC, NBC and CBS spent nearly a year promoting "President Obama's stimulus cavalry," as NBC's Lisa Myers put it. That…
NYT's Anti-Welfare Reform Reporter Takes 2nd Victory Lap: Food Stamp
Veteran New York Times welfare-beat reporter Jason DeParle took yet another victory lap in his Thursday story on how food stamps are losing their stigma in a piece co-written with Robert Gebeloff: "Once Stigmatized, Food Stamps Find Acceptance." These same two reporters wrote a national version of the same story with virtually the same headline less than three months ago, which appeared on the…
Apparatchik Assistance: AP's Latest Chrysler Ad Repeats Free Favor Don
On January 27, in the wake of Toyota's gas-pedal recall, the Associated Press ran what might as well have been a free advertisement for a marketing effort by government-controlled General Motors: Is there any substantive difference between the three paragraphs above and the text of a paid ad? Today, they just did it again, this time for government-controlled Chrysler (what follows is most of…
Think Tanks Do Journalism: Obama Admin's 'Budget Baseline' Incorporate
Two think tanks, the Tax Policy Center and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), have done something the New York Times, the Associated Press, and other supposed leading lights of establishment media journalism should have done days ago. As described in a Wall Street Journal editorial today, those two organizations have caught the Obama administration playing with the federal…
'Power Lunch' Guest Says No to Greek Debt, Warns All Governments Will
Just one day after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the U.S. wouldn't lose its "top-notch" credit rating, one CNBC guest said that ‘"all governments" will default - it's only a matter of time. When asked by "Power Lunch" co-anchor Sue Herera if he would buy Greek debt, Marc Faber said: "No, I'm not interested in government or sovereign debts because I think that all governments will…
Paulson Tells CNN: Americans 'Save too little,' 'Spend too much
There are at least two schools of thought in economics. One of them - Keynesian economics - suggests that consumption is the most important element and therefore spending is the way to restore a faltering economy. This is the theory that's been adopted by the spendthrift Obama administration and often the news media that have argued in favor of more government and personal spending. But according…
Olbermann's 'Federal Budget Debt a Good Thing' Staggeringly Stupid
On a nightly basis, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pompously presents himself as being the smartest guy in the room as he belittles every leading Republican in the nation.But on Tuesday, the "Countdown" host exhibited a staggering level of ignorance as he claimed "federal budget debt" -- whatever that is! -- as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is "about the same as it was in 1970," and "far less…
Starvation by Stimulus: Federal Receipts Are Dropping Faster Than Obam
White House Budget Director Peter Orszag and Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf have a problem: They can't revise their budget estimates quickly enough to account for the continued bad news about tax collections arriving daily from the Treasury Department. Luckily for them, but unfortunately for taxpayers, an establishment media obsessed with PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome), TDS…
MSNBC’s Brzezinski: ‘You Could Argue' Republicans 'Wrecked the Eco
On Monday’s Morning Joe show on MSNBC, during a discussion of President Obama’s recent suggestions that he would be willing to talk with Republicans about health care reform, co-host Mika Brzezinski recounted Obama’s initial refusal to include the GOP, and claimed that Republicans "ARE the ones, you could argue, who wrecked the economy," which set off co-host Joe Scarborough. After Brzezinski…
ABC Touts Blizzard of 2010 as Obama-esque 'Mini-Jobs Program
Amid all of the snow news on Sunday night’s World News, ABC reporter David Kerley tossed in a positive reference to President Obama’s supposed abilities to create jobs. “While President Obama didn’t come up with it, the storm is its own mini-jobs program,” Kerley touted, talking about the extra cash some people made helping to shovel out their neighbors.Actually, the jobs “created” by the snow…
Gregory Asks Greenspan: Bad Idea to Let Bush Tax Cuts Expire
A rather shocking thing happened on Sunday's "Meet the Press": host David Gregory asked Alan Greenspan and Henry Paulson if it would be a mistake to let the Bush tax cuts expire.Chatting with the former Federal Reserve Chairman and former Treasury Secretary, Gregory referenced Tuesday's Wall Street Journal article about what the impact of allowing these tax cuts to expire would be on the budget…
