Are Media Right About a Lower Dollar Causing Higher Oil Prices
A fairly common media meme during the past year or so has been that the continually declining value of the dollar is driving up oil and gas prices (image courtesy Slate).In the past three months alone, there have been over 100 stories involving this very subject, including this March 10 piece from U.S. News & World Report entitled "Why Gas Prices Rise as the Dollar Falls (emphasis added):…
MSNBC.com Pumps Up Bias, Shows Gas Price 21 Percent Above Average
It's a common trick the media employ when reporting on "skyrocketing" gas price stories: show photos or B-roll of price marquees that bear prices way above the actual average price.MSNBC.com's front page this morning is no exception, as the screen cap at right shows regular unleaded for $3.979, or 21 percent higher than the national average of $3.27.The article's headline reads, "Rising gas costs…
Mika Bemoans Blue-Collar Whites Who 'Can't Hear' Obama's Message
There's a new entry next to Mika Brzezinski's name in the annals of MSM elitism. The Morning Joe panelist today lamented blue-collar whites who "can't hear" the message Barack Obama propounded. Poor benighted souls. Joe Scarborough called Mika on it.Brzezinski's comment came in response to Scarborough's exposition of why he didn't think Obama's speech would work with many blue-collar whites.…
Kelo Calamity Continues; Media Remains AWOL
You really can't make this stuff up, as they say. This is from the New London Day last Friday (link probably requires registration, and would require a paid subscription after this coming Friday; HT Liberty Conspiracy): Fort Trumbull Developer Asks FHA To Back $11.5M LoanFaced with a tight lending climate, the Corcoran Jennison company has asked the Federal Housing Authority to back an $11.5…
ABC's Stephanopoulos: 'Economy Almost Certainly in Recession
For more than a week, NewsBusters has been pointing out that media seem to be adopting the 1992 Bill Clinton playbook of presenting the economy as being in much worse shape than it really is.On Sunday, former Clinton administration adviser George Stephanopoulos took this doom and gloom posture by repeatedly depicting the nation as already being in a recession. In fact, he began the most recent…
CBS Expert Says Taxpayer Housing Bailout Will Bring the Gov’t Tax Mo
With the housing market sinking and causing panic about the American economy, Moody's Economy.com Chief Economist Mark Zandi thinks the time is right for the government to invest in the housing market. Huh? Zandi, who has been pessimistic about the housing market and sees no end to its woes in sight, at least until the end of the decade, thinks a government bailout is the right way to solve…
AP Math: 0.2% Rise is Small, 0.4% Rise is Modest, 0.6% Decline is Plun
NewsBusters readers are well aware of our contention that the press have adopted the 1992 strategy of making every economic report look like the world is coming to an end, and we'll all be in soup lines next year if the Democrat presidential candidate isn't inaugurated in January.No finer example is available than Thursday's Associated Press article concerning February's very disappointing retail…
A Rather Sedate Jim Cramer Reacts to Spitzer Prostitution Revelation
Later Says He’d 'Bank on a Socialist in Brazil' more than 'a Republican'It wasn't exactly one of CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer's most jovial appearances, but it was certainly interesting to see how he'd react to the big story of the day. A dejected Cramer showed his disappointment immediately following reports New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was involved in a prostitution ring on CNBC's…
AP's 'Workers Giving Up' Claim Goes from 'Perhaps' to 'Fact
.... and in 24 Hours, with No Credible Support In a report from the presidential campaign trail in Wyoming early Saturday morning, Sara Kugler of the Associated Press picked up on an economic meme created out of whole cloth by one of her colleagues, and treated it as an undisputed fact -- all in the name of creating support for campaign rhetoric coming from one of the two remaining Democratic…
ABC: 'Drop in the Unemployment Rate is Bad News
ABC's "World News Tonight" had a hard time on Friday without normal anchor Charles Gibson, as in its segment about the employment numbers released by the Labor Department, guest host George Stephanopoulos said the figures were from January 2008.This was stated as a graphic came on the screen reading "JOBS LOST, January 2008, 63,000." Of course, Labor's report was for the month of February.Sadly,…
Media See Recession in Jobs Report Without Historical Reference
There's no denying the economy is slowing, and may have either entered a recession, or is on the brink of one. Maybe.However, the media's hysterical response to Friday's February jobs report lacked any historical reference to how the labor market behaved in previous recessions.Instead, press outlet after press outlet decided that the loss of 63,000 jobs in February was a clear signal the…
MarketWatch Reporter: We Got ‘Poorer’ Last Year
Yours truly had a memorable series of exchanges with MarketWatch Washington Bureau Chief Rex Nutting roughly 18 months ago. At one point, he appeared to reveal an expectation (otherwise, why provide a graph of it?) that home prices might actually fall like the NASDAQ did from 2000-2002 -- which, for the record, was almost 78%, from a peak of 5048 in March 2000 to a trough of 1114 in October…
Bloomberg's 'Net Worth' Report Doesn't Even Tell Us What It Is
.... for what I believe is a painfully obvious reason. It is reports like the one written up by Shobhana Chandra at Bloomberg yesterday on household net worth that make you wonder if everyday US citizens will ever get the information needed to accurately evaluate what's going on in the economy without doing more digging than they have time for -- or that they should even have to do. Chandra's…
