GDP Media Coverage, Part 2: Time's Error-Prone Embarrassment
This afternoon's report at Time.com's misnamed Curious Capitalist blog by Roya Wolverson ("GDP Report: What It Tells Us About the Debt") is an embarrassing hash of omissions, errors, and gratuitous political points.
Ms. Wolverson's most obvious omission is her failure to mention the government's breathtaking downward revision to first quarter gross domestic product growth from the annualized…
WaPo's The Fix: Utah Democrat Keeps 'Seat by Voting Very Conservativel
Yesterday on "The Fix", a politics blog of the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake wrote "Five Members to watch in the House debt ceiling vote." One of the five is Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT). He's described as a potential "yes" vote for Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) debt ceiling bill:
Matheson, a Democrat, has managed to keep his Republican-leaning Utah seat by voting very…
GDP Media Coverage, Part 1: AP 'Somehow' Misses That the Economy Hasn
This morning, Christopher Rugaber's coverage of the news from Uncle Sam's Bureau of Economic Analysis about the growth in the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the Associated Press appropriately characterized it as indicative of a "sharp slowdown" and "extremely bad" (via a quoted economist).
Today's report carried an advance estimate of second-quarter growth of an annualized 1.3%. As…
MRC-TV: Bozell Discusses Debt Crisis Bias on 'Fox & Friends
"When, oh, when is a Republican going to stand up" and call the liberal media on their lies about the debt ceiling debate, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell lamented on this morning's "Fox & Friends."
Bozell was reacting to a clip of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) answering a misleading and biased question by CBS's Bob Schieffer (video follows page break; MP3 audio here):
Flashback: With March 2006 Debt Ceiling Hike NBC, CBS Noted $30,000/pe
During the current debt ceiling debate, have the media told you what your personal share of the national debt would be after the ceiling is hiked?
Yeah. I didn't think so.
But when it was a midterm election year in which Democrats thrashed President George W. Bush and the GOP on overspending, it was a different story.
Bozell Column: The Hate-GOP Machine
The latest polls show the people are not happy with President Obama's handling of budget matters, but Republicans look even worse. And yet, while the GOP delivers one idea after another, Obama has offered nothing, instead just attacking, attacking, attacking, blaming everyone but himself in utter denial of the reality that no man on the face of this Earth is more responsible for our debt…
Press Celebrates Unemployment Claims Drop Below 400K, Ignores Track Re
Two "alert" emails hit my inbox this morning concerning the Department of Labor's just-released unemployment claims report.
The one I expected came from CNNMoney.com, which read: "Initial unemployment claims fall below 400,000 for the first time in more than 3 months, dropping 24,000 to 398,000 in latest week." The other one came from USAToday.com, which does not ordinarily issue alerts when…
Anderson Cooper Cherry Picks Poll Info to Disgrace Republicans
In a critical "Keeping Them Honest" segment Wednesday night, CNN's Anderson Cooper selectively reported findings from his network's own poll to bolster his argument that Republicans are out-of-touch with the wishes of the American people in the debt ceiling debate.
This came even after the Democrat Senate Majority Leader, supported by the president, produced a plan including no tax increases…
AP's Abrams, Quoting No One, Claims That 'Some Legal Scholars' Believe
Gosh, isn't it convenient that Associated Press reporter Jim Abrams, in a Wednesday evening dispatch ("Democrats say Obama should invoke 14th Amendment"), was able to find "some legal scholars" who believe that President Obama can invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to ignore the nation's current debt ceiling and have the government go out and borrow more money, but "…
Lowering the Bar: Reuters Sets 2.5% GDP Growth as Unemployment Rate-Lo
I guess at Reuters, when you see that an economy can't meet normal benchmarks for success, you simply lower them, and pretend that success will come anyway.
Over at the Associated Press a few weeks ago, in his write-up in the wake of the government's awful June employment report, Chris Rugaber correctly pegged the kind of economic growth it will take to get millions of currently unemployed…
CNN in the Tank for Gay Marriage
Perhaps CNN stands for the Closeted News Network. No, that doesn't work. There's nothing closeted about CNN's clear advocacy for homosexual causes.
A Culture and Media Institute analysis of 239 programs aired on CNN from the period June 15 to July 15 revealed that CNN quoted or interviewed nearly four times the number of gay-agenda supporters as critics.
Dayton Paper's 'Seniors Fear' Story Likely All Too Typical
If there's a reason why Dayton Daily News staff writer Drew Simon wrote his Tuesday morning story ("Seniors fear losing Social Security checks") other than to scare the elderly, I don't know what it is.
Nowhere in his report did Simon say who was the first person to invalidly raise the specter of Social Security checks not going out on August 2 (it was President Barack Obama, in case you…
MSNBC's Ratigan Claims National Debt Mostly Run Up Prior to Obama, by
During a roundtable discussion on the debt ceiling deadlock on his July 26 program, MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan, egged on by a former Durbin and Biden staffer-turned-lobbyist, argued that the bulk of the national debt was run up prior to the time President Barack Obama entered office, by Republicans:
Obama's Within-Hours Tax-Increase Contradiction: USAT Ignores, AP's Es
In his White House speech tonight, President Obama renewed his call for a debt-ceiling impasse solution which requires "the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to give up some of their breaks in the tax code and special deductions." In other words, he wants tax increases, even though earlier in the day, he backed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's "plan" (using the term loosely, as…
