Calculating Jobs a Muddled Mess – Press Presents it as Fact
January 31st, 2010 10:06 PM
The White House continues to throw out random numbers in their quest to convince the public that their behemoth stimulus bill is saving jobs at a massive rate. The confusion has even seeped into the President's biggest support group - the media. CNN recently announced how the stimulus plan funded nearly 600,000 jobs this past quarter. In their article, which parrots the numbers provided by the…
AP Headline Tells Readers DOJ Lawyers Approved Torture; Article Conten
January 31st, 2010 8:25 AM
Well if you can't win the propaganda war by twisting the content of something you don't like, you can at least plant a presumptive seed in the heads of those who will only see a story's headline. That seems to be the logic behind an unbylined Associated Press report this morning. Its headline ("Report: No sanctions for lawyers who OK'd torture") would tend cause anyone not reading further to…
AP Bashes Obama: 'Can He Get Any Other Democrats Elected
January 30th, 2010 11:33 PM
If the folks at the Associated Press lose their loving feeling for Barack Obama, his presidency could be in a lot of trouble.Consider if you will an article the wire service published Thursday shockingly titled "Can Obama Get Any Other Democrats Elected?" "Barack Obama built a powerful campaign organization and got himself to the White House," Liz Sidoti's piece began. "Now, as head of the…
Media Worried Corruption In N. Carolina Might Cost Democrats Votes
January 30th, 2010 4:47 PM
"Never before have you seen an allegation of corruption going that close to the governor's office in modern history." So said a Democratic consultant in North Carolina reacting to the latest casualty in the ongoing investigation of former governor Mike Easley. The scandal has brought down Easley's wife, bankrupted his coffers, disgraced a state university, and now, most recently, set federal…
AP Video Teases Give Away Attitude Toward Tony Blair's UK Iraq War Inq
January 29th, 2010 9:26 PM
Based on the two pictures seen at the right, it doesn't exactly take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the people at the Associated Press who decide on what pictures to use to tease the wire service's assorted video clips are not all favorably inclined towards Tony Blair. Rather than show a picture of the former UK Prime Minister, the AP chose pics of a demonstrator outside where the inquiry…
James O'Keefe Accuses Media of 'Journalistic Malpractice
January 29th, 2010 11:38 AM
James O'Keefe, the man that helped bring down ACORN and is now embroiled in a controversy involving Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), has accused the media of journalistic malpractice.In a statement released at Big Government moments ago, O'Keefe specifically pointed fingers at the Associated Press, MSNBC, and the Washington Post as a "few examples" of press outlets guilty of "inaccurate and false…
AP Lede on O'Keefe Raises Watergate Specter: 'What Did the Right Wing
January 27th, 2010 7:43 PM
The Associated Press on Wednesday insinuated there might be a wider conservative plot behind James O’Keefe’s alleged misdeeds at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office, and invoked the Watergate scandal in their lede: “Was it an attempt at political espionage? Or just a third-rate prank? How high did it go? And what did the right wing know and when did they know it?”AP writers Michael Kunzelman and Brett…
'Women's Groups' Pressuring CBS to Scrap Tebow Super Bowl Ad
January 26th, 2010 9:11 AM
The story behind Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow's arrival into this world is remarkable.So-called "women's groups" would seem to prefer that as many Americans as possible not know the story about the courageous and faith-based decision Tebow's mother made to carry her pregnancy to term. That's the only plausible reason why they are opposing a 30-second Focus on the Family (FOTF) ad scheduled to…
AP: Both Brown Win and Obama Anti-Bank Attacks Examples of 'Populism
January 24th, 2010 11:44 PM
It's amazing how Bernard Condon and Tim Paradis of the Associated Press managed to hang the same label on totally opposite political positions in their report on the situation in the stock market late this afternoon.According to the AP pair, Scott Brown's U.S. Senate win in Massachusetts was due to a "wave of populism," at the same time as President Obama is supposedly planning to use "populist…
AP Writer Worries Scott Brown Election Imperils Obama's 'Audacious Pla
January 24th, 2010 9:05 AM
Associated Press writers haven’t overcome their tendency to describe President Obama’s plans as "audacious" – like they'd just finished leafing through their well-worn copy of Obama’s campaign book The Audacity of Hope. On Friday, a Charles Babington political analysis began: President Barack Obama's bid to overhaul the U.S. health care system was in doubt Thursday as lawmakers rejected the…
Reuters Unemployment Claims Story Headlines 'Admin Issues,' But Ignore
January 24th, 2010 12:07 AM
A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the recovery this week: The U.S. Department of Labor reported on Thursday that initial claims for unemployment benefits jumped "unexpectedly" by 36,000 to 482,000, when analysts had predicted a slight drop. What's more, it turns out that data reported in previous weeks was understated because of "administrative issues" relating to paperwork processing…
Good, Bad, Pathetic: AP's Kuhnhenn Calls 'Bank Fee' a Tax, Labels As
January 19th, 2010 8:34 AM
Last week, in his "analysis" of Barack Obama's proposed "bank responsibility fee," the Associated Press's Jim Kuhnhenn got one important thing right and two others very wrong.The part he got right was describing the proposed fee as a "tax." The first thing he got wrong was identifying the proposed move as a legitimate form of "populism." The second is his claim that the idea is "straight out of '…
Shocking AP Headline: 'After Year, Hope Turns Into Disappointment
January 17th, 2010 7:38 PM
Given the love affair media had with presidential candidate Barack Obama, this is a headline I'm sure few people could have imagined they'd see as the first anniversary of his inauguration approached:After Year, Hope Turns Into DisappointmentMaybe even more surprising, the contents of this Associated Press piece were just as pessimistic about the man so-called journalists once gushed and fawned…
When Bush Plummets in Polls, It's News--Obama, Not So Much
January 17th, 2010 2:17 PM
It is a strange paradigm among much of the mainstream media that plummeting poll numbers are of far greater import for Republicans than they are for Democrats. That, at least, is the logical conclusion of the relative silence of major media outlets on the steep decline in President Obama's poll numbers compared with the decline in President Bush's.According to an Allstate/National Journal poll…