Essay: Eliot Spitzer – A Man Without A Party
Democrats dialing for damsels don't get labeled with the big "D" Changing His MindRonald Reagan often said "I did not leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me." For floundering and foundering New York Governor Eliot Spitzer -- a twist on the Gipper's words. Spitzer didn't leave the Democratic Party: the Media just didn't see the need to mention the fact that Spitzer was…
AP Notes GOP Affiliation of Lawmaker Calling Gay Agenda 'Bigger Threat
We've written at NewsBusters at how reticent the Associated Press is to note the Democratic Party affiliation of controversial or disgraced politicians, the latest of which is New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. But right off the bat the AP yesterday disclosed the party affiliation of an Oklahoma state legislator strongly critical of gay rights activists. OKLAHOMA CITY – A Republican member of the…
Scandal-Ridden 'Hip Hop Mayor' Superdelgate's Dem Power Links
A few days before Eliot Spitzer went down in flames, a highly-connected Barack Obama* superdelegate was mired in accusations of corruption, bid-rigging and a dead-stripper sex scandal. Usually the media love to report the downfall of party bigwigs, but not in the case of Detroit's youngest mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Much of the media downplayed the mayor's scandals and did not report his party, let…
AP Ignores Spitzer's Democratic Party Affiliation
Update (16:50 EDT): Clay Waters of MRC's TimesWatch informs me the 3rd paragraph reference in a NYT article to Spitzer's Democratic Party affiliation has been removed. Only an oblique reference to his party remains in the 15th paragraph, notes Waters. It's the first major political sex scandal of 2008 (aside from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick) and it involves a Democrat. So of course the Associated…
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…
AP Implicates Vice President Cheney in Iraq Water Problem
One of the truly disgraceful media fixations since America invaded Iraq five years ago has been to blame all the world's problems on energy contractor Halliburton while making it clear that Vice President Dick Cheney used to be its Chief Executive Officer.Despite it being almost eight years since Cheney resigned his position with the contracting giant and sold all of his stock, Halliburton-…
Michelle Obama’s ‘Mean America’ Statement Gets a Nearly Free Med
On Wednesday, NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard noted the following comments by Michelle Obama in her recent New Yorker Magazine profile by Lauren Collins: Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we're a divided country, we're a country that is "just downright mean," we are "guided by fear," we're a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. "We have…
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…
AP Badly Misquotes Labor Dept. on 'Discouraged Workers
For years, NewsBusters and the Business & Media Institute have regularly complained about the abysmal financial coverage offered by the mainstream press while accusing media of consistently painting a negative -- and oftentimes fallacious! -- picture of the economy.On Friday, a perfect example of such was illustrated by the Associated Press whose article about the February unemployment data…
AP Highlights Fewer Jobs, Ignores Steep Drop in Unemployed
Here's is the core information the Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa had to work with today in the Employment Situation Report released by the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): The "Dec.-Feb. change" column was added by me, but is easily calculated from the data in the BLS report. What Aversa did with this info, and my comments, are after the jump. (see also Noel Sheppard's post…
AP: Improved Retail Sales in February Only a 'Reprieve
When January's retail sales failed to meet expectations, Old Media made sure we knew about how "disappointing" the result was. But today, February's result, which beat expectations by about as much or more than January's trailed them, was described as a mere "reprieve." Associated Press reporter Anne D'Innocenzio's January coverage began as follows: Stores Post Disappointing January Sales Here…
AP Ignores Muslim Convert Status, Taliban Links of Convicted Terrorist
Former Navy signalman Hassan Abu-Jihaad was convicted today on charges "of leaking information about the movements and vulnerabilities of ships in his battle group to suspected terrorism supporters" in spring 2001, months before 9/11. These secrets were sent via e-mail to a pro-Taliban Web site. But in reporting the story, MSNBC.com ran an Associated Press story that failed to note Abu-Jihaad is…
CBS/AP Fail to Call FARC Narco-terrorists Terrorists
Leftist Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is threatening neighboring Colombia with war after that country successfully killed via airstrike FARC terrorists in a camp in Ecuador. Yet in reporting the story, CBSNews.com and the AP downplayed the terroristic nature of the leftist rebel movement.The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been on a Comprehensive List of Terrorists and Groups…
