Online Media

These economics reporters at the Associated Press have become experts at deadpan humor. Earlier today, I noted how the wire service's Christopher Rugaber told readers, in the wake of a government report showing the lowest wage and benefit increases on record, that "the job market is not yet back to full health." No kidding, Chris. On top of that, the AP's Martin Crutsinger reacted to yesterday's…

David Roberts has penned a tale of two media, dealing first with how a profusion of conservative outlets has pulled the Republican party to the right -- the subject of a recent Harvard study -- then pivoting to analyze the mainstream media’s belated (and still incomplete) awakening to the GOP’s “radicalism.” “One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left,” wrote Roberts in a…

Christopher Rugaber at the Associated Press and the "expert" he quoted in his writeup on the government's awful Employment Cost Index report seemed to be taking their cues from Steven Wright's deadpan comedy act. The problem, of course, is that they were writing and saying isn't funny at all. Rugaber, with his "expert" help, assembled an impressive array of understatements and misstatements in…

The bar-lowering in the business press continues. In the wake of today's disappointing news from the government on U.S. economic growth, an email from CNNMoney.com failed to properly describe reported second-quarter growth, and falsely characterized today's results as "solid":

On his Tuesday night show, with the help of Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News described how the "Black Lives Matter" movement sustains itself. The rest of the press wants readers, listeners and viewers to presume that it is a self-sustaining, grass-roots movement. It isn't. O'Reilly also noted that megastars Jay-Z and Beyoncé, numbers 28 and 29, respectively, on…

In some areas of the country, Planned Parenthood has gone on the offensive against local and regional news outlets in an attempt to minimize the exposure of damning undercover videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress. They are telling these outlets that the videos "should not be aired." This is an attempt at corporate censorship which the establishment press would treat as important…

I guess the slogan of labor has changed from "Look for the union label" to "Look for the union waiver." The Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story early this morning on an issue some people thought disappeared after its initial exposure two months ago. The issue is whether union workers should be exempt from minimum wage laws, especially the sky-high minimums being enacted in some U…

Slate writer Amanda Marcotte claimed this week that a drop in the number of teens having sex is the result of encouraging teens to use birth control and engage in sexual behavior. Meanwhile, she posited, education encouraging abstinence couldn't possibly, ever, in a zillion years, have anything to do with it.

2016 GOP presidential candidate and former Texas Governor Rick Perry is fighting a legal battle against an out-of-control Lone Star State county. That county's prosecutor has sued Perry, claiming that a) he committed an illegal act of "coercion" by threatening to veto legislation funding a "public integrity" office headed by Travis County's Rosemary Lehmberg, who was convicted of drunk driving in…

Veteran journalist John Harwood, according to his Twitter home page, covers "Washington and national politics for CNBC and the New York Times." Saturday morning, despite all of his experience, Harwood tweeted a question (HT Twitchy) so naive that a freshman journalism student would have been embarrassed to ask it:

In a speech at a Republican Lincoln Day dinner in West Virginia earlier this week, Murray Energy Corp. founder and CEO Robert Murray decried the Obama administration's determination to, as described at the financial news site SNL.com (to be clear, no relation to Saturday Night Live), "bypass the states and their utility commissions, the U.S. Congress and the Constitution in favor of putting the U…

The press — especially the Associated Press — wants everyone to know that the email controversy "swirling" around her is partisan and distracting. Why anyone would worry about its national security or legal implications is almost completely lost on them. That's their story, and they've been sticking to it for months. The latest installment from the AP came tonight from Lisa Lerner, Eric Tucker…

Jeff Schweitzer heralded the discovery of an apparent Earth-like planet as a nail in the coffin for religion in a Thursday item on Huffington Post. Schweitzer, a scientist, "rationalist," and former Clinton administration senior policy analyst contended that "with this discovery, we come ever closer to the idea that life is common in the universe," and added that religions would "all will come…

Rachel Zarrell, BuzzFeed's news editor, quickly apologized on Thursday night after two "reactive," as she put it, posts on Twitter regarding the shooting at a theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. Zarrell first linked to a NBCNews tweet about the murders, and added her obscenity-laced take on the incident: "Let's just give everyone guns, right? It's in the goddamn constitution." Twenty-one minutes…