Online Media

Ridicule by media critics has apparently made some headway against the business press's annoying habit of describing bad news about the economy as having occurred "unexpectedly." Now they seem to be reserving the "U-word" for unexpected improvements, which haven't been seen very much during the past seven-plus years. Instead, reacting to today's bad news from the National Association of Realtors…

Matt Lauer, aka Mr. Softee (when interviewing people with whom he sympathizes), tried to act like a tough guy in his Friday interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. You're not fooling us, Matt. After observing that he had "an enormous outpouring of questions about censorship" after he asked his Twitter followers what they would like to see discussed, Lauer "cleverly" asked Dorsey: "Does Twitter…

Does anyone remember how The Onion "humorously" satirized then-Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's refusal to consider the federal court nomination of Miguel Estrada in 2003? Oh come on, it was the one where there was an accompanying cartoon showing Daschle holding Estrada's "Severed Head Aloft in Front of the Capitol Building"? That was just a laugh riot, wasn't it? Of course, no…

Most readers here are by now painfully familiar with how miserable mainstream media reporting on police shootings of criminals can be. That said, the Associated Press's headline writers and reporter Lindsay Whitehurst have lowered the bar even further in their coverage of the shooting of a 17 year-old who was beating a man "near a homeless shelter" in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In a Monday afternoon post which gets close to taking pleasure in the serious economic decline in the heart of the coal mining industry in West Virginia, CNN Money's Patrick Gillespie observed, based on Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about coal miners' jobs, that she "has no love for coal companies." But in Gillespie's world, what Mrs. Clinton said doesn't matter, because "Clinton won't have…

The business press's determination to convince the public that weak economic news is really strong seemingly knows no bounds. Today, shortly after the Federal Reserve's Industrial Production report for February showed a seasonally adjusted 0.5 percent decline — worse than expectations of -0.3 percent — the Associated Press pretended in its headline and in reporter Christopher Rugaber's first…

Today's report from the government on February's retail sales was awful. Last month's sales fell by 0.1 percent, which was bad enough. Beyond that, January's originally reported 0.2 percent increase was revised down to a 0.4 percent decrease. Additionally, as I noted at my home blog this morning, January's seasonally adjusted revision should have been much worse, based on how terrible that month'…

Replying to a tweet about a story reporting that Ben Carson hints he was promised a position in a potential Trump administration, MTVNews senior writer Ira Madison III quipped "House or field?" 

Watch it happen like clockwork twice this year. Adjusting the clock for daylight savings? No. MSNBC's fear-mongering about voter ID laws, happening now in front of the North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio primaries and surely to repeat later this fall in front of the general election in those states.

Layers of editors and fact-checkers at the Columbus (OH) Dispatch and others involved in its production "somehow" failed to detect the creation of an obviously false caption to a campaign rally photo of Donald Trump taken by a St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer. The photo, taken on Friday at Trump's St. Louis appearance by the Post-Dispatch's David Carson, had the following caption, apparently…

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. apparently got on the good side of the Associated Press a year ago when it announced that would be raising entry-level wages. Since that announcement, AP, in particular wire service reporter Anne D'Innocenzio, has been excusing the company's relatively poor financial performance while complimenting it for a virtually imaginary "perk up" in sales. Falling profits…

Sometimes there's a problem when a far-left reporter admiringly covers a far-left political official or candidate. What occasionally happens is that items which would clearly be objectionable to sensible people make it to print or onto the airwaves because the lefty journalist doesn't recognize how problematic they are. If he or she did, it would be kept out of their reports. At NBC News, former…

From reading most establishment press news, especially their economy-related reports, you'd think that those who are complaining about the current U.S. economy are outliers — especially the millions of Americans who are angry about it. Though they sometimes acknowledge that forward progress  since the recession hasn't been robust, the media's meme-makers have mostly told us that "overall job…

For the "Freedom for me, and not for thee" file: Donald Trump decided to cancel a campaign rally in Chicago tonight "due to safety concerns after protesters packed the arena where it was to take place." An Associated Press report time-stamped at 10:12 p.m., like so many AP reports in similar circumstances before subsequent revisions "clean things up," so to speak, has some elements of balance,…