Oct. New Home Sales Flat; AP's Crutsinger Insists on Tagging Sandy; Ne

November 28th, 2012 3:54 PM
The real news in today's new-home sales information published by the Census Bureau is that September's previously reported 389,000 in seasonally adjusted annual sales was written down by over 5 percent to 369,000. Hmm -- The higher figure, aggressively touted as the highest in 2-1/2 years by the Associated Press and other establishment media outlets, was reported on October 24, just 13 days…

At National Journal, Fournier's New Role Involves 'Moving the Needle

November 28th, 2012 10:32 AM
Well, at least he isn't shy about it. According to Dylan Byers at Politico, the National Journal's Ron Fournier is going to "step down as editor-in-chief" and moving to "a role as editorial director." Before joining that publication in June 2010, Fournier worked at the Associated Press for a total of over 20 years in two different stints. In an email response to Politico yesterday, Fournier…

At the Associated Press, Benghazi Is Just a 'PR Disaster

November 27th, 2012 5:12 PM
Well, if the President himself can call a sacked consulate and four dead Americans who deserved adequate security and didn't get it "bumps in the road," why not? Monday morning, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, presented a story in advance of United Nations ambassador Susan Rice's meeting today with certain Republican senators -- a meeting from which Rice, who engaged in…

NYT Still Wants Readers to Believe 'There Is a Dispute' Over Role of

November 26th, 2012 10:25 PM
Others can comment on the entirely of the Sunday New York Times story by Serge F. Kovaleski and Brooks Barnes (used in Monday's print edition) about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the maker of the infamous "Innocence of Muslims" YouTube trailer the authors characterize as a "film" a dozen times in their write-up. Nakoula has now been in jail for two months. I'm only going to comment on the…

Politico's Tau Ignores 'Hostage' Language in Obama Admin Econ Advisers

November 26th, 2012 10:13 AM
This morning the Obama administration's "National Economic Council & Council of Economic Advisers" jointly released "The Middle-Class Tax Cuts' Impact on Consumer Spending & Retailers." Among the howlers in this non-economic political document: "Independent Economic Analysis Clearly Demonstrates Why We Need to Extend the 2001/2003/2010 Tax Cuts for the Middle-class." But not everyone…

IBD and WSJ Editorials Make Morsi Power Grab-U.S. Praise Linkage the R

November 26th, 2012 9:05 AM
As has so often been the case for nearly four years, one needs to go to the editorial pages of the nation's two leading financial publications, the Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily, to get to the truth behind news developments, especially the ones with potential to cast the Obama administration in a bad light. There may not be a better example of the press ignoring the…

Months-Old, Three-State Teacher Certification Test Cheating Scandal Ge

November 25th, 2012 11:35 AM
From what I can tell, a major scandal involving teachers in three states has received almost no national press coverage since CNN first broke a story about it in July. Among the non-participants or nearly non-participants (again, from what I can tell based on archived news search attempts) is the Associated Press, which decided early this morning on a slow news weekend when few are paying…

Reuters Social Media Director Wonders Why Israel Should 'Retaliate' (i

November 24th, 2012 8:37 AM
Well, that didn't take long. Fulfilling a fear expressed on Tuesday by David Horovitz in the Times of Israel, someone is already using the country's mostly (but to be sure, not completely) successful deployment of its Iron Dome missile defense system as an argument against Israel's right to robustly defend itself. The assertion came the very next day in the form of a tweet from a member of…

Arab Winter: AP Minimizes Visibility of Morsi's Dictatorial Power Grab

November 23rd, 2012 9:16 AM
So what's more important, the fact that Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was involved in brokering a Gaza-Israeli peace deal which appears to be more than sightly tilted in Hamas's direction, or the fact that Morsi has opportunistically seized nearly dictatorial powers? They're arguably equal, but if compelled to choose, I believe most readers here would contend that because of the…

AP Story on Hobby Lobby Ruling Misdirects to Avoid Facing When Life Be

November 21st, 2012 1:35 PM
In his Monday evening coverage of a federal judge's refusal to grant retailer Hobby Lobby injunctive relief from ObamaCare's mandate that it "provide insurance coverage for the morning-after and week-after birth control pills," the Associated Press's Tim Talley "cleverly" recast the government's argument over what constitutes an abortion (the government says that the morning-after pill isn't an…

AP Story on Bridge Bomb Plotters' Sentencing Fails to Note Their Occup

November 20th, 2012 10:52 PM
Continuing his wire service's sadly predictable kid-glove treatment of the Occupy movement which sometimes verges on open romance, Chuck Murr's Tuesday evening story at the Associated Press on the sentencing of three of the five participants in the foiled plot to bomb a major bridge in a Cleveland suburb utterly failed to note the active involvement of the convicted domestic terrorists (the…

Press Virtually Ignoring Lisa Jackson's Use of 'Alias' Email Accounts

November 20th, 2012 8:12 PM
It's been over a week since the Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller exposed EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's use of alias email accounts to conduct official business. A Monday evening Investor's Business Daily editorial noted that this practice is more than likely illegal, because "Federal law prohibits the government from using private emails for official communications unless they are…

NYT Ignores Jihadist Presence in Bombed Gaza Media Building, Obfuscate

November 19th, 2012 11:06 PM
Despite evidence reported elsewhere, a Monday story in the New York Times by Fares Akram, Jodi Rudoren and Alan Cowell described the bombing of "two buildings housing local broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets" as a possible example of Israel "targeting journalists" -- while ignoring one "little" thing. As the Washington Free Beacon noted (HT Instapundit), "Four senior…

AP and Politico Ignore Dem Senators' Demand for Another Round of 'Stim

November 19th, 2012 9:56 AM
On November 14, the Hill reported that "Senate Democrats, feeling confident from their net gain of two seats in last week’s election, say any deficit-reduction package negotiated in the coming weeks must include stimulus measures." Alexander Bolton's writeup quoted Senator Chuck Schumer publicly asserting that "We have to do something because the economy is not growing fast enough in the first…