Wire Services/Media Companies

It's strange how this "mandate" thing works, at least at the Associated Press. In Ohio, Republican John Kasich defeated incumbent Democratic Governor Ted Strickland on Tuesday with a victory margin of about 2.5%, or almost 100,000 votes. Strickland is the first incumbent Buckeye State governor to lose a reelection bid since Democrat John Gilligan lost to Republican Jim Rhodes in 1974. In that…

One of the more egregious results of the Democrat-controlled Congress skipping town without passing a budget, thus failing to address the issue of whether scheduled income tax increases will really go into effect for everyone, the highest income-earners, or no one at all, is that the Internal Revenue Service and employers have been left in the lurch with no idea of how to prepare for next year…

In early September, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) was raked over the coals by her Democratic opponent Terry Goddard and by the mainstream media for a statement she had made about decapitated bodies found in the Arizona desert due to illegal immigration. "It's a good bill. We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, and the kidnappings and the extortion and…

Per MerriamWebster.com -- Gaffe: 1) a social or diplomatic blunder; 2) a noticeable mistake. The Associated Press's Calvin Woodward has had a few shining analytical moments during the first two years of the Obama administration (examples here and here). The AP reporter's dispatch on "gaffes and gotchas" Friday morning, which attempted to communicate a sense of bemusement tinged with…

"Follow the money," the left insisted when News Corporation donated $1 million to the Republican Governor's Association. The implication was that since News Corp. gave lots of money to Republicans (nearly 10 times as much as it did to Democrats), Fox News coverage that casted the GOP in a positive light could fairly be seen as a direct result of that contribution. By the standard much of the…

Clearly, Becky Bohrer at the Associated Press is very picky about what she'll report. In her story datelined early this morning ("Senate race in Alaska is bitter and unpredictable"), she played the "any Tea Partier whose family or extended family has ever taken a government benefit is automatically a hypocrite" card. She made sure readers knew about Republican candidate Joe Miller's…

In a Monday article, Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press played up the efforts of Catholic "theological conservatives" online who "say the church isn't Catholic enough" and are "unsettling the church." Zoll even quoted from a Vatican analyst for a heterodox Catholic publication who dubbed the phenomenon "Taliban Catholicism," with the slight caveat that "liberals can fit the mindset too." The…

At an open NewsBusters thread this morning, commenter "ThisnThat" pointed to a Friday unbylined Associated Press item that twice used the label "ultraconservative" to describe Nevada U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle. Just for the heck of it, AP also threw in Reid's reference to Angle as being "too extreme," and his parroting of that biennial Democratic falsehood that a GOP candidate is for…

When a Democrat or leftist makes an ill-advised remark, it seems that there's a three-stage process at the Associated Press, and perhaps in most other establishment press outlets, for handling it. It goes roughly like this: Stage 1 - Ignore it as long as you can. If there isn't much outcry, keep ignoring it. Stage 2 - If there ends up being enough of an outcry from conservatives or…

In a report so riddled with errors, inconsistencies, incompleteness and sloppiness that it's really hard to know where to begin, Associated Press real estate writer Alan Zibel couldn't even keep his housing recovery benchmark remotely consistent with what it was only a month ago. The Census Bureau's September release of information about August housing starts and building permits informed the…

Here's the headline at the Associated Press's 12:49 p.m. report today on Steven Slater's plea bargain: "Attendant who slid on chute to fame pleads guilty." Earlier headlines had used the word "famous" (example here: "JetBlue attendant in famous meltdown pleads guilty"). For those who still care about what words mean, the primary meaning of "famous" is "having a widespread reputation, usually…

Most readers are probably unaware that the first African-American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School who was also the first female surgical intern at Boston City Hospital passed away this weekend. Though the wire service did file a brief local story, the Associated Press's national site has no coverage of Dr. Mildred Jefferson's death.  I would suggest that the coverage is so…

To Associated Press writer Jim Abrams, the 111th Congress seems to be the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics. It just gets no respect. This despite the fact, Abrams laments in an October 18 story, that it's been a thoroughly "productive" Congress. Apparently to the AP writer, American voters are just ingrates who don't appreciate the "historic" nature of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid…

To the national establishment press, this appears to be another one of those "It's at the Politico, so we can ignore it" incidents. Thursday night, before a debate with GOP opponent George Phillips, nine-term New York Democratic Congressman Maurice Hinchey "had a heated exchange with a local reporter ... that became physical." Quite physical, in fact, to the point where Hinchey "pushed ... (…