Wire Services/Media Companies

President Obama today announced $17 billion in "spending cuts" Thursday. Here are the substantive early paragraphs of the the Associated Press's coverage of what the President had to say: Obama sent Congress a detailed budget Thursday proposing to eliminate or trim 121 programs and save $17 billion next year — not a trifle, for sure, but only about half of one percent of the $3.4 trillion in…

As of early Tuesday evening, according to a report by Liz Moyer at Forbes, the latest news on the Chrysler bankruptcy filing is that: The recalcitrant non-TARP lenders who would not agree to the deal the government attempted to force on them are now attempting to challenge the deal the government and Chrysler have proposed in bankruptcy court.These lenders want to keep their identities hidden.In…

As expected, Joe Biden is fast becoming the clown prince of Washington D.C. His never ending case of athlete's mouth resulting from his penchant for sticking his foot between his chompers is something that should be no surprise to any long-time Biden watcher. But, amusingly, UPI tries to re-center the Biden story, rescuing him from ridicule, to discuss the supposedly important things that…

Friday, after the April vehicle sales figures rolled in, Associated Press reporters Kimberly S. Johnson and Dan Strumpf, in the opening sentence of a report carried at USA Today, showed that they finally noticed two things, one of which yours truly caught three months ago (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog), and the other which first became clear last month (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog). The former point is that…

The Associated Press's obituary on Jack Kemp continued two troubling trends found in recent AP death notices.In July of last year, covering Tony Snow's passing (saved here; covered at NewsBusters here), AP reporters found seemingly everything negative they could think of to write about the former White House press secretary and 2008 Media Research Center Buckley Award winner (examples -- "good…

Somebody needs to 'fess up. Who put truth serum in Calvin Woodward's coffee this morning?Whoever it is, they're in a heap of trouble, as Woodward produced a fact-checking critique of Barack Obama that is so good you'd swear most of it was ghostwritten by a conservative talk host.It will be interesting to see how much distribution it gets. I would suggest not counting on too much, but being open…

The Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa, who became infamous last year for her stories of "vanishing jobs" that weren't, sounded hopeful early this morning before the release by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of its first-quarter report on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth:Economy's free-fall probably eased in 1QThe recession's grip on the country may be letting up a bit.The…

Imagine that former Vice President Dick Cheney was set to be honored next month at a Catholic university's commencement ceremony and news came down that another person to be honored at the same ceremony with a different award declined the honor, stating that she felt it inappropriate for the university to honor a man who believes in and furthered the use of torture by condoning waterboarding of…

The Associated Press's Stylebook (as of 2008, per this Houston Chronicle blog entry) has the following to say about political party identification in stories:Party Affiliation - Let relevance be the guide in determining whether to include a political figure's party affiliation in a story. Party affiliation is pointless in some stories, such as an account of a governor accepting a button from a…

I am not a doctor, but I play one on the Internet. So, take the following as a prescription for what ails you. Now, if for some unexplainable reason you have been feeling queasy since November of last year, if you have felt like you want to throw up but just can't seem to get that bile to overflow, well I have a little something here that will surely cause that gag reflex to result in a healthy…

Straight from UPI's transcript of Barack Obama's Earth Day remarks in Newton, Iowa yesterday -- in the midst of flights that reportedly expended 9,000 gallons of jet fuel -- here is the President's take on this country's oil dependency (bold is mine):Twenty percent of what we spend on imports is the price of our oil imports. ..... It's the cost we've known ever since the gas shortages of the…

On April 21, the Business and Media Institute's Dan Gainor testified before the House Judiciary Committee's Courts and Competition Policy in a hearing on "A New Age for Newspapers."As MRC's Tim Graham wrote on April 22, the hearing was spurred by the steady drumbeat of newspaper closings around the country, and calls from some Democrat lawmakers to bail out and subsidize the newspaper business.…

A grisly late 2007 quadruple-murder case in the Cincinnati suburb of Sharonville has apparently been solved with the arrest of Santiago Moreno. Moreno apparently brutally stabbed his four other apartment mates with near-surgical precision. It is horrible that these men died. It is great news that the monster who did it has apparently been caught. What is hard to understand is why after nearly 1-1…

...and Once again, the AP trots out Mikhail Gorbachev and sets him up as the ideal world leader. The Associated Press has for years been good for inventing the news out of its own vivid imagination. But now, not only is the AP inventing news it is inventing an entire national self-image, then batting it down all in an effort to prop up the feckless foreign policy of its messiah Barrack Obama.…