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Someone needs to tell Emily Jane Fox that for workers refusing to do scheduled work assigned by their employers to be engaging in a "strike" ("a concerted stopping of work or withdrawal of workers' services, as to compel an employer to accede to workers' demands or in protest against terms or conditions imposed by an employer") there needs needs to be enough of them to matter. If there aren't, it's pretty much a small group of people conducting a (conceivably justified) protest.

As Fox described it in her Thursday report at CNNMoney.com about a group of Wal-Mart employees workers planning a Black Friday walkout -- which, if large enough, may qualify for "strike" status -- what happened in October appears to have been little more than a tiny temper tantrum:

A November 13 piece by Dan Merica on CNN’s Belief Blog, titled Liberal Catholics Use Election Results to Battle Bishops,” promoted the same tired attacks from the left about the Catholic hierarchy daring to defend religious liberty and Catholic teachings on life and marriage issues.

Merica cited President Obama’s re-election as a spur to liberal groups to step up their attacks on the Roman Catholic hierarchy: “Emboldened by the re-election of President Barack Obama, a cadre of liberal Catholic activists and groups is waging a campaign alleging that America's Catholic bishops are out of touch with Catholic laypeople.”

How dare Catholic bishops use their teaching authority to speak out in favor of religious liberty! That was the thrust of University of Dayton theology professor Vincent Miller’s November 8 post on CNN’s Belief Blog (which has a tendency to attack conservative ideas) titled “Catholic Bishops’ Election Behavior Threatens Their Authority.”

Miller complained that: “The Catholic Church was well within its rights to conduct its campaign on religious liberty, but its “Preserve Religious Freedom” yard signs were clearly designed to be placed alongside partisan candidate signs.” He continued by bewailing the supposed partisan nature of the campaign: “The technically nonpartisan nature of the Church’s religious liberty campaign was further drowned out by a small chorus of strident bishops who left no doubt about how Catholics ought to vote for president.”

Updated below | An election season mailer linked to Focus on the Family and sent out to evangelical Christian voters in Iowa unfairly quoted President Obama out of context, CNN's Political Tracker blog complained this morning.

Yet in Peter Hamby's blog post -- Anti-Obama mail piece: ‘We are no longer a Christian nation’ --  the CNN.com staffer glossed over the fact that the other charges waged in the mailer are spot-on about areas in which the president is sharply to the left of religious conservatives on abortion, same-sex marriage, and a religious exemption for the contraception mandate (emphasis mine; see mailer photo below page break):

As the presidential contest enters its final weeks, one loser is clear: the Big Three television networks' evening newscasts, home of some of the worst examples of ongoing and still influential media bias.

Chris Ariens at Media Bistro noted this on October 2 in covering the results for the week of September 24: "Leading into a presidential election, one might think the tune-in to the evening news programs would increase. But one would be wrong." The trend continued during the following week, as will be seen in the graphic following the jump.

A July campaign story by CNN's Jim Acosta was so biased that the Obama campaign trumpeted the headline in its new attack ad. That came after MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell cried foul over the campaign using footage of her in its ads, perhaps telling evidence of the role the liberal media is playing in this campaign by providing fodder for Obama.

Back in July, Acosta hyped that Mitt Romney's overseas trip to Europe began in "shambles" even though CNN hosts Piers Morgan and Fareed Zakaria threw water on that sentiment. Team Obama now has featured Acosta's story to cast aspersions on Romney's foreign policy credentials. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Although a CNNMoney survey had economists by a three-to-one margin saying a Mitt Romney presidency would be better for the economy than another term of President Obama, the report's title said they "reluctantly" chose Romney.

"And many of those picking Romney were more critical of, as opposed to excited about, the Republican challenger's plans," the report read. Would CNNMoney have reported that economists "reluctantly" picked President Obama by a three-to-one margin?

One really wonders if there is any adult supervision in the department where CNNMoney's business headline emails originate.

There certainly isn't much knowledge of the general business environment or of the recent history of the housing market present, because if there were, the following email would almost certainly never have been published -- or if the message had somehow escaped by accident, it wouldn't have taken more than a half-hour to "correct" it. The original and the "correction" follow the jump:

Who knew that "a source familiar with Ambassador Steven's thinking" may have been Ambassador Stevens himself?

Citing an unnamed but mysteriously close source on Wednesday, CNN's Anderson Cooper reported that Christopher Stevens was concerned about security threats, Islamic extremism, and an al-Qaeda hit list in the months leading up to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

Two days later, Cooper admitted that some of the information from that report secretly came from Stevens own handwriting, in a seven-page personal journal that the network had found at the scene of the attack.

In Cooper's own words:

A report yesterday in the Toronto-based Globe and Mail ("Obama’s reaction to Benghazi will be muted") concerning the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya caught my eye. Right there in its third paragraph, Alan Jamieson said that "On Wednesday, the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was destroyed by Muslim militants."

"Destroyed"? I hadn't read that anywhere else. CNN and many other U.S. news outlets described what happened in Benghazi as an "attack" -- as if the damage done, even if serious, was not in effect a demolition. The distinction seemed particularly germane to a report yesterday in the Associated Press about Marines being dispatched to Libya:

While the Obama-loving media ignore or make excuses for the almost incessant gaffes by Joe Biden, they are carefully scrutinizing every word said by the Republican nominees for President and Vice President.

Doing its part Tuesday was CNN.com which moments ago actually published an article with the headline "Ryan Muddles Origin of Reagan's 'Are You Better Off' Line":

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan is a Catholic – but not a good enough Catholic in the eyes of the media. Writers, bloggers, and talking heads have hammered Ryan for his supposed “dissent” from Catholic teaching.

Journalists have falsely claimed that the bishops “rebuked” Ryan and called his budget “un-Christian.” Writers who usually scorn the Church and its hierarchy fretted that the bishops found Ryan’s budget “uncompassionate.”

Today, per Nasdaq.com, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 4.49 points to 13107.48, the S&P 500 went up 1.19 points to 1410.49, and the NASDAQ gained 4.05 points to close at 3081.19.  The average of the three gains is less than 0.1%.

That didn't stop the disseminators of CNN Money's email at the close of business from interpreting the result as being due to "signs of stronger U.S.growth." Huh?

Minnesota Democratic State Rep. Kerry Gauthier has had a rough go of it lately. Embroiled in a sex scandal that has attracted the attention of national media outlets, Gauthier has gone from waging a promising reelection bid for his seat, to being caught engaged in oral sex acts at a rest stop with a teenage boy, to pulling out of the race and facing possible expulsion from the Minnesota legislature.

Gauthier does have one place in which he can reliably look for cover on this story however – CNN.

It's as if these people think that we're still in the era of the Pony Express and passenger pigeons.

Both CNN's email alert after the close of the markets today and the Associated Press's post-close report acted as if Monday's stock market gain was due to a positive momentum effect from Friday's splendiforous jobs report, which really wasn't that good at all. CNN's 4:01 p.m. email told recipients that "U.S. stocks end higher on momentum from July jobs report." AP's first paragraph at its news summary page read as follows:

CNN associated a white supremacist neo-Nazi band with the political right-wing as it labeled the punk rock band of Wisconsin shooter Wade Michael Page as "far right."

CNN had reported Page's band named "End Apathy" as "white supremacist," "neo-Nazi," and as a "hate group." Yet it also repeatedly labeled it "far right" on Sunday and Monday. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Give credit to CNN Money's Annalyn Chensky for intuitively recognizing the ridiculousness of the economic projections included in the White House's Mid-Session Review released today. That especially goes for the assumption that full-year economic growth in 2012, with the first and second quarters coming in at an annualized 2.0% and 1.5%, respectively (the latter subject to revisions which probably won't be significant), will somehow still come in at 2.6%.

Chensky gets demerits, however, for understating how fast growth will really have to be during the second half of the year to get that 2.6% (bolds are mine):

Today's report on the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) during the second quarter didn't impress anyone -- except, apparently those who send out email alerts to CNN Money subscribers.

For several years, it has seemed like the primary goal of these alerts has been to create the illusion of pervasive prosperity when the economic news is even remotely tolerable, and to ignore or downplay news that is really bad -- all so that the relatively disengaged can be convinced that the economy isn't performing as poorly as it really is. The email alert received shortly after the government released its report showing that the economy grew at an annualized 1.5% rate during the second quarter arguably fits both categories:

At the Associated Press, Christina Rexrode placed the blame for Monday's mediocre performance in the stock market squarely and obviously where it belonged: "Stocks struggled to stay out of the red in quiet holiday-week trading after a trade group said American manufacturing shrank in June for the first time in almost three years." The trade group involved is the Institute for Supply Management. Its manufacturing index dropped from 53.5% in May to 49.8% in June. Any reading below 50% represents contraction. Analysts expected that it would come in at between 52% (per Business Insider's email) and 52.5% (according to Zero Hedge).

Apparently the people who write CNNMoney's emails didn't want their readers to know the truth, as will be seen after the jump.

On CNN's sister network HLN, when you don’t know how to answer an interview question, bash the Catholic Church - you’ll have your anti-Catholic bigotry promoted by CNN. In an interview with HLN’s Dr. Drew featured on CNN.com, stripper Joslyn Jones claimed that “most stuff that goes on at church” is “dirtier than what goes on in strip clubs.”

When challenged by Dr. Drew about the drug use and trauma history common among strippers, Jones deflected the question, bizarrely arguing: “It’s definitely very common, but it’s actually like, um, like I always try to use the analogy. You know, you look at the Catholic Church. How much nonsense and debauchery, and disrespect, and really underground, you know, seedy stuff goes on, that’s, the Catholic Church, you’re supposed to go to Church and everybody’s like oh I go to Church and I’m all prim and proper, sweet – it’s not really like that. Most stuff that goes on at church is dirtier than what goes on in strip clubs.” 

The count of prominent Democratic Party politicians who have decided not to attend the Democratic Party's convention in Charlotte, thereby attempting to avoid direct association with the formal renomination of incumbent President Barack Obama, is up to seven. Press coverage has been sparse. One can only imagine how much media end-zone dancing there would have been in 2004 had one governor, one senator and five congresspersons chosen not to attend the Republican National Convention to renominate George W. Bush.

On Thursday, the Hill had the story about the latest declared non-attendee, who admittedly is the least surprising addition to list (internal links are in original):

Elephants are one of nature’s most popular creatures. And one of its most protected. The ivory trade has been outlawed for many decades. Yet, a recent CNN guest column claimed that renewed poaching to feed an illegal Asian ivory market (along with more run-of-the-mill lefty environmental threats) is “a tragedy beyond reckoning.”

The hyperbolic June 15 article that said saving the elephant is “an urgent moral imperative” (those, to the author, are the words of Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel).  The piece, by photographer and filmmaker Cyril Christo, explained the killing of the elephant is one of the pressing world issues.

As of 11:15 p.m., with about 74% of the votes counted, Wisconsin Governor Scott was ahead of Scott Barrett by roughly a 56-44 margin. Late-arriving votes from Democrat-heavy areas of Milwaukee and Dane Counties seemed likely to narrow the margin to perhaps 10 points. (UPDATE: Because heavier margins of support for Barrett in those two counties, the final margin was 6.9%, roughly the same as Barack Obama's 7.4% margin in 2008, which was never labeled a "survival" or "narrow" or anything similar.)

The headlines currently at CNN (HT to a NewsBusters tipster) and the Associated Press both act as if Walker squeaked by. Pics follow the jump.

When the news pertains to issues in the Catholic church, CNN loves to promote liberal theologians and religious, especially ones that are defying Catholic teaching. In contrast, orthodox priests and bishops might receive vastly different treatment – if they even get on CNN, that is.

So when an American nun's book on sexual ethics was found by the Vatican to be "not in conformity" with the Catholic Church's teaching, CNN contributor Stephen Prothero smacked the Vatican for its "unjust" condemnation of the book and accused the Catholic Church of continuing to "attack the sort of apple pie, mom kind of institutions in America."

Some stories are so biased and one-sided they must have come whole and unadulterated from deep inside the liberal media echo chamber. Take CNNMoney’s recent manipulative story  pertaining to the trials and tribulations of illegal immigrants’ grown children, who are unable to fully participate in U.S. society because they lack legitimate identification.

More a pamphlet for the DREAM Act than news report, the article detailed the problems such illegals face: companies are wary of hiring anyone with uncertain citizenship status. States like Arizona decided they couldn’t afford to pay tuition for illegal aliens, and family members sometimes get deported. Some of the more enterprising of these grown but still illegal immigrants become entrepreneurs as a result, but are still held back by their status.

“[sigh] When will those mouth-breathing right-wingers give up their caves and clubs and learn to love science?” Pity the sophisticated liberal like CNN contributor Laura Sessions Stepp, whose impatience at Neanderthal misogynists and snake-handlers is palpable.

It’s also an act that helps them continue to push the falsehood that conservatives are anti-science and anti-contraception – and continue to play fast and loose with the facts in order to advance that narrative.