Ellen Simon

Earlier this week, to avoid "undue" emphasis on how much the situation has been improving in Iraq, the press, in search of bad news, switched its focus to Afghanistan (examples here, here, and here). Kyle Drennen and Warner Todd Huston at NewsBusters noted this on Tuesday.

Similarly, Associated Press writer Ellen Simon, confronted with a key report showing economic improvement, decided that it was more important to discuss inflation.

On Tuesday, the Institute for Supply Management's Manufacturing Index, after four months of contraction, returned to slight expansion mode with a reading of 50.2 (any reading above 50 indicates expansion). The result confounded the "experts," who predicted that the index would fall by about a point instead of rising by 0.6 points.

I don't think I've ever seen AP fail to give the overall ISM result first- or second-sentence treatment, but Simon managed that trick by covering the report's inflation component, moving the overall ISM index reading down to the fourth paragraph:

Don't miss the significant reporting errors noted at the end of this post.

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If this were a boxing match, with "The Economy" in one corner, and "Expectations" in the other, we'd be seeing a third-round knockout with "Expectations" taken away in an ambulance.

But if you think the news this week has changed the tone of the Associated Press's business and economy coverage, think again.

There have been three pieces of pretty decent news so far this week: