Business Coverage

At the Associated Press, covering today's durable goods report from the Census Bureau, Martin Crutsinger wrote that "Orders for durable goods fell 4 percent last month." No they didn't. They fell by a seasonally adjusted 4%. The raw data before seasonal adjustment says that they fell by over 15%:  

At the Associated Press on Thursday, reporter Chris Tomlinson clearly took the side of statist environmentalists in covering the Texas Supreme Court's decision recognizing the right of landowners to pump water flowing through their property underground. Tomlinson's sub-headline said that the court "approved" the idea, and his text claimed that it had "expanded property owner's rights." All…

The Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, and designated drone Derek Kravitz clearly haven't tired of putting smiley-faces on the ongoing, relentlessly awful conditions in the new-home market. As shown on February 17 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the number of single-family homes under construction is barely above its all-time low (since records have been kept), while January's…

Yesterday, the initial one-sentence squib from the Associated Press on the Census Bureau's monthly housing construction release stated that "(A) Surge in apartments offsets weak single-family homes, pushing housing starts up 1.5 percent" (the headline reads the same). By the time AP real estate writer Derek Kravitz turned it into a full-blown report, the headline became "US housing starts…

On February 2, Blake Ellis at CNN Money (HT to a NewsBusters tipster), in an item which treated minor regulatory changes relating to annuities as some kind of "rescue plan" for retirees, gave President Obama credit for "measures ... (he) has put in place to help Americans save for retirement, including automatic enrollment in 401(k)s." There's no word on whether Ms. Ellis also believes that…

Sometimes you read the most interesting things in those supposedly boring trade publications. One such item of interest comes from an article in Manufacturing News (HT to an emailer) written by Richard A. McCormack which is primarily about the Mainland China's designs on the worldwide auto parts industry, including the U.S. Some of the larger American unions are demanding that the…

On Monday (appearing in the print edition on Tuesday, New York Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera gave President Barack Obama a pass for rejecting the Keystone Pipeline. In the process, he also complained about "the way our poisoned politics damages the country," and, in a revelation which shouldn't but did surprise him, learned that far-left environmentalists want to stop all tar sands…

Apparently Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog don’t take criticism well. The pair was asked at a press conference for “The Muppets” premiere in London about concerns over the movie’s attack on the oil industry and business. The Muppets were asked how they felt when Eric Bolling from Fox News discussed their latest movie and said the Muppets were “pushing a dangerous liberal agenda and trying to…

In two items about today's report on economic growth from the federal government's Bureau of Economic Analysis today, Martin Crutsinger claimed that today's lower-than-expected annualized growth of 2.8% during the fourth quarter of 2011 (vs. expectations of 3% or higher) was hurt because of big "cuts" in government spending, especially federal spending -- supposedly the biggest cuts in 40 years…

Today's report by Derek Kravitz at the Associated Press (also known to yours truly as the Administration's Press) covering the Census Bureau's December and full-year 2011 new-home sales release put a smiley-face on the "worst ever" year (the AP headline's term) in the category. I like the adjective used at Sweetness & Light's related blog post to describe Kravitz's crud: "unfazed." The AP…

I guess what follows shouldn't be a total surprise, given that the Obama administration was perfectly comfortable ruining hundreds of thousands of perfectly good cars during the Cash For Clunkers program in 2009. The video which follows from CBS News in San Francisco last Thursday (full transcript here) tells viewers what is happening to valuable parts at the main manufacturing plant of the…

On Friday, the White House engaged in its customary document dump, mostly secure in the knowledge that a lazy establishment press would, as usual, pay it little heed and then declare it to be old news by Monday morning. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air identified the significance of documents relating to now-bankupt Solyndra, the California-based solar panel manufacturer which borrowed $535 million…

On Friday, two Deputy Secretaries, one at the Department of Transportation and the other at Defense, in their capacities as co-chairs of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Executive Committee, released a one page letter concluding that the modified broadband deployment plan of LightSquared could not coexist with current GPS devices and their spectrum. That's…

UPDATE: James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute's blog has more, including the possibility that the original story misidentified "Bain Consulting," as well as a theory as to the story's original source. It looks like someone ran with something they thought was too good to check. A retraction described as a "Correction" currently on CNBC's web site tells readers: "A previous…