Business Coverage

Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and the brain trust at ThinkProgress probably won't like this, but CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer thinks the Glenn Beck boycott won't have an impact on NewsCorp's (NASDAQ:NWSA), the parent company of Fox News, bottom line. During the "Stop Trading" segment on "Street Signs" Aug. 24, Cramer explained that Unilever (NYSE:UN) was going all out with its advertising, by…

Hyping how "Whole Foods devotees"  are "lash[ing] out" at CEO John Mackey, Washington Post's Ylan Q. Mui paid particular attention to one "Mark Rosenthal, a playwright living in Massachusetts who founded the Boycott Whole Foods group a few days ago." At time of publication, Rosenthal's group had "nearly 14,000 members." Mackey, you may recall, penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed laying out his…

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's recent Wall Street Journal op-ed may well have been "in bad taste", ABCNews.com would have its readers believe (see screen cap at right). Emily Friedman devoted an August 14 story mainly to liberal Whole Foods patrons huffing and puffing in disgust about Mackey's op-ed:Joshua has been taking the bus to his local Whole Foods in New York City every five days for the…

UPDATE: Sargento says Colors of Change did not influence company's decision (at bottom)What constitutes "hateful speech?" It depends on the views of the individual, or in this case the advocacy group propagating the claim. Earlier this week, Plymouth, Wisc.-based Sargento Food, Inc., along with several other companies, pulled their advertising from the Fox News Channel's "Glenn Beck" program,…

The White House's perpetual campaign site, er, home page, currently has rotating messages at the top left. Two of them relate to health care (yellow underlines are mine): The administration would be well-advised to hold back on the blather about "blatant falsehoods" and "misinformation" until their guy in charge stops disseminating them himself.Take Obama's claim that the surgeon's fee for a…

Does the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger moonlight as a Code Pink operative? There has to be something that explains what I'll call his Iraqnaphobia. Last month (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the AP reporter erroneously cited the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a "major factor" explaining why "the deficit has widened." In a quick review of the related June 2009 Monthly…

As the likelihood of President Barack Obama's style of health care/health insurance reform has looked more and more uncertain, health care sector stocks have rallied, nearly 10 percent over the last month. But now as Obama is showing some signs of managing his message and could be trying to make a comeback, even as polls show the odds aren't his favor, CNBC market analyst Steve Grasso is…

Ben Bernanke's able use of monetary policy to steer the economy during the current financial crisis sometimes makes it easy to forget that Bernanke helped steer the ship into that crisis early in his term as Federal Reserve Chairman and a member of the Fed's Board of Governors. That's a point Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) founder and CEO George Friedman made when asked the likelihood of…

Someone forgot to send the CNN health care kool-aid over to the office of Fortune editor at large Shawn Tully in the days leading up to July 24. Tully in turn forgot to toot his own horn, and ObamaCare opponents forgot to take a peek inside what is normally enemy lines to find it. In a must-read special report at affiliate CNNMoney.com, Tully lays bare Barack Obama's core claim, while…

The Senate stepped in to save Cash for Clunkers Aug. 6, giving it a $2 billion extension. But on Aug. 7, CNN.com found a big difference between independent analysis and government claims of which cars were most popular buys. Peter Valdes-Dapena explored the difference between government data on the clunkers program (claiming small cars were most popular) and Edmunds.com analysis which showed…

Times have been tough financially for media companies across the board and satellite radio has been no exception. On Aug. 6, Sirius XM Radio (NASDAQ:SIRI) posted a second-quarter loss and the company hasn't lived up to expectations after Sirius and XM completed a merger a little over a year ago. According to "CNBC Reports" host Dennis Kneale, part of the satellite radio's problem is shock jock…

When in doubt blame conservatism, even when it comes to the struggles of a media outlet - and ignore the possibility that liberalism might be to blame. Ever since Nielsen came out with the July numbers for CNBC that showed the network had suffered a 28 percent ratings decline over a year ago, some of the financial media intelligentsia have been eager to point to what they perceive are the right-…

His show has usually been Fox News third-highest show, behind Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. And since Fox News host Glenn Beck has come on the scene, he has been a thorn in the side of the left-wing machine. But his July 28 "Fox & Friends" criticism of President Barack Obama's comments on the racially-charged Cambridge, Mass. incident in which a local policeman arrested Harvard professor…

Chalk another one up to the law of unintended consequences. Last fall, the media promoted the $700-billion TARP bailout. During the weeks and months leading up to that bailout, they were also on board with cracking down on oil speculators for driving up the price of oil. But now it seems the TARP program is contributing to oil speculation. On Aug. 3, Richard Bernstein, CEO of Richard Bernstein…