Business Coverage

Late Sunday evening, the United Auto Workers and General Motors reached a tentative four-year agreement shortly before the union's 11:59 p.m. strike deadline. The agreement was expected, simply because the financial and political blowback of a strike at a company bailed out by taxpayers at a cost running into tens of billion of dollars back in 2009 would have been severe. Also expected: the…

The news coming out of Detroit about near-deadline negotiations between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors has been pretty quiet. As the Sunday 11:59 p.m. deadline approaches, the Associated Press only has a four-paragraph blurb indicating that the union wants to get a richer package than it just garnered in negotiations with Fiat Chrysler. A Reuters report goes into detail about GM…

If a Republican or conservative was in the White House, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger would have found a reason to be unimpressed in his dispatch today about how low initial unemployment claims continue to be, even as hiring has been slowing down. (Ideally, reporters should just relay the facts and leave the theorizing out of their stories, but that ship has sadly long since sailed.)…

On October 2, the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that U.S. payroll employment increased in September by a seasonally adjusted 142,000 jobs. That was disappointing enough, but then the BLS's regional and state report for September released on Tuesday showed a combined total of 21,000 jobs lost in all 50 states and DC. In his coverage of the state report, the Associated Press's…

Life is so unfair. "The rich" live in nicer places, have nicer amenities, drive nicer cars, etc., etc. Here's the last straw: Now they even have better breakfast sandwiches. But never fear: The press's inequality police are on patrol to supply the outrage.

It was obvious from the start of ABC’s new drama, Blood & Oil, that Hap Briggs (the “Baron of the Bakken”) would turn out to be ruthless and conniving, no matter how charming he might seem. After all, he’s an oil man and the media just love (to hate) them. In prior episodes Briggs appeared to admire Billy LeFever’s tenacity and mind for the oil business. He even seemed to have taken Billy “…

In their coverage of government and other economic reports, the business press routinely tells readers that the figures they are relaying are "seasonally adjusted." That is, raw results are smoothed out to supposedly "remove normal, recurring variations" in data. There's one notable exception: The government's monthly employment report.

Although it was very disappointing, the September Employment Situation Summary, which told us that the economy added only 142,000 seasonally adjusted jobs as hundreds of thousands of Americans withdrew from the labor force, was not the worst economy-related news of the day. That dubious honor belongs to the Census Bureau's Factory Orders report. At least the employment report showed more people…

As part of a piece on Friday’s CBS This Morning about the opening of the first freestanding Chick-fil-a in New York City, correspondent Vladimir Duthiers couldn’t help but harp on the company’s conservative Christian values and how they had to supposedly draw customers back “in 2012 when those values ran afoul of public sentiment” after “CEO Dan Cathy affirmed his support for tradition marriage.”

Conservative filmmaker Phelim McAleer has a new film challenging Josh Fox and his claims about hydraulic fracturing. McAleer’s GasHoax will be released on October 1, the same day as Fox’s latest short film, GasWork, will be aired on MSNBC. The head-to-head match up is intentional. McAleer said GasWork is “a zero credibility film because it comes from filmmaker Josh Fox who has a history of…

August's seasonally adjusted Pending Home Sales Index value contained in the related press release from the National Association of Realtors was the lowest in the past five months, and 2 percent below April's level. Disclosing the size of the recent slump apparently wasn't considered important at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press. What was news at AP, whose Josh Boak…

Thursday morning at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Christopher Rugaber opened his coverage of the Census Bureau's New Residential Sales report as follows: "Buoyed by steady job gains and low mortgage rates, Americans purchased new homes in August at the fastest pace in more than seven years." Sorry, pal, it was the "fastest pace" in — wow — three months. The bureau's not…

The competition for the most annoying aspect of establishment press business reporting is fierce. One which immediately identifies a reporter as hopelessly biased and ignorant is any reference to "laissez faire" as a condition allegedly present in any modern economy anywhere on earth. "Laissez faire" is an economic concept involving "an economic system in which transactions between private…

In the wake of the ongoing controversy surrounding Volkswagen’s diesel car emissions controversy, MSNBC reporter Tony Dokoupil wildly proclaimed that Republican politicians were cheering on the German car maker for deceiving the Environmental Protection Agency. Dokoupil appeared on All In with Chris Hayes Tuesday night and insisted that “[i]f you’re a Republican, if you think the EPA goes too far…