Business Coverage

The front page of Tuesday's New York Times featured labor reporter Noam Scheiber celebrating Obama as (finally!) the champion of workers' rights, belatedly beating back the retrograde efforts by Ronald Reagan and free-market conservatives to "roll them back," with Schreiber portraying all of the administration's new regulatory burdens on emerging jobs as wholly positive developments. The online…

At the Associated Press today, Christopher Rugaber appears to have played along with a game of make-believe in his coverage of the August release of the University of Michigan's Survey of Consumers. The index dropped for the second straight month, this time from 93.1 to 91.9, a point below August's prelimnary reading of 92.9. That trailed expectations that it would come in at 93.0. The survey's…

Almost four years ago, solar energy manufacturer Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, leaving the federal government with a loan guarantee-related loss of up to $535 million. The Energy Department's inspector general released a report on the debacle today. At the Associated Press, reporter Kevin Freking made sure readers knew that the loan guarantee program began under President George W. Bush, but…

As Venezuela's Chavista economy under Nicolas Maduro continues to crumble, the Associated Press and others in the media to describe its problems as if they came out of nowhere instead of originating with its statist, oppressive government. Examples follow the jump.

It doesn't seem likely that an oil company CEO would get the benefit of the doubt Apple CEO Tim Cook received from the press yesterday after he emailed well-known financial commentator and investment adviser Jim Cramer about his company's performance in China. In an email read over the air on CNBC, Cook reported that "we have continued to experience strong growth for our business in China…

The downward spiral of China’s economy has sent U.S. stocks plunging wildly. The Dow dropped 1,000 points as the market opened Aug. 24, but stocks were rebounding by midday according to MarketWatch. MarketWatch reported that day, “Chinese equities surrendered all of their gains for 2015, and a rout in the U.S. on Friday that capped the worst week for the market in four years. Investors are…

Tonight's report at the Associated Press in the wake of Wall Street's disastrous day isn't quite an Animal House moment — "Remain Calm! All Is Well!" — but it's more than fair to say that the wire service's Matthew Craft and Bernard Condon allowed quite a bit of wishful thinking into their writeup. In late June, I noted that the AP's Ken Sweet asked a very important question about China ("IS…

Imagine if, in 1987, a Federal Reserve official could have pointed to a poorly performing economy and said, "Gee, this supply-side economics hasn't worked out very well." The press would surely have treated the story as a front-page item and ensured that it got air time on the Big Three networks' then-dominant nightly news broadcasts. Of course, there was no such credible report, because the…

The award for trollish headline of the day should go to MSNBC.com.

Several commenters at my econ-related posts during the past several months here at NewsBusters and my home blog have noted how Washington's mix of high deficits, over-regulation, and quantitative easing never seem to get any kind of blame for the economy in establishment press coverage. One could hardly find a better example of that deliberate avoidance than Josh Boak's writeup today at the…

It "seems" that a bit of doubt seeped into an economy-related Associated Press report today. An hour later, it was gone. An early report by Josh Boak with a 10:22 a.m. time stamp found at a subscribing outlet's site described job growth in the past 12 months as "seemingly robust." An hour later, in an expansion of that early report primarily covering today's government release on July retail…

Records are made to be broken, but apparently government spending records are not meant to be reported. The Monthly Treasury Statement released today showed that the federal government spent a mind-boggling $374.86 billion in July. That's an all-time single-month record, surpassing the previous high of $369.39 billion "achieved" in August 2012. Yes, there was a calendar "quirk" which caused this…

Two wire service dispatches covering the government's June Wholesale Sales and Inventories release either glossed over or completely ignored what others are saying about the report's impact on near-term economic growth. The final sentence of an unbylined Reuters report vaguely referred to future impact by indicating that current inventory balances, which are bloated by historical standards, "…