Business Coverage

Under Barack Obama, the Federal Communications Commission has walked away from any sense of enforcing traditional broadcast decency, a dramatic change from the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” drama of 2004. Two years ago, the courts consented to the broadcast networks’ demands that indecency is an outdated notion. (Liberals want to redefine broadcast obscenity as words like "Redskins.") But…

In a sign that the historical revisionists and Barack Obama legacy builders at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, may have shifted their operation into high gear for the final weeks of the midterm election campaign, Andrew Taylor has written that "Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." The occasion for Taylor's tripe is the…

The dictionary tells us that "a few" is "a small number of persons or things." Though there is some ambiguity in the guidance I have reviewed, it's fair to say that "Generally a few is more than 2." Not at the Associated Press, where "a few" can apparently be two, at least when it comes to "fact-checking" President Obama's grandiose claims in his Thursday speech at Northwestern University.…

Yesterday's news that the economy added 248,000 payroll jobs, while the official unemployment rate dropped to 5.9 percent, generated the expected hosannahs from much of the establishment press. One utterly predictable such writeup came from the Associated Press. The headline at Christopher Rugaber's report, "SURGE OF HIRING CUTS US JOBLESS RATE TO 5.9 PCT," utterly ignored the fact that much of…

In a report for Tuesday's CBS Evening News, correspondent John Blackstone touted California passing a law to ban plastic bags from grocery stores as "a victory for those who've declared the single-use plastic bag an environmental enemy." Leading off a similar segment on Wednesday's CBS This Morning, he declared: "You see them everywhere, plastic bags by the road, by the water, in landfills. But…

The Census Bureau reported earlier today that seasonally adjusted housing starts and homebuilding permits fell by 14.4 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, in August. The detail wasn't any better, as the two categories within each statistic — single-family and multiple-dwelling homes — also fell. You can tell that the news wasn't seen as good at the Associated Press, because Josh Boak's…

As been its habit since Barack Obama took office in 2009, the Associated Press has, whenever possible, considered the impact of news developments on the President and his party as far more important than what's actually happening in the lives of real people. The latest example is the wire service's coverage of Tuesday's Census Bureau report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage in the…

In today’s Biased Headlines department, see today’s Reid Wilson report on the Washington Post website from Wednesday: “Nevada is about to pass the biggest corporate tax giveaway in its history.” But has the Post recently described welfare programs or food stamps as a "giveaway"? It doesn't look like it.

The press is good at putting the most positive spin possible on the monthly job-market news. But at the same time, many of its members still claim that food stamp enrollment remains as high as it is because of the lingering effects of the (Bush did it) recession. On Friday, following the release of August's employment numbers, Obama administration Labor Secretary Tom Perez celebrated how "…

The Obama administration-prepared koolaid delivered to the Associated Press's economics writers on Monday must have been extraordinarily concentrated. How else can you explain how the AP's Christopher Rugaber could have written the following — "The U.S. job market has steadily improved by pretty much every gauge except ... Pay" — without doubling over with laughter? No, Chris. The reason pay…

In a Wednesday report on the Congressional Budget Office's downward revision of this year's predicted gross domestic product growth to a dismal 1.5 percent, the Associated Press's Andrew Taylor acted as if the Obama administration's prediction of 2.6 percent still has a realistic chance of occurring. While one never wants to absolutely say never, the administration's higher prediction would…

Anti-factory farming rhetoric is all the rage on the left, so when the USDA announced changes to its inspection for the first time since 1957, liberal outrage was sure to follow. Al Jazeera America devoted most of an episode of “The Stream” to criticism of the changes on Aug. 20. And the left-wing slant of that episode about USDA changes to poultry inspections was predictable, given the…

Ever since fast food chain Burger King announced its desire to purchase Canadian coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons, CBS has done its best to play up the supposed backlash the company will face as it moves its headquarters overseas to lower its tax burden.  On Wednesday morning, following the news that billionaire investor Warren Buffett is helping finance the merger, CBS This Morning made…