Double Standards

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…

Liberal websites were thrilled with new Daily Show host Trevor Noah for comparing Donald Trump to a series of African dictators, including Uganda’s notorious Idi Amin, alleged to be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths during his reign in the 1970s. "What I'm trying to say is Donald Trump is presidential. He just happens to be running on the wrong continent," said Noah, a native of South…

Religious double standards on the front of Thursday's New York Times: "The Pope, the Clerk and Culture Wars Revisited." During his U.S. tour, the Times celebrated Pope Francis's liberal tone on economic, environmental, and immigration issues. But when he reaffirmed his belief in religious freedom (and the Church's opposition to gay marriage) by secretly meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky county…

ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel took time out of his opening monologue on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live to grumble over the news that Pope Francis secretly met with Kentucky clerk Kim Davis last week during his visit to the U.S. and quip that it would have been better if he met with Kim Kardashian or murderous North Korea dictator Kim Jong-un instead.  

During his segment on the Wednesday edition of MSNBC’s All In attacking Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy for his comments about Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi Committee, host Chris Hayes made quite the choice of liberal pundits in none other than failed Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who compared McCarthy and the panel to the “witch-hunt” against Planned…

Apparently, the establishment press is waiting for its marching orders on how to handle what an Investor's Business Daily editorial has already called a "scandal." This one's a joint effort involving Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, a recently deceased former CIA operative named Tyler Drumheller who worked with Blumenthal — and CBS News. As Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard reported…

On Wednesday night, the CBS Evening News punted on the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s State Department e-mails released hours earlier while their competitors at ABC and NBC did cover them, but only through the veil of defending Clinton against Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy’s comments on the Benghazi Committee that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell touted as “an unlikely political lifeline…

Hours after Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards testified Tuesday before the House Oversight Committee concerning the videos that have embroiled the abortion provider in scandal over the selling of aborted baby parts, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC rushed to the defense of the “unfazed” and “spirited” Richards as she “endured a five-hour interrogation” by the GOP.

The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog, after years of usually sincerely prepared though not always accurate posts, appears to have descended to the level of hackery typically found at Politifact. One recent example demonstrating that the effort has turned into a weapon dishonestly employed against Republicans and conservatives comes from Michelle Ye Hee Lee, who on Friday called 2016…

Filling in for Anderson Cooper on Monday’s AC360, John Berman chided Carly Fiorina spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores over Fiorina’s outspoken criticism of Planned Parenthood in the wake of their aborted baby parts video scandal with the CNN host imploring Flores to consider admitting that her boss “is getting it wrong” about the content of the videos.

If the establishment press was treating Hillary Clinton's private server/email and other controversies as the genuine scandals and the national security nightmares that they really are, we'd be getting daily or near-daily updates on the latest developments. It really isn't too much to ask. After all, outlets like the Associated Press frequently capsulized the latest Watergate developments during…

The left's strategy for smearing Republicans and conservatives is, from all appearances, to "throw anything and everything out there, not matter how false or outrageous, and see what sticks." A major reason why this strategy works is that the establishment press ignores bogus leftist smear attempts which should be utterly embarrassing, effectively eliminating the strategy's downside. Take Debbie…

Hours after 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina sparred with NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd over the Planned Parenthood videos, Sunday’s NBC Nightly News similarly went to bat for the abortion provider against Fiorina as White House correspondent Kristen Welker scolded Fiorina for promoting videos with “doctored and unrelated footage.”