Economy

From the first words out of anchor Scott Pelley on Thursday’s CBS Evening News, one had to know what kind of newscast it would be. Throughout the newscast’s A-block, every segment involved almost exclusive criticism of the Trump administration on issues ranging from the border to the media to Syrian refugees to trade agreements.

In a Tuesday morning dispatch about President Donald Trump's federal hiring freeze, the Associated Press's Matthew Barakat presented a quote from Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer. He followed it with a statistic which he wants readers to believe refutes Spicer's claim. That statistic does no such thing, but I expect, even though it's remarkably lazy and misleading, that it will become a very…

“The most important development of the last half-century in American politics,” believes New York magazine’s Chait, is “the Republican Party’s embrace of movement conservative ideology.” In a Thursday post, Chait cited six books, none of which was written by a conservative, that “help elucidate” this phenomenon. Among Chait’s choices: E.J. Dionne’s Why the Right Went Wrong; Richard Hofstadter’s…

MRC Vice President of Business and Culture Dan Gainor denounced NBC’s attempt to downplay President-elect Donald Trump’s role in bringing new jobs to the U.S. On Twitter, Trump credited himself for new job creation on Jan. 17. The next day, NBC’s Today ran a “fact check” on Trump’s claim with MSNBC’s Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber, who said Trump had a “very small or non-existent” impact.

Some liberals were disappointed by the result of the presidential election. Others were devastated. Former Fox News Watch panelist Gabler is in the latter group. “The anguish of Nov. 8 has not subsided,” wrote Gabler in a piece that appeared last Thursday on Salon and originally ran at BillMoyers.com. “We think of the election almost as a kind of death -- the death of the America we thought we…

President-elect Donald Trump's threats against American companies looking to relocate in foreign countries have won favorable review from many quarters. Support comes from those alarmed about trade deficits, those who want a "level playing field" and those who call for "free trade but fair trade," whatever that means.

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's New Day on CNN, Georgetown University professor and former MSNBC analyst Michael Eric Dyson likened police actions against black Americans to terrorism as CNN's Chris Cuomo argued that many voters were motivated to vote for Donald Trump by non-race-related issues like terrorism from ISIS.  Dyson griped: "Color-neutral and ISIS? Many African-American people said…

Because he was the "singular 2016 (GOP) presidential contender never to fall in line behind Trump," Ohio Governor and two-time former presidential candidate John Kasich now has the Associated Press's deep respect. This largely explains why the wire service has been all too willing to ignore the fact that Kasich alone owns Ohio's impending budget problems.

There are predictable signs that after eight years of giving the problem inadequate attention and occasional ridicule, the business press has decided that federal budget deficits and the national debt are going to start to matter again. Gosh, I wonder why? The Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber was relatively subtle about it in a report on Uncle Sam's December and year-to-date budget deficits…

The FBI reported that the total number of homicides in 2015 was 15,696. Blacks were about 52 percent of homicide victims. That means about 8,100 black lives were ended violently, and over 90 percent of the time, the perpetrator was another black. Listening to the news media and the Black Lives Matter movement, one would think that black deaths at the hands of police are the major problem. It…

Next Tuesday, three days before the current POTUS becomes an ex-POTUS, Jonathan Chait’s Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail will be published. On Tuesday, New York magazine, where Chait is the chief political pundit, ran an excerpt from the book in which he claimed, “The truth is that Obama enacted careful, deep, and mostly popular solutions to a…

Broadcast networks barely covered the skyrocketing national debt in the past year, but spent far more time on toy animals called Hatchimals. ABC and NBC gave the toy sensation three times more coverage than the debt. As of Jan. 9, the United States’ national debt was nearly $20 trillion ($19,955,343,885,377.73), according to the Treasury Department. The rising debt, according to multiple sources…

President-elect Donald Trump started a controversy on January 3 when he alleged in an early-morning tweet that "General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U.S. car dealers-tax free across border. Make in U.S.A. or pay big border tax!"

As much as Republicans dislike Hillary Clinton, often intensely, few if any of them believe she’s Satan. Yes, Donald Trump described Bernie Sanders’s endorsement of Clinton as “a deal with the devil,” but presumably it was just a figure of speech. That said, some on the left are darkly suspicious about how low conservatives go in their opinions of HRC. In a Tuesday Daily Kos post, cartoonist and…