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NBC and ABC Ignore Companies Forcing Change in Connecticut Tax Hike
On Wednesday, only CBS This Morning noticed a setback for Democrats proposing a massive tax hike in Connecticut, with co-host Norah O’Donnell reporting: “The Connecticut Post says two major corporations, General Electric and Aetna, forced changes in Connecticut's proposed budget. The companies said they would consider leaving the state over plans to raise business taxes. Democratic lawmakers…
Nets Spend 48 Minutes on Jenner’s Cover, Skip Obama's Bad News
Since Vanity Fair unveiled its cover featuring Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn Jenner on Monday afternoon, the “Big Three” (ABC, CBS, and NBC) networks have gone over the top in their promotion of the story, giving it a whopping 48 minutes and 25 seconds of coverage (Monday night through Wednesday morning) -- while omitting several damaging stories regarding President Obama’s policy agenda.
Press Fails to Note Steep Year-Over-Year Declines in Factory Orders
This morning's April factory orders report from the Census Bureau showed yet another seasonally adjusted decline. This time, they fell 0.4 percent, seriously underperforming expectations that they would come in flat.
This naturally brought forth another sighting of the U-word ("unexpectedly"), this time at Reuters. Both Reuters and the Associated Press failed to note how steep the year-over-year…
Baltimore Wants FEMA Aid; Sun Ignores How Mayor Encouraged Rioters
In case you missed it, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have requested disaster relief assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to recover costs incurred during that city's April riots. You read that right.
Yvonne Wenger at the Baltimore Sun predictably buried the lede in her May 26 story's third paragraph, giving uninitiated readers the impression that…
Blogger: Limbaugh ‘Distracted the Masses’ While the Rich Stole
When did Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president of the United States end? Officially, on January 20, 1989, but Washington Monthly blogger D. R. Tucker posits that in a sense Reagan stayed in office well after that. In a Saturday post, Tucker asserted that in 1988, some right-wing “ideologues” sought to “artificially extend the Reagan administration past its constitutionally limited time by propping…
The Hill: 'Washington Is Ready to Spend'; Doesn't Mention How Much
Facts are such inconvenient things. Especially financial facts and figures.
On Tuesday, Rebecca Shabad at the Hill composed a 34-paragraph report entitled "Washington is ready to spend." Really? When have Congress or the White House not been ready to spend? Oh, I get it. She really means that they're getting ready to spend more. How much more? Readers will search in vain for anything beyond a…
Daily Beast Writer: Gay Marriage Could Be a ‘Liberal Wedge Issue’
A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans self-identify as social liberals, and that an equal percentage call themselves social conservatives -- the first time since Gallup began conducting such surveys in 1999 that conservatives haven’t outnumbered liberals. On Tuesday, pundit Michael Tomasky seized on this development as an indication that Republicans no longer will be able to use…
Bloomberg News Still Thinks the U.S. Is in a 6-Year Economic Expansion
This shouldn't be a trick question, but to the nation's establishment press business reporters it apparently is: What is the current length of the U.S. economy's expansion?
The answer, after yesterday's reported 0.7 percent annualized contraction in U.S. Gross Domestic Product, is obviously zero. But that's not what Bloomberg News and reporter Sho Chandra, who has used her full first name of…
NPR Bewails Texas's 'Unqualified No' to Medicaid Expansion
Friday's Morning Edition on NPR did its best to try to promote the liberal cause of expanding Medicaid in Texas. Wade Goodwyn lined up six soundbites from pro-expansion talking heads, versus only two from former Texas Governor Rick Perry, an opponent. Goodwyn played up that "in hating the Affordable Care Act, the state is leaving on the table as much as a hundred billion dollars of federal money…
LA Unions Lobby for Exemption From Minimum Wage Law They Pushed
This has to be the month's top entry in the "Just when you think you've seen it all" category — and it will be more than a little interesting to see how the nation's press handles it.
As the Associated Press reported a week ago, the City Council in Los Angeles, by a vote of 14-1, ordered the drafting of a law mandating a citywide minimum wage of $15 per hour by 2020, noting that "the support of…
AP Offended That CEOs Are Paid As Well As Elite Entertainers
Seldom does one see such an obvious betrayal of reporters' biased mindsets as the one found in the opening paragraph of an Associated Press report earlier today on CEO pay at major U.S. publicly-held companies.
According to the AP's Steve Rothwell and Ryan Nakashima, that entertainers, whose incomes are derived from leveraging special physical and artistic talents, deserve all the money they can…
Salon: ‘The U.S. Military Is a National Security Threat’
In the early 1990s, politicians floated the term “peace dividend” regarding a hoped-for post-Cold War reduction in the U.S. defense budget, and Pentagon spending indeed fell somewhat in the mid- and late ‘90s. Sean McElwee, a research associate at the lefty think tank Demos, argues that America now needs a post-9/11, post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq peace dividend which would allow greatly increased…
Hostess's Revival: What Can Happen With a Fresh Start
Given how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there was in the press when the old Hostess liquidated in 2012, a mid-April story at Forbes on the company's has gotten surprisingly little attention. Well, maybe it's not that much of a surprise, for reasons which will be indentified here.
Readers may recall that the final straw in that drama occurred late that year when the the AFL-CIO-affiliated…
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NBC Host Comes Out for Capitalism, Opposes Price Controls
On Wednesday’s NBC Today, co-host Tamron Hall stumbled upon conservative economic philosophy as she defended a hot dog vendor’s right to charge customers whatever he wanted, even if it was overpriced: “But why can’t he set his own prices? I mean, if a restaurant sells their hot dog, steak, or whatever for the price they want, why is his price regulated?”
