Economy

For the second month in a row, taxpayer-bailout beneficiary General Motors fared worse than every one of its non-bailed-out competitors. The Associated Press's Tom Krisher and Bree Fowler didn't totally hide that fact, but it took them until the 22nd paragraph of their report, which was supposedly about the February performance of the entire auto industry ("Auto sales slump persists as consumers…

This report carried in the Washington Business Journal typified yesterday's coverage of yet another decline in the stock market:Dow declines further stillWall Street’s major stock indexes followed Monday’s strong sell-off with a day of fluctuation, ending with more losses.The Dow Jones Industrials Average gyrated between modest gains and losses throughout the trading day, ending the down 37…

In February, in the build up to the ultimate passage of President Barack Obama's $787-billion stimulus package, there was a lot of discussion about how much the stimulus was going to help the ailing economy. And to promote the bill, Obama visited a Caterpillar plant in Peoria, Ill. Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., who represents the 18th Congressional District of Illinois, where the Caterpillar plant…

Here we go again - another Obama administration/media personality feud in the works. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has no problem addressing media critics of President Barack Obama - even on an individual basis. Since Obama was sworn in as president, Gibbs has addressed criticism from conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, CNBC mercantile exchange floor reporter Rick Santelli and now…

Although an admitted Barack Obama supporter during last year's campaign, CNBC's Jim Cramer has certainly changed his view concerning our 44th president.On Tuesday's "Today" show, the outspoken "Mad Money" host said: we have "an agenda in this country now that I would regard as being a radical agenda";  Obama's just announced budget "put a level of fear in this country that I have not seen ever in…

Did you hear the one about Joe Biden claiming that Louisiana under Governor Bobby Jindal is losing 400 jobs a day? Probably not. A search at the Washington Post on "Biden 400 jobs Louisiana" (not in quotes) came back with no results. No relevant results were returned with the same searches done at the New York Times and the LA Times. The math-challenged Biden, who infamously said during the…

It was news media conventional wisdom during the 2008 presidential campaign: the worse the economy, the better it was for Democrat candidate prospects. But now that they have the legislative and executive branches and the burden of actually governing, that advantage is slowly being chipped away. CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer, who first starting connecting that perhaps a Democrat-controlled…

Playboy Magazine got its undies in a bundle over the nation wide Tea Party protests held last Friday that were inspired by CNBC's Rick Santelli's free market rant of February 19. As Noel Sheppard noted on March 1, the skin mag published a piece claiming that Santelli was part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to protest Obama's socialist policies. It turns out, however, that the story has been…

ABC News is excited about porn. At least excited by the "fact" that conservative and religious states have the highest levels of porn usage in the country. This, ABC says, is according to a study by Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School. Yes, it's another one of those dime-a-dozen studies. ABC trumpets the bare "facts" in its February 28 piece titled, "Porn in the USA: Conservatives Are…

NPR's Nina Totenberg revealed Friday, not surprisingly, that she was enchanted by President Barack Obama's address earlier in the week to a joint session of Congress. “It made me feel pretty good. I thought it was a great speech,” she enthused before relaying a contrast with former President George W. Bush: “A friend of mine said, 'oh my God, we have a President again!'” Totenberg added that “in…

There's an N-Word you apparently write at your own risk if you're in the establishment media. It's "nationalization." The Associated Press's Stephen Bernard, with the help of old reliables Jeannine Aversa and Martin Crutsinger, blew through almost 800 words (link is dynamic; 12:49 p.m. version is saved here for future reference, is now authored by Crutsinger, and is longer than what I originally…

At the end of Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric introduced a segment on Tysheoma Bethea, a 14-year-old girl who attended Obama’s address to Congress: "President Obama has said one of the biggest adjustments of his new job is living in a bubble. Now, to combat that problem, he started to read a handful of letters everyday from average Americans. One letter, written by an eighth…

At the top of Thursday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith declared: "Tax the rich. New details on how President Obama plans to pay for his $3 trillion budget." Later, correspondent Bill Plante reported on Obama’s proposed budget in a matter-of-fact way with little skepticism: "It spends almost $4 trillion. That's trillion with a 'T.' And the deficit is $1.75 trillion because of spending on the…

Maybe it was just too easy to assume the worst of the news network most others in the press love to hate. Or perhaps it was deliberate.Whatever the reason, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) wire service's Wednesday story about reaction to Barack Obama's sort-of State of the Union Speech the previous evening spent four of its last five paragraphs pinning a report harshly critical of various claims in…