Government Agencies

On October 8, Andrew Taylor at the Associated Press wrote that "(President Barack) Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis." In a NewsBusters post later that day, I pegged Obama's true inheritance at roughly $245 billion as of when he was first sworn into office, and at about $600 billion if projected over the full fiscal year. The actual deficit for fiscal…

In an all too typical unskeptical report, Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, allowed President Barack Obama to claim, in Kuhnhenn's words, that "health and security experts continue to tell him that the screening measures already in place for travelers are more effective" than "restricting travel to the U.S. from the three Ebola-stricken West African nations."…

Appearing on Friday's CBS This Morning, Republican pollster Frank Luntz reacted to the latest CBS News poll showing Americans having a "crisis of confidence" in government institutions: "The problem is that the institutions that have the greatest impact on us, the CDC, the FDA, the EPA, those that are responsible for our health and safety, are the ones that have had the biggest collapse. In fact…

On Thursday's Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN's Tom Foreman zeroed in on representatives on "both sides of the aisle...[who] are also clearly frustrated by what they see as a lack of answers and accountability from the CDC." Foreman highlighted that "CDC Director Tom Frieden dodged even basic questions – like how did two hospital workers get the disease" at a congressional hearing on the federal…

For years, government watchdog groups have chronicled numerous instances of waste and abuse — at the very least — at the Centers for Disease Control and its National Institutes for Health. An establishment press corps doing its job, upon hearing the director of the National Institutes for Health claim that "if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have…

Early this morning, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's designated fact-checker gave the left's claims that Republicans alone were responsible for alleged "cuts" to Ebola research four Pinocchios (i.e., a "whopper"). That's nice, but it hardly undoes the damage news outlets like the Associated Press have inflicted on the truth in the apparent name of ginning up resentment among low-information…

The federal government's latest fiscal year ended on September 30. The final Monthly Treasury Statement for the fiscal year, will likely be published during the coming week or possibly a few days later. From time to time, commenters at NewsBusters have pointed that Uncle Sam's reported deficits don't represent the whole story. They are certainly right. While the press is all excited over this…

This morning, I received two identical daily briefing emails from USA Today. The subject line was "Life Expectancy in USA Reaches Record High." As USA Today's web-page version of the email shows, the email body contained no link to or mention of a life-expectancy related article. Giving the paper the benefit of the doubt, I clicked on the email's "5 things you need to know Friday"; it also has…

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.…

On Thursday, President Barack Obama did something Republicans have inexplicably been reluctant to do. He nationalized the impending midterm elections by telling a friendly audience at Northwestern University that "I am not on the ballot this fall ... But make no mistake: These policies (of my administration) are on the ballot -- every single one of them." That evening on Fox News's Special…

On her Thursday Fox News show, Megyn Kelly interviewed the State Department's Jen Psaki. Psaki's thankless and impossible task was to defend the administration against former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's assessment that U.S. troops completely left Iraq too early. Video and the damning portions of the transcript follow the jump:

Bill O'Reilly's opening talking points on his show tonight went after President Obama's claim that the intelligence community underestimated and did not adequately communicate the dangers of ISIS/ISIL in Iraq and Syria with both barrels. As documented in several NewsBusters posts in the 48-plus hours since Obama's Sunday night "60 Minutes" interview, O'Reilly's no-holds-barred analysis…

Steve Kroft's interview of Barack Obama was the focus of this past Sunday's episode of "60 Minutes" on CBS. It has become noteworthy primarily because of Obama's statement that U.S. intelligence agencies "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria." As several previous NewsBusters posts have shown (examples here, here, here, and here), the press is working mightily to minimize how the…