Labeling

Imagine if, in 1987, a Federal Reserve official could have pointed to a poorly performing economy and said, "Gee, this supply-side economics hasn't worked out very well." The press would surely have treated the story as a front-page item and ensured that it got air time on the Big Three networks' then-dominant nightly news broadcasts. Of course, there was no such credible report, because the…

You rubes. Don't you understand that the entire problem Hillary Clinton is facing over her use of a private server to process government communications is the fault of thousands upon thousands of people who don't know how to classify documents? That's essentially the argument Hillary Clinton's spinmeisters are now employing. This evening, Josh Gerstein at the Politico was all too ready to relay…

No issue most exposes the liberal bias of the New York Times more than the matter of illegal immigrants (or as the paper prefers to call them, "undocumented immigrants"). The Times favors generous amnesty, and keeps pushing it both on its news pages and in opinion. A Wednesday Page One story by Trip Gabriel and Julia Preston tried to transform Donald Trump's blunt words on illegals into a problem…

The Associated Press works very hard to ensure that its subscribing outlets and low-information voters who rely solely on its work — knowingly or unknowingly — never learn about Hillary Clinton's smart-aleck, sarcastic, condescending, reality-avoiding behavior. Tuesday night, four AP reporters (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) — Jack Gillum and Stephen Braun in…

W. Kamau Bell, a new CNN host, joined Don Lemon on his program on Tuesday to poke fun of the Iowa State Fair. Lemon touted Bell's "visit to one of the whitest places in America." The former Current TV correspondent, who hosted a show on the FX network named Totally Biased, cracked that people at the fair were "taking pictures of me. I don't think it's because I'm famous. It's because I'm a black…

On Tuesday's CNN Newsroom, Carol Costello did her best to downplay the significant rise in violent crime in major cities around the country during a segment with Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. Costello wondered if "the crime statistics were so unbelievably low over the last decade or so, and there's been this little spike – right? And so, because the crime statistics were so low, does it…

Yesterday, CNN.com published a attempted defense of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State by Eleni Kounalakis. An "Editor's Note" before the piece begins describes Ms. Kounalakis as the "United States ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013," the author of a book on her time there, and "a senior adviser to the Albright Stonebridge Group" (as in "Madeline Albright"). The "editor" at CNN…

Several commenters at my econ-related posts during the past several months here at NewsBusters and my home blog have noted how Washington's mix of high deficits, over-regulation, and quantitative easing never seem to get any kind of blame for the economy in establishment press coverage. One could hardly find a better example of that deliberate avoidance than Josh Boak's writeup today at the…

On Monday, Washington Post's "Civilities" columnist Steven Petrow criticized a reader's comparison between the LGBT rainbow flag and the Confederate battle flag. Petrow, the former president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, asserted that "the history and symbolism of the two flags could not be more different; the responses they evoke — or provoke — even more disparate."…

All you need to know about the Associated Press's interest in accurately reporting current developments in the investigations into 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server is this: A search at its national site on "Hillary crime" (not in quotes) returns nothing. Ken Thomas's coverage of the former Secretary of State's "forceful defense" last night in "a…

Carrying water for the left as their pet programs implode while pretending to be an objective reporter is a daunting task. The Associated Press's Stephen Ohlemacher was not up to that task Thursday afternoon. Twice, in relatively early paragraphs of his 31-paragraph writeup, the AP reporter claimed that the Social Security system has "money." He then separately quoted a Democratic congressperson…

It "seems" that a bit of doubt seeped into an economy-related Associated Press report today. An hour later, it was gone. An early report by Josh Boak with a 10:22 a.m. time stamp found at a subscribing outlet's site described job growth in the past 12 months as "seemingly robust." An hour later, in an expansion of that early report primarily covering today's government release on July retail…

Records are made to be broken, but apparently government spending records are not meant to be reported. The Monthly Treasury Statement released today showed that the federal government spent a mind-boggling $374.86 billion in July. That's an all-time single-month record, surpassing the previous high of $369.39 billion "achieved" in August 2012. Yes, there was a calendar "quirk" which caused this…