Labeling

Here's how a "Business Highlights" item at the Associated Press summarized the situation between Timothy Geithner and London banks whose officials had admitted to rigging the London Interbank Offered Rate ("Libor") on Friday evening: "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released documents Friday that show it learned five years ago of big banks understating their borrowing costs to manipulate a…

Microsoft’s ill-advised marriage of convenience to NBC News has finally landed in divorce court, and it couldn’t have happened soon enough. Like any marriage built on a lie – in this case that MSNBC would be a legitimate news organization – it was doomed to fail. The MSNBC brand is a tumor, corrupting everything it touches, and it’s good to see that Microsoft is finally cutting it off. Even…

Democrats are at it again, claiming that Republicans, particularly House Republicans, are sabotaging the economy, while ignoring the quite effective job President Barack Obama has done to ruin the economy both on his own (regulatory and anti-fossil fuel hostility, wasteful green "investments," etc.) and with the help of Congressional Democrats when they controlled both Houses of Congress (…

One might think that yours truly, who has been nagging the establishment press for years over its blind acceptance of seasonally adjusted data in government economic and employment reports, would be pleased to see that the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber finally got around to making such adjustments the primary focus of his final report on the most recently released unemployment claims…

My, it was awfully nice of Marcy Gordon at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, to give Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner such excellent protection in her report on the New York Federal Reserve Bank's release of documents relating to its knowledge of the manipulation of the "Libor" (London interbank offered rate) used as the basis for the pricing of trillions of dollars of loans…

Veteran New York Times reporter Erik Eckholm covered a lawsuit filed by "women's rights advocates" against new restrictions on abortion in Arizona: "Lawsuit Tries to Block New Arizona Abortion Law." Favorable treatment for the pro-abortion side was evident in Eckholm's labeling and source disparity. A supporter of the law, Cathi Herrod, was identified as president of "a conservative Christian…

On Friday's Morning Edition, NPR's Scott Horsley favored Obama supporters in his report on the battle for Virginia's electoral votes, playing three soundbites from them, versus only one from a Republican official in the commonwealth. Horsley also played up how "the demographics are shifting in the Democrats' direction." The correspondent led the segment by noting the Democratic incumbent's…

The Sunday newspaper supplement Parade magazine is showing its liberal bias again...but this time, it's helping the Bush family whacks anti-tax conservatives again. Just as Jeb Bush slammed the Grover Norquist tax pledge last month, George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush unload for this Sunday's papers. George asks:  "Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?" Barbara thinks he should "go back to…

The ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights are trying to keep Arizona safe for late-term abortionists. But they must not be labeled as liberal, or even in the usual argot (as AP showed) as “abortion-rights groups.” The Reuters headline (repeated by Yahoo and other online aggregators) is “Rights groups file suit challenging Arizona abortion ban.” The story by David Schwartz repeated that…

Uncle Sam's June Treasury Statement released today told us that with three months remaining in the 2012 fiscal year the government has already run up a deficit of over $900 billion. According to the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger, Americans should see that as a "positive sign," because "deficit is growing more slowly than last year." During the final three months of fiscal 2011, the…

Left-wing author Touré Neblett wildly accused Mitt Romney of playing the race card in a Thursday item on Time's website, claiming that Romney "went to the NAACP's National Convention planning to get booed," so he could "elicit an emotional reaction from white voters. Romney's performance wasn't intended to win more black votes, it was intended to help win more white votes." Touré, the…

Wednesday's CBS This Morning hyped a "groundbreaking" new report from federal government scientists that claims "the first-ever statistical connection between extreme weather and man-made climate change." Correspondent Wyatt Andrews spotlighted how the study "found that man-made heat made the Texas drought roughly 20 times more likely." Andrews also hinted a connection between climate change…

It seems that Matt Drudge is a better headline writer than whoever at the Associated Press performed the same task at its story about California lawmakers' passage of "building the nation's first dedicated high-speed rail line, a multibillion dollar project that will eventually link Los Angeles and San Francisco" -- if sanity doesn't prevail in the meantime. Since late yesterday, Drudge's…

CBS's Jeff Glor confronted David Axelrod on Friday's CBS This Morning over his most recent attack on presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney: "You said that Mitt Romney was the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon....I think that would strike a lot of people as extreme. Do you stand by those comments?" Glor also pressed Axelrod on the Obama campaign's "outsourcer-in…