Labeling

On Tuesday, Tom Brown at Reuters (HT CounterContempt.com aka "Republican Party Animals") wrote about the case of Quartavious Davis, a 20 year-old sentenced to life (and then some) after being "convicted of participating in a string of armed robberies in the Miami area in 2010." In the process, Brown, whose column title was inadvertently humorous ("Insight: Florida man sees 'cruel' face of U.S…

Not even in death will the New York Times accurately describe Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat as a terrorist. In a January 6, 2005 story not long after Arafat's death, then-Jersualem bureau chief Steven Erlanger described Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as having "no heroic history like that of his predecessor as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasir…

In an analysis piece which, based on its title ("In divided era, what does July 4th mean?"), was as predictable as heat in July, Ted Anthony, who is tasked with writing "about American culture" at the Associated Press, attempted to explain, 236 years in, where what he claims is "the only nation in the world that was built solely upon an idea" stands. (Communism as an idea is what originally…

A write-up with a current time stamp of Tuesday afternoon on how shocked (shocked, I tell you) legal Mexican immigrants and Mexican illegal aliens in the U.S. are that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) just won a plurality of the popular vote in "their homeland" by the the Associated Press's Julie Watson posited as a fact a statement so obviously false that you have to wonder if she…

At the Associated Press, Christina Rexrode placed the blame for Monday's mediocre performance in the stock market squarely and obviously where it belonged: "Stocks struggled to stay out of the red in quiet holiday-week trading after a trade group said American manufacturing shrank in June for the first time in almost three years." The trade group involved is the Institute for Supply Management…

Washington Post reporter Sudarsan Raghavan filed a 12-paragraph story today, published on page A9 about "coordinated assaults... in the town of Garissa" Kenya on Sunday morning in which "[m]asked gunmen sprayed bullets and hurled grenades at two churches... killing at least 15 people and injuring several." "It was the latest in a series of attacks in this East African nation suspected of…

I'll bet it would shake people up to know that all of the recent and steep decline in consumer confidence has occurred in households earning $75,000 or more per year. On Friday, the June Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers told us just that. The key sentence in the U of M press release reads as follows (PDF; bold is mine): "Perhaps of greater importance was that…

July 1 is traditionally the day when many new state laws take effect, and every year on or about that date, the Washington Post makes sure to inform its readers of some new laws hitting the books in Maryland and Virginia. This year, Marylanders are seeing tax increases, with residents of Montgomery County -- a significant portion of the Post's subscriber base -- disproportionately affected.…

In a report currently time-stamped early Saturday morning, Emily Wilkins at the Columbus Dispatch claimed in her opening sentence covering Ohio's second We The People Convention in Columbus ("Fears fuel kinship at tea party convention") that "Tea party members are alone and scared — and to them, that’s a good thing." Well, I was there this weekend in Columbus. I didn't see "alone" or "scared…

From the headlines to the verbiage in many establishment press write-ups, it would be easy to believe that the just-resolved controversy over interest rates on student loans affects virtually everyone in college who has borrowed money and anyone who graduated (or didn't) who borrowed and is still owes Uncle Sam. That isn't so. To cite just one example, readers of Christine Armario's Saturday…

On Thursday's CBS This Morning, Norah O'Donnell played up President Obama's experience as a lecturer in constitutional law just hours before the Supreme Court upheld his health care law. O'Donnell trumpeted how the President apparently "paid so close attention to this - not only reading the opinions, but going back and actually listening to them on tape." The correspondent also forwarded the…

It seems that there will be little reason for the Obama campaign to bother issuing press releases as long as Julie Pace of the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is around to breathlessly relay the information for them as some kind of exclusive, insider report. If there's any difference between campaign hype and what Pace wrote in a theoretically objective news piece, it must…

Recent job cuts at Alabama newspapers have been steep. The Birmingham Business Journal, which (ahem) apparently is not among the participants, reports that "Three of Alabama’s largest daily newspapers, including the Birmingham News, will lay off about 400 employees as they cut back their printing schedules and increase their focus on digital." The other affected publications include the…

NPR's Scott Horsley amped up a campaign rally for President Obama to biblical proportions on Tuesday's Morning Edition, as he singled out an Obama supporter who clearly was in awe of the incumbent Democrat, to the point of practically deifying him.         Horsley set the scene, pointing out how "the rain had stopped, and a little sunshine was peeking through the clouds," and how the…