Oil & Gas Prices

Tonight's report at the Associated Press in the wake of Wall Street's disastrous day isn't quite an Animal House moment — "Remain Calm! All Is Well!" — but it's more than fair to say that the wire service's Matthew Craft and Bernard Condon allowed quite a bit of wishful thinking into their writeup. In late June, I noted that the AP's Ken Sweet asked a very important question about China ("IS…

In Monday evening’s edition of network bias by omission, CBS and NBC neglected to stories concerning a data breach of American taxpayers at the scandal-ridden IRS and the Obama administration finally giving approval for a major oil company to begin oil drilling in the Arctic off Alaska’s coast. Surprisingly, ABC’s World News Tonight picked up the pieces and provided their viewers with coverage of…

In a Wednesday column, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman extended his odd obsession with raising the gas tax into the 2016 Republican presidential debate. But Friedman will have a hard time convincing Republicans to listen if he keeps throwing around insults, like describing the party's donors and supporters as embracing the "angry anti-science, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-minorities,…

"Dodge City" blared the teaser headline atop msnbc.com's home page. "Clinton blatantly sidesteps Keystone question," noted the subheadline for the story by the Lean Forward network's Alex Seitz-Wald.

Tom Steyer’s concern for the environment and almost religious devotion to promoting green energy appear to be targeting another kind of green. Steyer, criticized for the hypocrisy of having built some of his fortune on coal, is now connected to green energy companies that might benefit from his climate change activism.

After the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft report on Thursday declaring that, in his own words, "The government has no public safety justification to ban" hyrdraulic fracturing, or fracking, Houston Chronicle business writer Chris Tomlinson falsely claimed that the industry believes it "needs no regulation." Tomlinson formerly toiled at the Associated Press, and it shows. One…

This was pretty funny. William Shaheen, Hillary's New Hampshire co-chair and husband of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, appearing on today's With All Due Respect, boasted that he knows where Hillary stands on 10 different issues.  But when hosts Mark Halperin and John Heilemann put Shaheen to the test, asking him where Hillary stands on the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans Pacific trade deal, Shaheen had to…

While all three of the major broadcast networks on Tuesday night covered President Barack Obama's veto of the bill passed by Congress approving construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, ABC, CBS and NBC failed to mention Obama's veto came despite a majority of Americans supporting the pipeline. Total coverage amounted to one minute and six seconds.

When it came to the major broadcast networks covering the full congressional passage of the Keystone XL oil pipeline on their Wednesday night newscasts, ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley chose to ignore the story completely and left their viewers in the dark on this issue. Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News made it the second topic covered on its…

At the recent meeting of the world's elites in Davos, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon circulated a proposal to ban cars in all major cities in the world by dense-packing their layouts. The cost, as I noted on Monday: a mere $90 trillion (that's right, trillion). It's telling in a foreboding sense that the pair's idea wasn't laughed off the continent…

The nation’s leading newspapers buried the Senate’s strong 62-36 vote for the "controversial" Keystone XL pipeline inside Friday’s newspapers. Nine Democrats joined unanimous Republicans in setting up an Obama veto. Other stories seemed more interesting to the papers -- like the president's budget plans. House vote?

During her MSNBC show Now on Monday, Alex Wagner had on guest Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, who took advantage of the blizzard set to strike New York City and New England to invoke climate change and blame the “big oil industry” and Republicans for “voting down science” in a Senate vote last week. Not to be outdone, Wagner took her own swipe at those who don’t subscribe…

Three results returned in a search at the Associated Press's national site on "Venezuela" tell us almost nothing about that country's deepening economic crisis. An unbylined January 10 item reports on the visit of Nicolas Maduro, the country's de facto dictator, to Iran in hopes of "stabilizing" (i.e., raising) oil prices. A second unbylined report on January 9 tells readers that there's really…

An article about a dramatic decrease in the price of oil appeared in the Washington Post's WonkBlog. However a certain F-word is notable by its very obvious absence. So what is that word? "Fracking."