Unemployment

The New York Times leaned "Forward!" for Barack Obama's reelection in its campaign coverage over the weekend. The front of the paper's Saturday Election 2012 section featured a large photo from an Obama rally of a volunteer handing out flags at a fairground rally in Hilliard, Ohio on Friday. The caption noted "A crowd of 2,800 showed up to see Mr. Obama." Meanwhile, campaign reporter Ashley…

The nation’s leading newspapers really didn’t want to highlight the unemployment rate going back up to 7.9 percent. On the front of Saturday’s Washington Post, the headline was “Report shows Oct. job growth.” The New York Times wouldn’t even put the news on the front page. Up front was a tiny headline, “Job Growth Tops Estimates.” The Times shifted the story to B-1 with the headline “U.S.…

The ignorance and blind sycophancy of Bill Maher knows no bounds. On HBO's Real Time Friday, the man who proudly gave a million dollars to Barack Obama's Super PAC said on national television, "Who cares what somebody in his administration wrote down on a piece of paper and predicted?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

ABC, CBS and NBC did their part Friday night to minimize the negative impact to the Obama campaign from the rise in the unemployment rate from 7.8 to 7.9 percent in October. ABC anchor Diane Sawyer allocated a piddling 18 seconds to the news as she characterized the 171,000 jobs growth as “beating predictions,” NBC’s Brian Williams stressed how the 171,000 additional jobs number “was better…

On the Nov. 2 edition of CNBCs “Squawk on the Street,” former chief economic advisor to George W. Bush and Hoover Fellow Ed Lazear commented that today’s jobs report may not be as good as the Obama administration and media make it out to be. “You have to think about how much do you need to keep employment constant as a proportion of the population,” he stated.

After the last jobs report before the election, CNN's Soledad O'Brien tried to be positive even with high underemployment and unemployment rates. On Friday's Starting Point, she ridiculously cast underemployment moving down one tenth of a percent to 14.6 as "improving." "Underemployment which was 14.7 percent, now 14.6; labor force participation, as well, that's better. Are you feeling…

Presidential elections have been won or lost due to the economy. Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. This election season is no different as polls, including a recent one from NBC News/Wall Street Journal, continue to show the economy is the top concern of voters. But the network news media often skew economic coverage in favor of liberal…

On Thursday, I wrote a piece exposing several factual errors in Andrew Sullivan's recent love letter to President Obama. Sullivan responded hours later:

As NewsBusters has been reporting, Jay Leno has been hitting Barack Obama hard during his opening monologues lately. On Wednesday's Tonight Show, the host once again took aim at the President's horrible economic record (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CEO Sergio Marchionne of Fiat, the parent company of the U.S. government bailed-out Chrysler, got two unexpected and undeserved breaks from Craig Trudell at Bloomberg yesterday. The first was the story's presidential election-driven focus in its headline ("Chrysler CEO Reiterates Jeep Production Staying in U.S.") and first five paragraphs on Fiat's plans to manufacture vehicles in China for…

Although it should have used harsher language in its headline, FactCheck.org, the Annenberg Foundation-funded outfit, has apparently set its leftist bias aside long enough to take shots at an ad narrated by President Barack Obama which claims 5.2 million jobs created and gives all but the most alert viewers the impression that the number represents those created during his entire administration.…

In their third Presidential debate analysis, the Jurassic Press Media last night and thus far this morning have failed utterly in their role as fact checker and record-corrector - at least when it comes to what President Barack Obama had to say.  As but one glaring example, there were the President’s absurd assertions regarding the auto bailout and China.

UPDATE: Henry Blodget at Business Insider reports that a "source, who is an analyst at the Department, " has told him that "the number of California claims that were not processed totalled about 15,000-25,000." Today's release of the Department of Labor's weekly unemployment claims report showed 339,000 initial claims filed during the previous week -- a sharp decline of 30,000 from the previous…

In a Friday interview where the primary purpose was to give her an opportunity to defend her Bureau of Labor Statistics, Obama administration Department of Labor head Hilda Solis gave CNBC viewers the false impression that prior-month upward revisions to reported job additions were in the private sector (they were all government jobs), and falsely claimed, despite her boss's refusal to do…