Wages & Prices

CNN's Carol Costello showed a massive double standard in her coverage of Thursday's fast food strikes, grilling a National Restaurant Association executive while treating a striking worker with kid gloves. The disparity between the interviews was stark. Costello started by putting the NRA executive on the defensive: "do these workers have a point? Should they make more money?" In contrast,…

It must be nice to blithely talk about how you would spend somebody else's money without thinking through the consequences. Kendall Fells, the organizing director of Fast Food Forward in New York, told Yahoo Finance's Bernice Napatch at its Daily Ticker site that "McDonald’s made $5.5 billion in profits and there’s plenty of money to pay the workers who work there and new hires without firing…

The four panelists of MSNBC’s The Cycle each weighed in on yesterday's nationwide fast food workers’ strike on Thursday’s show. All four of them voiced their support for the strikers, including the supposedly conservative member of the panel, Abby Huntsman. Huntsman claimed the strike was “bigger than the minimum wage. This is about making enough to live.” She groused that the average…

Vickie Thomas and the news department at Detroit TV station WWJ really ought to be ashamed of themselves. The open question is whether they even know enough to be ashamed. In reporting on a Motor City McDonald's store which was forced to close — whether it was for a few hours or all day and night isn't disclosed — Thomas quoted a "protester" claiming that "McDonald’s made like $500 billion…

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski vehemently criticized Miley Cyrus’s lewd display during Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” at the MTV Video Music Awards, but Brzezinski herself has blurred the lines between morning show anchor and social activist. On today’s Morning Joe, broadcast from a Ford assembly line near Detroit, the co-host openly declared her support for the nationwide fast food workers’ strike…

When conservatives rally or march over an issue, such as the yearly March for Life, they don't get much attention. Yet, ABC offered two reports on Thursday promoting a liberal-backed strike on fast food restaurants. Good Morning America's Rebecca Jarvis went so far as to link the protest to Wednesday's 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's rally. Jarvis touted, "They're hoping that scenes…

There are two key words missing from the report Bloomberg's Kasia Klimasinska & Shobhana Chandra published Tuesday morning — a writeup that is so incredibly sunny and over-the-top that is probably would have embarrassed the Old Soviet Union's Pravda in its heyday. One is "income." The reason is obvious. Real median household income is still way below where it was when the recession ended…

Anthony Mason played up President Obama's $89 restaurant tip on Monday's CBS This Morning, underlining that "when it comes to tips, President Obama is tops." However, the network has yet to cover a Monday story from the New York Times that pointed out the "uncomfortable reality for the White House: the administration has named no more women to high-level executive branch posts than the Clinton…

A chart accompanying a writeup by Robert Pear at the New York Times on how Americans' real incomes have fallen and barely begun to recover is interesting in its selection of comparison points. Pear himself tried to pretend that what President Obama wants to do to try to make college more affordable is somehow relevant to reigniting economic growth. Really.

Potentially the most dishonest aspect of the Obama-loving media's reporting since January 20, 2009, pertains to how they've almost totally ignored how poorly the economy is performing. On Tuesday, Michael T. Snyder, author of the gloom and doom book "The Beginning of the End," wrote a fabulous piece titled "33 Shocking Facts Which Show How Badly The Economy Has Tanked Since Obama Became…

What do you do when you're the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, and you're trying to do your level best to described a floundering economy without incurring the wrath of the Obama administration? You search for positive-sounding words to describe what is in reality a marginal situation. The AP seems to have settled on "steady" and "steadily."

Economists, business owners and employees are worried that the Affordable Care Act is resulting in fewer hours for workers. The networks had been ignoring this shift toward part-time work and its relationship to Obamacare earlier this year, but NBC has let the cat out of the bag. On the Aug. 13, “Nightly News” Lisa Myers reported on an NBC News investigation into the issue.

Mika to the barricades! Move over, Reverend Al.  You're not the only MSNBC host who moonlights as a liberal activist. On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski announced that she will be not merely be covering a pay protest by fast-food workers in Detroit on August 29th--she'll be an active participant in it. Joe Scarborough tried—in vain—to school Mika on Econ 101.  But she did the equivalent…

On Monday’s Morning Joe, an all-liberal panel discussed, with co-host Joe Scarborough, the recent feud between the D.C. Council and Walmart, highlighting the standoff between the discount retail giant and city councilors over wages at three future Walmart locations in the nation’s capital. Co-host Mika Brzezinski bashed Walmart throughout the segment, responding with a long pause and a…