Associated Press

Presumed union member (the News Media Guild) and Associated Press reporter Sam Hananel's Sunday morning coverage of union threats against a pilot partnership between the U.S. Postal Service and Staples Inc. fails to deliver on at least three counts. First, while noting that American Postal Workers Union (APWU) boycott threats ended a similar effort at Sears stores in the late-1980s, Hananel "…

Imagine if Texas Senator Ted Cruz or Lone Star State Governor Rick Perry told a public radio show's host that "people who support abortion, gun control, and same-sex marriage have no place in Texas." There would be breaking news alerts on every cable news station. It would be a press obsession for weeks. More immediately, there would be intense pushback from the show's host. On the public…

In May 2009, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, announced that it would be "launching an index that will provide monthly, multi-format updates on the economic stress of the United States down to the county level." Not a bad idea, especially if you were concerned that evidence of an economic recovery under Barack Obama would not otherwise be convincing. The AP likely…

A search at the national web site of the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, on the name of Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker (not in quotes) returns only two recent relevant items. One relates to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, where Walker is described as saying, in AP's words, "that (last week) he didn't know enough about the situation to comment ... (and) has…

Following up on Friday's awful jobs report from the government (only 74,000 seasonally adjusted jobs added, with the unemployment rate dropping to 6.7 percent only because adults continued to leave the workforce), the Asssociated Press's Christopher Rugaber tried to search for excuses. To its credit, the headline at Rugaber's report didn't blatantly dissemble like the one at Bloomberg, which…

Bullying by staffers of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has denied knowledge of their actions when they were taken, is a national news obsession. Bullying by staffers of Colorado Senator Mark Udall — which the Senator has acknowledged and is defending — is barely a blip. The story, first reported in the Colorado blogosphere at Complete Colorado, is that Udall staffers "worked…

Kudos to the Washington Post's Express tabloid, which on Friday published a gripping story from Associated Press by Didi Tang headlined "The Perils of Pregnancy In  China." It described how China's communist government still carries out a one-child policy with late-term abortions that are supposed to be banned. The text box in the Post tabloid came from once-expectant mother Gong Qifeng, who…

Discouraging headlines are appearing about the deterioration of the situation in Iraq, the war U.S. troops won in 2008. Bloomberg News notes, "Al-Qaeda Fighters Take Fallujah as Iraqi Army Attacks." The Washington Post reports that an "Al-Qaeda force captures Fallujah amid rise in violence in Iraq." At the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, the headline writers are apparently…

Obamacare's designers appear to have assumed that life is completely static. As far as they're concerned, people who are single don't marry, women don't have children, married couples don't sometimes divorce, individuals and families don't move, and workers don't change jobs. I say that because HealthCare.gov will from all appearances not accommodate any of the aforementioned common life…

Remember when George W. Bush was intensely criticized in 2004 for using a couple of seconds of footage from the World Trade Center attacks in a campaign commercial? He was "exploiting" 9/11. Let's talk about an example of really crass exploitation which the press has largely ignored. As reported by Politico's Joseph Delreal, recently elected New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's daughter…

In a Monday, December 23 write-up, Associated Press National Writer Jocelyn Noveck went so over-the-top in her awe at Miley Cyrus's ability to attract attention during 2013 that she called her "this year's pop-culture prom queen," and included a mention of Cyrus in her rundown of "pop culture moments" during every month of the year. As I noted earlier this morning (at NewsBusters; at…

According to its Frequently Asked Questions page, the Associated Press "currently (has) around 1,400 U.S. daily newspaper members and thousands of television and radio broadcast members." The wire service attempted to identify 2013's Entertainer of the Year by sending out an "annual survey of its newspaper and broadcast members and subscribers." Based on the response rate, it should have…

It seems that Associated Press reporter Maggie Michael and Sarah El Deeb, her partner in distortion, can hardly believe that Egypt's military-backed government is calling terrorists "terrorists." The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. Even if one believes, as Michael asserts, that "The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, denounced violence in the late 1970s," that alleged repudiation…

Though it certainly isn't a hard news item, a montage of identical story openings at roughly two dozen local TV stations assembled by Conan O'Brien's staff early last week shows us that their news readers will often parrot whatever their national news script services provide them. The primary and perhaps dominant purveyor of such scripts is more than likely APTN, the video division of the…