Associated Press

In separate reports for the Associated Press during the past week, Christopher Rugaber and Jeannine Aversa, economics writers for the wire service, each dealt with estimates for next year's average unemployment rate. They came back with significantly different predictions for 2011 without recognizing how widely those estimates varied. On Tuesday, Rugaber dealt with the Federal Reserve's…

When I first saw this video at a non-Government/General Motors site, I said, "Wow, that's quite a spoof. Who did that?" It's not a spoof. It's for real. It's posted in the media section at GM's web site. Even diehard defenders of the GM and Chrysler bailouts have to wonder what in the world the folks who put together the 60-second ad were thinking. Here's the hype for the ad found at GM's…

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin on Thursday struck back at media members that bothered reporting the slip of the tongue she made the previous day concerning North Korea being America's ally. In a Facebook posting entitled "A Thanksgiving Message to All 57 States," Palin mocked news outlets for not giving similar coverage to gaffes made by Barack Obama:

Correction: My initial post incorrectly conveyed that Chandra Levy was an intern for then-Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif.). She was in fact an intern for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. "Salvadoran Immigrant Ingmar Guandique Found Guilty of Murdering D.C. Intern Chandra Levy " That was the breaking news headline that was blasted to my inbox from ABCNews.com regarding today's murder conviction of…

The media is practically falling over themselves with a report, propagated in part by the flimsy Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press, that Pope Benedict XVI has "justified" the use of condoms. (See this enormous (and misleading) headline at HuffPo, for example.) But is it true? In a word, no. Nowhere in his remarks does the Pope talk about "justifying" anything. Rev. Joseph Fessio is the…

A couple of NewsBusters posts during the past week -- one from yours truly and another courtesy of Ken Shepherd -- have pointed to the press's reluctance to identify the Democratic Party affiliations of indicted Prince George's County Executive Jack Johnson and his also-indicted wife Leslie, who is a County Council member. Today, the Associated Press's Brian Witte kept up the wire service's…

On Thursday, I noted (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) that the Associated Press's Marty Crutsinger and Chris Rugaber worked very hard to gloss over October's horrid housing market news as reflected in the Census Bureau's reports on housing starts and building permits. That's bad enough. But a Tuesday report covering the latest release of the Housing Market Index (HMI) by the National…

I owe Ottmar Edenhofer thanks for two things. First, I am grateful that Edenhofer, a German economist who is "co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change," has a last name on which searching is easy. I quickly determined that his name last name doesn't currently come up in searches at the Associated Press's main web…

Persistent pursuit of a story by journalists has in all too many cases been replaced by a dogged determination to keep politically incorrect facts out of important stories. An Associated Press item out of Grand Island, Nebraska this morning illustrates this point. It's not very difficult to identify aspects of the story reporter Josh Funk worked mightily to leave out (bolded items hinting at…

Gosh, what's a bigger story -- that to the extent it was ever happening at all the housing recovery "seems to have been aborted," or that according to the government there was very little inflation in October?

I guess after about a year and a half of dancing around the truth, the Associated Press decided that confession of some of the truth about Government/General Motors is good for the soul. Conveniently, the AP's de facto partial confession, delivered via reporter Sharon Silke Carty, comes as the success of the company's initial public offering seems assured. Carty's confession consists of…

When you increase demand for something, its price should go up. In the case of bonds, if the demand for them increases, their price should go up, and their effective interest-rate yield should go down. That didn't happen on Friday when the Federal Reserve began executing its second round of "money from nothing" quantitative easing. Even though the Fed increased demand, bond prices went down…

Thursday evening, NB's Ken Shepherd accurately pointed out how little establishment press interest there has been in prominently carrying an Associated Press report about how the Obama administration has been, in the words of the wire service's Dina Cappiello, "downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited." This is…

During the Bush administration, the media made much of political appointees supposedly editing and otherwise interfering with the integrity of the work of career federal government scientists, particularly on studies pertaining to global warming/climate change. Well now the Associated Press is reporting that an inspector general's report from the Interior Department released yesterday found…