Associated Press

Thanks to Shirley Sherrod, Andrew Breitbart, and the NAACP, political journalists have supposedly discovered the importance of "context" (though they strangely seem to lost interest once fuller context items like this and this became known). It would be helpful if such an interest in full context would legitimately and consistently spread to business reporting. Full context would include looking…

This is almost too obvious. Many readers may already be familiar with recent exposure of the treasury plunderers disguised as public officials serving up hefty salaries to themselves while allegedly serving their constituents in the LA suburb of Bell, California. Here's some of the latest from the Associated Press, carried at the Los Angeles Times, which broke the original story, for those who…

UPDATE (3:20 PM): A couple of quotes below the fold demonstrate just how ideologically diverse critics are who note that Fox played no direct role in Sherrod's resignation. Pundits from the Washington Post and National Review weigh in. Shirley Sherrod placed the blame for her ouster at Fox News's feet. Hardly surprising. She's a liberal (former) member of a liberal administration. More surprising…

If it worked for Germany, it should work for the United States, right? In a July 21 story, AP writer Geir Moulson praised government stimulus for helping Germany "bounce back" from the recession. Moulson highlighted two government stimulus packages totaling $104 billion and a government-sponsored program that cut back workers' hours instead of laying them off as reasons for Germany's endurance…

The Associated Press on Monday published a news item that would more correctly be called a shameless press release on behalf of the NAACP. Writer Allen G. Breed followed the liberal group to Raleigh for a recent show of kabuki theatre. The cause? Getting the Wake County school system to continue the antiquated method of forcibly busing students to far-flung neighborhoods in pursuit of racial…

Geez, can't anybody here play this game? During his visit to Holland, Michigan on Thursday, President Obama spoke with NBC's Chuck Todd. NBC aired the interview on the NBC Nightly News and The Today Show. (On Friday morning, NB's Geoffrey Dickens covered a separate aspect of that interview relating to the recess-appointed Donald Berwick.) In reporting on that interview, the Associated Press…

It's not a stretch to believe that the folks at the Associated Press would rather not report bad news from that communist workers' paradise known as Cuba. Just look at how the wire service has dealt with clearly significant news about the island nation's economy. Though the news, carried originally at the Miami Herald, is three months old, the AP as best I can tell finally got around to writing…

The Associated Press is among many news organizations which have been ignoring the now-sworn testimony of J. Christian Adams, the whistleblowing lawyer who first asserted almost three weeks ago that there is "profound hostility by the Obama Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department towards a race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws." Adams resigned from the DOJ after the following…

There are two different ways of defining a recession. The Associated Press is using one of them to define its beginning, and the other to define its end. Using the former makes George Bush look bad; using the latter makes Barack Obama look good. Imagine that. The traditional definition of "recession," which is used as the official metric in the vast majority of countries around the world, is…

UPDATE, JULY 18: This post was based in an Associated Press's quote of a statement President Obama made to NBC News that "my policies ... got us out of this mess." Subsequent review of the video and transcript of that interview shows that the President really said "my policies ... are getting us out of this mess." I have prepared a follow-up post dealing with this matter and a separate…

It's bad enough the federal government's official budget deficit has topped $1 trillion for the second year in a row, according to the just-released June 2010 Monthly Treasury Statement. But, focusing only on receipts for the moment, a closer look makes it obvious that the situation is even worse than it appears. Don't expect the establishment press to take any interest in the annoying but…

In October 2007, I put up a BizzyBlog post (also cross-posted at the Cleveland Plain Dealer's short-lived Wide Open Blog) about William Garner (pictured at right), the Ohio man who killed five children (three of them and the lone survivor also pictured at right) to cover up a burglary in 1992. At the time, it appeared that Garner's date with the executioner had been indefinitely called off, for…

How do you honor a man who built a $1.3 billion baseball dynasty and revived one of the most iconic American sports franchises? If you're the Associated Press, you whine that he avoided the estate tax. In a July 14 article, the Associated Press bemoaned that Steinbrenner died in a year with a "quirky tax situation" due to the suspended estate tax. The AP complained that the estate tax suspension…

"Where would Jesus drill?"  That sounds almost like it could be the opening of a tree hugger's bad joke, but instead it's the lede in a recent Associated Press story written by John Flesher about a so-called "Green religion movement." Efforts to make environmentalism its own sort of religion have been underway for some time now. But the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has sparked a new push to…