Blogs

When the Associated Press issues a brief unbylined report on an obviously important matter, one's first instinct should always be to ask: "What are they deciding not to tell us?" More often than not, the answer is "Plenty." An example justifying the need to look further appeared this morning when the wire service published a five-paragraph report on inflation in Venezuela's economy:

You could have set your watch to it. When a leftist local, gubernatorial or presidential regime enters its final year after demonstrating its corruption, incompetence and inexcusable disrespect for law and procedure to that point, someone in the press will directly or indirectly excuse them by saying that the entity that person is running is "ungovernable," or that "its best days are behind it…

On December 28, the headline at a conveniently unbylined report at the Associated Press screamed: "HOLIDAY SPENDING UP 8 PERCENT; ONLINE SALES SURGE." As I noted in a post later that day, this was odd, to say the least, given that even the incurably optimistic National Retail Federation had predicted an increase of only 3.7 percent. It turned out that the reported growth rate was based on the…

Poor President Barack Obama. Juan Williams, in a Monday column at The Hill, insists that "the president is not to blame for the rancor and polarization that have characterized his presidency," and "is not responsible for the unprecedented obstructionism employed by (Mitch) McConnell’s Senate Republicans." Why, In Williams's world, Obama has apparently been the very model of civility, while…

Politifact, the leftist propaganda mill disguised as a "fact-checking" web site, always has its "Pants on Fire" matches at the ready for conservatives and Republicans. This is remarkable, given that it has never given any Hillary Clinton statement or campaign assertion a "Pants on Fire" evaluation. The one example it cites falsely claims to "involve" her, but has nothing to do with anything she…

On Wednesday, Amber Phillips at the Washington Post's The Fix blog impressively took President Obama to task for his over-the-top bragging about the nation's mediocre (and likely getting worse) economy. She noted that "the biggest knock on the Obama economy ... is that the recovery has been very good for the wealthy and certain sectors and not so much for the middle class and everyone else." Hear…

During the middle years of last decade, the business press, including the Associated Press, worked the word "recession" into its reports on the economy quite regularly. Yesterday, despite a current economy facing far worse fundamentals than were seen during 2007, the AP's Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon gave us a nearly 882-word treatise on "WHY GLOBAL WOES AND SINKING STOCKS DON'T MEAN US…

The Associated Press's coverage of Friday's deep U.S. stock market dive in two Friday afternoon reports engaged in the reality avoidance longtime readers here have come to expect. An item by Stan Choe ("Get used to it: Big drops for stocks are back again") spent most of its verbiage on "volatility," and only cited "China's sharp economic slowdown ... Tensions in the Middle East ... the plunge in…

The press's determination to protect liberal politicians against their own mistakes by minimizing their significance or failing to report them at all extends far to the left — as far left as Vermont Senator, self-described socialist and Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Excerpts from Ars Technica's report on Team Sanders' attempt to prevent Wikipedia from using the campaign…

The press's fierce determination to avoid blaming any of the steep decline in this nation's stock markets so far this year on horrid U.S. economic data, or on the Obama administration which has given us such a sour economic environment, has gone way beyond annoying. Shortly after noon at Yahoo Finance, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average's Friday dive hit 500 points, Nicole Sinclair, who is also…

The Brookings Institution, the leftist think tank, is wailing and gnashing its teeth over its finding that in many metro areas, "income inequality," their favorite bogeyman, is being "driven by declining incomes" among their poorest residents. The problem isn't so much that the rich are getting richer as it is that the poor are getting poorer. As a result, "Inequality is higher today in most…

On Saturday, after one of the worst year-opening weeks for the stock market in many years, Myles Udland at BusinessInsider.com complained that "The stock market is having a nightmare start to 2016 and it's all the Fed's fault." This sentiment is apparently widely held in the media. At NationalInterest.org on Tuesday, Christopher Whalen wrote that "the Fed created the current unstable market…

It would appear that Yuri Kageyama at the Associated Press has fallen into the trap of believing the rubbish her employer and much of the rest of the world's press has been pushing about how the world's economies really aren't performing all that poorly, that this "new normal" world isn't all that bad, and what we are seeing is all we have a right to expect. You see, Kageyama doesn't understand…

Iran's increasing belligerence towards the United States in the wake of — or, more accurately, as a result of — the so-called nuclear "deal" between the two countries is unmistakable, as is the Obama's willingness — no, make that eagerness — to kowtow before that rogue regime. Thus, the facade created at the New York Times by reporters Thomas Erdbrink and Helene Cooper after Iran released ten U.…