Bloomberg

Media outlets ranging from CBS to CNN and MSNBC had egg on their faces Tuesday night after their bombshell revelations about a supposedly new, “previously undisclosed” meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin fell flat upon reading a July 8 BuzzFeed news item.

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg reacted to a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Deal by pledging $15 million to the United Nations’ climate change efforts.   As a billionaire and the eighth richest person in the world, he can afford to — unlike all the ordinary taxpayers and low-income households who would have been saddled with the burden of living up to the agreement. One of the…

On Friday, the government reported that the economy added a seasonally adjusted 211,000 jobs, and that the unemployment rate dropped to a 10-year low of 4.4 percent. The day's press coverage had three noticeable highlights. The first was the headline at the Associated Press's coverage — "US JOBS DATA SHOW SOME SCARS FROM RECESSION FINALLY HEALING."

On Friday, Adam Housley at Fox News delivered bombshell news that a "very well-known, very high up, very senior (person) in the intelligence world" not in the FBI had engaged in "the unmasking of the names of American citizens" in the course of surveillance surfacing "members of the Trump administration" that had  nothing to do with Russia ... or foreign intelligence of any kind." On Sunday…

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist who has been portraying life in the office cubicle for over three decades, spotted the Donald Trump phenomenon early on, wrote that "I have never seen better" persuasion skills, and ultimately predicted that Trump would win the presidency. Bloomberg Businessweek's Caroline Winter, apparently originally believing like so many others that Adams would be proven…

Meg Kinnard at the Associated Press betrayed quite a bit of unhappiness Wednesday evening and Thursday morning in her coverage of workers' decisive rejection of a union organizing effort at Boeing Corp.'s 787-10 production plant in North Charleston, South Carolina. In two very similar reports found at the wire service's Big Story site, Kinnard solely blamed "Southern reluctance toward…

UPDATE, Feb. 7: On Feb. 5, Jake Tapper tweeted that "if you're concerned about things being 'incomplete' maybe consider adding into your post Manchin on same show response to rule." I attempted to find that video, and could not. If it was so important, and in the interest of balance, one would hope it would be part of the CNN video at the web link cited below — and it's not. As Nicholas…

Here's an episode which indicates that many reporters in the establishment press expect the worst from Donald Trump, and can't wait to put it out there when they think they have it. On Friday, when Time Magazine political reporter Zeke Miller didn't immediately see the bust of Martin Luther King in the White House's Oval Office where he expected to see it, his knee-jerk assumption was that it was…

Bloomberg's John Heilemann played up President-Elect Donald Trump's "very monochromatic group" of Cabinet picks so far during a segment on Monday's CBS This Morning. Gayle King underlined how Vice President-Elect Mike Pence stated that Trump "will represent all of the people of the country," and added that "when you look at the picks so far, there are some troubling signs, some say, about lack of…

For the but-tell-us-how-you-really-feel file, this headline on a Friday post by Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum: “Fuck You, James Comey.” The post, of course, centered on the presumed effect on presidential voting of Comey’s October 28 letter which jump-started the Hillary Clinton e-mail story. “When an election is close…there are dozens of people, events, and movements that can make a difference…

Thursday evening, Venezuela's Bolivarian Socialist government arbitrarily suspended the recall effort against "President" Nicolas Maduro, demonstrating beyond any doubt that the South American country now functions as a dictatorship. Given its gravity, this news, described in coverage at the Wall Street Journal as "a crisis of democracy," is not getting the visibility it should be receiving.

The federal government's fiscal year ended on September 30. As has been the administration's habit for years with news that might draw negative attention, the Treasury Department conveniently released its year-end Monthly Budget Review Friday afternoon to minimize the discussion of its grim news.

The latest installment of Stupid Fact Checks involves Politifact, the heavyweight champion of dishonest "fact checkers." The web site's clear mission is to make false leftist claims look credible while discrediting valid statements made by those on the center-right.

As the National Football League's Week 6 went into full swing Sunday, it has become clear that its TV ratings plunge is real, serious, and having a bottom-line impact. At the same time, there's a growing determination in the establishment press to avoid citing the "(Colin) Kaepernick effect" of player protests during the playing of the national anthem as a contributing factor. Recent lengthy…