Google

Last time it was your refrigerator's ice maker, and we wondered what the media would come with next. They have outdone themselves. The latest climate culprit: Internet search engines. The Vancouver Sun calculated in an article last week that each search engine submission emits a minuscule one to 10 grams of carbon dioxide via a small amount of electricity usage. Add up the hundreds of…

Earlier today, NB's Tim Graham noted that the establishment press has given the silent treatment to a study by Timothy Conley of the University of Western Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State University showing that the stimulus plan passed in February 2009 was a major net economic loser. In the first paragraph of the study, the authors revealed their core estimate that  the American Recovery…

Yesterday evening (late afternoon West Coast time), Phil Bronstein at the San Francisco Chronicle informed his readers that one of its reporters had been banned by the Obama administration: The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.   White House officials have banished one of the best…

University of Virginia media professor Siva Vaidhyanathan on Sunday said the Huffington Post is a bigger threat to journalism than Google. Such occurred during a discussion about the internet behemoth on CNN's "Reliable Sources" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The fate of former Luzerne County, Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciavarella is in the hands of a jury tonight. After an initial media slip-up that occurred and was quickly "corrected" when he and a fellow judge were indicted two years ago ("Un-Name That Party" proof here), Ciavarella's party affiliation (Democrat, natch) has gone virtually unmentioned. One such non-party-identifying example (…

Here's a little something I stumbled across today while looking through my Google Calendar settings. I subscribe to Google's "US Holidays" calendar, which adds to my personal calendar tags for U.S. federal holidays as well as some major non-federal religious or cultural holidays like Easter and Groundhog Day respectively.

When the legislators and good-government people who drafted the law requiring the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit and render an opinion on the financial statements of the federal government as a whole and the major departments within it, they must have known that early-year results would not be very pleasant. But I also suspect that they thought the shame of being exposed as…

A funny thing happened on the way to finding yet another year of media emphasis on the use of "holiday" vs. "Christmas" in describing the shopping season. Google News searches conducted this morning at about 7:30 ET on "Christmas shopping season" and "holiday shopping season" came back with the highest percentage of "Christmas" results I've seen in the six years I've been doing these searches…

There are many areas where the establishment press's terminology preferences are significantly out of sync with everyday usage by the general public. To name just two examples, the ever so PC press routinely replaces publicly favored and more informative terms such as "illegal immigrants" and "Muslim terrorists" with "undocumented workers" and "militants." And of course, we can't forget the…

Shortly after the Labor Department announced a very disappointing jump in the unemployment rate to 9.8 percent, Google News featured as its top story an Associated Press article published Thursday predicting "the tight job market may be easing at last." Here's a screen cap of Google News from about an hour ago:

This is the sixth year I have looked into how the media treats these two topics: The use of "Christmas shopping season" vs. "holiday shopping season," and the frequency of Christmas and holiday layoff references. I have done three sets of simple Google News searches each year -- the first in late November, followed by identical searches roughly two and four weeks later. A graphic containing…

Hours after Bloomberg News revealed Google's billion dollar scheme to avoid corporate taxes, President Obama spoke at a Democrat fundraiser held at the home of one of the Internet giant's executives. From what I can tell, only the Washington Examiner's Byron York thought the timing of this event was at all odd (h/t Seton Motley):

Here's a delightful little story from the Sept./Oct. issue of Mother Jones, the far-left political magazine. It's called "Rick Santorum's Anal Sex Problem," and, with its helpful creative artwork, it's not something you want to read over lunch. Thanks to the efforts of a vindictive liberal writer, anyone Googling conservative former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is fairly likely to get an…

The theater of the Sherrods continues. Earlier today, Shirley Sherrod, who, according to the current version of ruling class wisdom, was prematurely evacuated from the USDA by Director Tom Vilsack, decided not to accept an offer to return to the agency. Instead, according to Politico's Matt Negrin, "she hasn’t accepted the department’s offer to work there again, but that she wants 'some type of…