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A January 24 item in the East Bay Times, which serves the San Francisco East Bay area, wondered: "What’s behind the spate of recent restaurant closures?" While it didn't ignore the problem, the article made only glancing references to current and planned increases in state and city minimum wages. Preliminary year-end statistics at the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Bay…

All that "non-partisan" posturing, and they couldn't even get CNN to buy it. On Friday, CNN presented a segment on the 44th annual March for Life before it began. The press usually ignores the march's existence until after it has taken place, typically barely recognizes it afterwards, and almost invariably insists on describing crowd sizes which have often been in the hundreds of thousands as…

One of the more revealing side effects of the 2016 presidential campaign, and especially the November election, is how old-line liberal publications which once had at least a veneer of respectability have completely gone off the deep end. Readers have come to expect completely unhinged, error-ridden material to routinely appear at places like Salon.com. But at the Atlantic? Beyond occasional…

In a late Wednesday afternoon NewsBusters post, I commented on the extraordinary hostility reporters at the Associated Press exhibited towards Donald Trump and his administration during their first two full business days in power. In that post, I wondered if they might be carrying a childish grudge over not being able to ask the first question at Press Secretary Sean Spicer's briefings, as they…

Tuesday afternoon, the Washington Examiner broke the story of a Secret Service agent who, in October on Facebook, declared her unwillingness to put her life on the line for a potential President Donald Trump. At that point, Kelly O'Grady, the special agent in charge for the Denver district, decided to become a selective Service agent, writing, per the Examiner, that "she would endure jail time'…

Since last decade, it's been White House tradition that the press secretary typically calls on an Associated Press reporter to ask the first question at briefings. Trump administration Press Secretary Sean Spicer has not selected AP for the first question at either of his first two briefings, and numerous press outlets have noted that avoidance. It's more than fair to ask, given the tone of the…

The New York Times reported Monday afternoon that NBC has suspended Saturday Night Live writer Katie Rich indefinitely for tweeting ... well, what? Reporter Dave Itzkoff failed to tell readers what Rich tweeted just minutes after Donald Trump was inaugurated as the nation's 45th President on Friday. Instead, he vaguely described it as "a widely criticized post she made Friday on her personal…

CNN's David Gergen and Martha Pease gushed over the anti-Donald Trump Women's March in a Sunday op-ed for the news network's website: "It was certainly a magic moment -- hundreds of thousands of women pouring hour after hour into the Mall in Washington." Gergen and Pease contended that "Trump may have done something that...even Barack Obama could not do: spark the creation of a progressive…

On CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 on Saturday, Bakari Sellers described Saturday's "Women's March" as "something we haven't seen in this country or around this world in a very long time." Concerned Women for America CEO Penny Nance then pointed out the obvious, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned, which is that the Annual March for Life in Washington has routinely drawn crowds in the hundreds of…

At 6:55 a.m. on Sunday, Angie Goff of NBC4 in Washington, whose Twitter handle is @OhMyGOFF, tweeted, "JUST IN: The White House releases statement ..." on Saturday's "Women's Marches" in Washington and elsewhere. Goff attached the alleged "White House" statement. 2-1/2 hours later, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tweeted that "The White House has not issued a statement." Good grief.

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…

On Tuesday, Kyle Pope, Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, posted "An open letter to Trump from the US press corps." Pope informed Mr. Trump, as if the man who is now this nation's 45th President didn't know already, that "while you have every right to decide your ground rules for engaging with the press, we have some, too."

During MSNBC's Friday coverage of the inauguration, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow played up a report from the Huffington Post claiming that President Trump's transition team requested military hardware for the inaugural parade. Matthews wondered, "Wouldn't that look like a little shades of Pyongyang?" Maddow added, "It would be a little Red Square to do that." Minutes later, Maddow revisited…

An attempt by the Associated Press to smear Tom Price, nominated by Donald Trump as the next HHS Secretary, began Wednesday after the opening round of a Senate committee hearing. As of this writing, the wire service is up to its third such entry. The misleading reporting and hostility have increased with each dispatch.