Reuters

On Thursday, the Census Bureau's report on May retail sales said that seasonally adjusted sales came in 1.2 percent higher than April. The press almost universally cited that result as demonstrating that the economy's rough patch earlier this year is likely over. Yours truly and the contrarians at Zero Hedge both noted that the result is highly suspect, and doesn't adequately reflect the raw…

Will Deener, who has been a business reporter since at least before the turn of the century, considers his most unforgettable experience on the job to be "Covering the crash of the Internet stocks and Enron in 2000-2002." Sunday evening, the Dallas Morning News columnist moaned about how big U.S. companies engaged in real businesses are avoiding paying billions in taxes because "the nation’s…

The business press has gotten really excited about the possibility — some of them are even treating it as a probability — that the first-quarter's recently reported annualized economic contraction of 0.7 percent will go positive if it gets revised for so-called "residual seasonality." "Residual seasonality" is "the manifestation of seasonal patterns in data that have already been seasonally…

This morning's April factory orders report from the Census Bureau showed yet another seasonally adjusted decline. This time, they fell 0.4 percent, seriously underperforming expectations that they would come in flat. This naturally brought forth another sighting of the U-word ("unexpectedly"), this time at Reuters. Both Reuters and the Associated Press failed to note how steep the year-over-year…

This has to go down as one of the most idiotic comparisons of all time.  On Sunday, Reuters posted a story trying to link the Texas biker gang shootings to the peaceful patriotic bikers making their way to the Rolling Thunder event held in Washington D.C., as they have done each Memorial Day weekend since 1988. The story headline reads, “Thousands of bikers gather in Washington to honor vets.” …

Maurice Tamman at Reuters put spin on the latest Reuters poll in a blog headlined “Fake newscaster, real credibility: Jon Stewart stands at the peak of American punditry poll.” Tamman reported: "As Jon Stewart winds down his 19-year stint as host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, he and Stephen Colbert sit at the peak of American punditry despite their left-leaning view of life, the universe…

It appears that someone might need to schedule an intervention with the Associated Press's economics writers. In his dispatch published a half-hour after the government's March release on international trade at 8:30 this morning, the wire service's Martin Crutsinger quoted a normally upbeat economist who was singing the blues about the result's effect on previously reported first-quarter…

Japan just reported yet another awful retail sales result. Though it far exceeeded predictions of a 7.3 percent fall, the 9.7 percent March 2015 plunge compared to March 2014 doesn't reveal much, as March 2014 saw a splurge at the stores ahead of a steep sales tax increase which took effect on April 1. The really telling figure is the 1.9 percent seasonally adjusted dive compared to February.…

A Reuters report published late Saturday evening ("Obama meets Venezuela's Maduro at time of high tensions") is astonishing for what it ignores. The unbylined report from Panama City opens by referring to how "the United States recently placed sanctions on Venezuela." Indeed, President Barack Obama did just that in an executive order on March 9, stating that he was "declaring a national…

Reuters announced its latest poll results on Monday: “Republicans see Obama as more imminent threat than Putin.” Republican views were deemed the most newsworthy ones, because they sound vaguely unpatriotic about the president. Reporter Roberta Rampton began: “A third of Republicans believe President Barack Obama poses an imminent threat to the United States, outranking concerns about Russian…

On Thursday night and Friday morning, the major broadcast networks neglected to cover a new poll from Reuters/Ipos showing support for likely Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton slipping among Democrats following the e-mail scandal as a majority of voters expressed support for an independent review of all her e-mails as well as the belief that she hasn’t entirely honest in her…

How low does left-wing hate-tank Southern Poverty Law Center have to go before the media stop sharing its “studies” as if they had objective merit?  Even though the activist group uses easily disproven, bogus stats and a “hate map” that has inspired a potential mass murder at the Family Research Council in 2012, the media continue to cite them as a legitimate and neutral source.

On Friday, the government reported that the nation's economy, as measured in its real gross domestic product, grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent during last year's final quarter, sharply trailing analysts' consensus predictions ranging from 3.0 percent to 3.6 percent. As is the case after the first version of every GDP report, economy watchers have been trying to estimate the effect other…

None of the Big Three networks' evening newscasts on Friday covered the shooting of an American citizen in eastern Saudi Arabia earlier in the day. A Friday item by Reuters reported that "a vehicle carrying two U.S. citizens came under fire in the Eastern Province district of al-Ahsa, one of the main centers of Saudi Arabia's minority Shi'ites."