Plight of Long-term Unemployed Rarely Reported in Obama Years, Was Med
A week ago, Associated Press reporters and their articles' headlines described the nation's job market in positive terms. An early a.m. report on Janaury carried this headline: "U.S. job market resilient despite budget fight." Later that same morning, just before the government's release of that day's employment report, there was this: "Jobs report expected to show underlying economic strength…
Wires Ignore Bad News in Raw Unemployment Claims Data
Today's news from the Department of Labor on initial weekly unemployment claims was supposedly good -- as long as one doesn't scratch beneath the surface. Journalists used to do that. Today they didn't.
All one had to do is reach the third paragraph of DOL's release to realize that today's seasonally adjusted claims number of 343,000, touted as the lowest in two months in several news reports…
Confidence Crash Mostly Concealed: AP Barely Notes, Bloomberg Minimize
The first entirely post-election reading from the University of Michigan-Thomson Reuters consumer confidence survey came out on Friday. It was awful. As reported at MarketWatch, the overall index "fell to 74.5 from 82.7 in November," far below expectations of 82.0, representing "the biggest one-month drop since March 2011." Zero Hedge noted that it's the "biggest miss on record" compared to…
Reuters Offers Readers Heavily-Slanted Story on Right-to-Work Bill in
Reuters correspondent Andrea King Collier offered readers a heavily-slanted 27-paragraph story last evening about Michigan Republican lawmakers pushing a right-to-work bill in the state legislature. King Collier quoted only one proponent of the legislation -- Gov. Rick Snyder -- who was described as a "reluctant supporter of the measure," unlike "other Republican governors who have championed…
Not News: Syria's Rebels Want Israel's Destruction Next
In August, President Barack Obama "secretly" authorized support for Syria's rebels. It was so "secret" that Reuters had a story about it. It "broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad."
At the Daily Beast, former Obama administration State Department member P.J. Crowley believes that " Later this year or early next, Washington may…
Fun Facts of the Night in the West Coast Ports Strike
Tonight's fun facts relate to the strike by the group a Reuters report describes as "500 clerical workers at the ports, members of the relatively small Office of Clerical Union Workers" at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The strikers' picket lines have been honored by "some 10,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union."
These fun facts are rarely mentioned, but…
Remembering Some of Those Who Said the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt Was
Reviewing several dispatches from the past couple of days, the latest news out of Egypt is that Egyptian "President" Mohammed Morsi "is not backing down in the showdown over decrees granting him near-absolute powers," that "clashes between the two camps (Morsi's Islamist supporters and secular opponents) ... left two dead and hundreds injured," and that the country's Muslim Brotherhood-…
Reuters Thinks Going From 100% to 35% Tax Rate Will Be a Burden for Cu
Reuters somehow can't recognize a 100% tax rate even when it is right under their noses in their own article. Reporter Marc Frank apparently thinks that going to a 35% tax rate would somehow be more of a burden for Cubans than their current tax rate which is 100%. Frank even wrote about the 100% tax rate but absurdly didn't recognize the fact that total confiscation of revenue is the same thing…
CNN's Cooper Retracts Video of Palestinian Man Faking Injury
On Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, as noted at HonestReporting.com, host Cooper devoted a one-minute segment to informing viewers that his show on Thursday had used footage of a Palestinian man in Gaza who was apparently faking injury for the benefit of cameras. Cooper began his retraction:
What the Business Press Won't Tell Us: Single-Family Home Sales Are St
The Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters all eagerly told readers today that the seasonally adjusted annualized level of single-family home sales in September of 389,000 was the highest in 2-1/2 years and really, really good news for the housing market, the economy as a whole, or both. What they all "somehow" failed to mention was the fact that sales are still far below where they were…
As Others Report WH Knew Nature of Attack, AP Still Insists That the B
At the Associated Press Tuesday evening, the wire service re-posted verbatim Eileen Sullivan's "Why It Matters" report from October 15. One of that report's core assertions is that It "injected the issue of diplomatic security into the presidential campaign and renewed questions about the quality of U.S. intelligence." At my related NewsBusters post that day, I noted that President Obama and…
Fact Checking the Fact-Challenged Obama Auto Bailout Czar
Ex-Barack Obama Administration $82 Billion Auto Bailout Czar Steve Rattner has a bit of a problem telling the truth.
What Rattner does not have is a problem with the Jurassic Press Media calling him on his serial flights of factual fancy.
'Million Muppet March' Story Smelled Fishy, And Is
My initial reaction to the story by Daniel Trotta at Reuters about plans for a "Million Muppet March" in Washington on November 3, the Saturday before Election Day, was that the whole thing doesn't seem as wildly spontaneous, grass roots-driven, and coincidental as presented. It turns out that it isn't. As Lee Cary at TeaParty911.com found (HT Newsalert via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit), the…
Labor Dept. Unemployment Claims Data Incomplete For One 'Large State
UPDATE: Henry Blodget at Business Insider reports that a "source, who is an analyst at the Department, " has told him that "the number of California claims that were not processed totalled about 15,000-25,000."
Today's release of the Department of Labor's weekly unemployment claims report showed 339,000 initial claims filed during the previous week -- a sharp decline of 30,000 from the previous…
