Jobs Lost in Best Buy HQ Layoffs, Store Closures: Several Thousand, No
From what I can tell, no one in the establishment press yesterday attempted to quantify the total employment impact of yesterday's announcement by Best Buy that it will reduce its headquarters headcount by 400 and close 50 stores. One thing is certain: It's not just 400, as the headlines and verbiage in certain media reports might lead readers to believe -- and it's not excusable to say that…
DOL's Seasonal Initial Jobless Claims Revisions Increase Past 4 Weeks
Earlier this year, a reporter informed me of what is apparently a common belief in the business press, namely that "the Labor Department considers the (seasonally adjusted, or SA) numbers to be much more reflective of what’s actually going on in the economy" than the raw (i.e., not seasonally adjusted, or NSA) economic data. That's interesting, given that you can't even do seasonal adjustments…
Memo to All AP Propagandists: It's Okay to Call It 'ObamaCare' Now
Apparently most reporters at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Propagandists, lost the memo that Reuters got ("Obama Campaign: Obamacare Not a Bad Word After All"). Either that, or they haven't been paying attention their Obama For America emails.
OFA and President Obama himself both say it's now okay to call the fraudulently named Affordable Care Act which became law in March…
Wires Trumpet Unemployment Claims As Tying '4-Year Low'; Historical Ch
The exercise of watching the press report on the current week's unemployment claims figure as if it's etched in stone and assessing it as if it's the last word -- only to see the figure get upwardly revised the next week virtually without media comment -- is getting extraordinarily tedious and predictable (but of course watching what they do remains necessary).
At the Associated Press,…
More Grading on the Curve: At RTT, Acceptable Weekly Unemployment Clai
The Department of Labor reported today that initial claims for unemployment benefits increased to 362,000 from an upwardly revised (as usual) 354,000 the previous week. Expectations were for a reading of 351,000 (Business Insider's email) or 352,000 (Bloomberg).
Over at the Associated Press, also known as the Administration's Press, the headlined reaction in its 9:17 a.m. report was: "…
AP's Boring Borenstein: Gleick's Heartland Doc Theft 'Mirrors' Climate
On Thursday, over 40 hours after the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick (pictured here) revealed that he stole documents from the Heartland Institute by posing as one of that organization's board members, Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press finally broke the ice and filed a related three-paragraph "this is boring, you don't need to read it" dispatch. Two hours later, the AP science writer…
Name That Party: Reuters, AP Fail to Tag Ray Nagin, Under Federal Inve
Maybe there's some unwritten guideline in the press relating to when a politician who is no longer holding office doesn't have to have his party label applied if he gets into some kind of trouble -- even if that trouble is related to when he was in office.
The suspicion here is that the rule only applies to past Democratic Party officeholders, and that the guideline period is unduly short. A…
Biz News Wire Reuters Spins Passage of Ind. Right-to-Work Bill with Li
The passage of "controversial" right-to-work legislation in Indiana is a "blow to organized labor." That's the spin by Reuters reporter Susan Guyett, who front-loaded her coverage of the bill's passage by focusing on anger from liberals and labor unions over the new legislation (emphases mine):
Reuters Touts Pro-Abortion Study in One-Sided Article
The day after the March for Life, a one-sided article from Reuters touted the safety of abortion, claiming that getting an abortion was much safer for women than giving birth.
But Reuters failed to include vital information about the study and the people it quoted - namely, that the authors of the study and both of the experts it cited were either abortion doctors or had strong ties to the…
Beware False Claims: 'Romney's Tax Rate Is Below That of Most Wage-Ear
Now that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has released some of his recent tax returns, it is quite clear that the Obama-loving media are going to use the information against the former Massachusetts governor in any way they can.
Take for example the wire service Reuters who was quick out of the gate early Tuesday morning with the following bogus report (emphasis added):
Reuters: Gingrich 'Canceled Appearance,' Showing He May Not Be 'Discip
In the final three paragraphs of a report that was primarily about Mitt Romney trying to lower expectations concerning the results of tomorrow's South Carolina Primary voting, Steve Holland of Reuters told readers that Newt Gingrich canceled an appearance.
Holland then used that appearance as an opportunity to build on a meme the press has been working on for some time about the former…
Press Virtually Ignores Upheld Holy Land Foundation/Hamas Funding Verd
On Wednesday, as Terry Baynes at Reuters reported, "A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld the convictions of five leaders of an Islamic charity on charges of funneling money and supplies to Hamas, designated a "terrorist" group following a 1995 executive order by President Bill Clinton. ..." The organization involved was the Holy Land Foundation based in Texas. The five involved received…
AP Kept Blago's Party ID Out of Three Pre-Sentencing Stories on Tuesda
Wednesday afternoon, Matthew Balan at NewsBusters noted that two of the three network morning shows failed to mention disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's Democratic Party affiliation.
Not that it's an excuse, but what was probably their primary raw material, namely three Tuesday reports from the Associated Press, completely failed to tag Blago as a Democrat, specifically the…
Wesley Smith Notes Pro-Embryonic, Anti-Adult Stem Cell Research Bias i
On November 15 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I compared how two of the leading wire services, Reuters and the Associated Press, covered the announcement by Geron Corp. of its decision to halt the first government-approved clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells. Reuters fairly noted that "teams working with adult stem cells -- a less ambitious area -- are making good progress." While…
