July New Home Sales: Wire Reports Dour, But Still Understated; Reuters
July's bad news in new home sales is even worse than it first appears. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of 276,000 units is bad enough. That is an all-time low since records have been kept and 12% lower than June's annual rate. It's also lower than what analysts predicted by about the same percentage. The lazy business press is running with those figures. But, as has been the case so many…
Reporters Visiting WH for Off-the-Record Lunch Work For Pubs That Dema
File the news in this report filed late yesterday afternoon by Michael Calderone and John Cook at Yahoo's Upshot Blog under "D" for Double Standards: White House reporters mum on Obama lunch, even as papers back transparency White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who've advocated in the past for the…
Wire Watch: Rostenkowski Name That Party Round-up (See Update
Wednesday evening, Brent Baker at NewsBusters noted that two of the Big Three television networks failed to tag Dan Rostenkowsi, the former long-time congressman from Chicago who was ousted from his seat in 1994 over corruption charges and ended doing prison time, as a Democrat. Rostenkowski (RIP), who was 82, died yesterday. At the five major wire services whose reports I reviewed -- The…
In 'Context': Two June Housing Stats Are Worst For Any June Since Such
Thanks to Shirley Sherrod, Andrew Breitbart, and the NAACP, political journalists have supposedly discovered the importance of "context" (though they strangely seem to lost interest once fuller context items like this and this became known). It would be helpful if such an interest in full context would legitimately and consistently spread to business reporting. Full context would include looking…
Name That Party: Bell, California Edition
This is almost too obvious. Many readers may already be familiar with recent exposure of the treasury plunderers disguised as public officials serving up hefty salaries to themselves while allegedly serving their constituents in the LA suburb of Bell, California. Here's some of the latest from the Associated Press, carried at the Los Angeles Times, which broke the original story, for those who…
Reuters: Racist Images ‘Often Displayed at Tea Party Rallies
(Update: Reuters quietly improves statement by eliminating the word 'often'. Thank you Reuters, for being forthright in the error, er, slipping this in, in the hopes that your readers won't notice. We're certain that all of the Tea Party Patriots being wrongfully portrayed as racist appreciate the effort.) Reuters recently ran a piece that analyzed persistent race issues amidst the Obama…
Reuters Editor Thinks Financial Regulation 'Still a Very Feudal' Syste
Chrystia Freeland, global editor-at-large for Reuters, believes the new financial regulations are still pretty loose."It is still a very feudal, very Byzantine regulatory system," Freeland complained on the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, referring to the Senate's approval of a financial regulations bill yesterday.A radical policy, Freeland maintained, could have done away with the current "…
WaPo Finally Runs Story on NASA Administrator Bolden: Eight Paragraphs
In a June 30 interview with "Talk to Al Jazeera," NASA administrator Charles Bolden revealed that President Obama had tasked him with "find[ing] a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering."The media largely ignored the story, with a few exceptions, such as…
Investigation Clears Israeli Commandos of Wrongdoing; AP, WaPo Focus o
The Israeli commandos who intercepted a flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip on May 31 were cleared of wrongdoing by a military inquiry into the matter. The same panel faulted the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for "mistakes that were made in decisions, including some taken at relatively high levels," according to retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland. While we at NewsBusters have taken Reuters…
AP Breaking: Supremes' Ruling 'Casts Doubt' on Chicago Handgun Ban
Lord have mercy, even when it hits him in the face, the Associated Press's Mark Sherman won't concede the obvious: "Cast doubt"? Is that what court rulings do now? A USA Today item has it right:
Media: GOP Blocked Unemployment Bill to Hurt Economy Before Midterm El
On Thursday, a new unemployment bill died in Congress as Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) joined Republicans on the grounds that government spending can't go on forever. Instead of reporting both sides, the media couldn't seem to hide their anger. The bill was called a "jobless aid" package that "governors were counting on" to help "the poor" across the nation. Almost all news reports began from the…
Revolutionary Rot, But News It's Not: AP Ignores Venezuela's 'Battle f
Late last year, a story carried by the wire service AFP reported on an announcement by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez that his government would launch "a new chain of government-run, cut-rate retail stores that will sell everything from food to cars to clothing." Chavez reportedly said that these "discount socialist stores" would show people "what a real market is all about, not those speculative, money…
Media Continue War against BPA; Claim It Causes 'All Sorts' of Health
Toys, food, packaging. Chemicals are in them all. The media make a living by sensationalizing the potential dangers of just about everything in our modern world. Bisphenol-A (BPA), a chemical found in many plastic items, was no exception. The news media have been scaremongering about BPA for years, even going so far as to compare it to tobacco at one point, but a cautious tone from the…
Media Tout CBO Stimulus Numbers, Ignore Their Disconnect From Reality
Update - 5/27, 3:08 PM | Lachlan Markay: A new Harvard study finds that increased government spending actually reduces economic activity, contradicting the basic premise behind CBO's assumptions. Details below. Good economic news is so rare for the current administration, that when some does emerge, many in the media parrot it as fact without really examining the claims that undergird it. New CBO…
