Wall Street Journal

Thanks to ObamaCare, about two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see a spike in their health insurance premiums. Reaction at ABC, CBS and NBC to this devastating news for employees across the nation? A big fat yawn. No one at the Big Three networks have reported on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report, issued on Friday, that anticipates 65 percent…

According to a report by Tim Cavanaugh, news editor of National Review Online, the Federal Communications Commission “has pulled the plug on its plan to conduct an intrusive probe of newsrooms” as part of a “Critical Information Needs” survey of local media markets. FCC spokesperson Shannon Gilson issued a news release that indicated in the course of the commission's review and public comment…

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik was given the chance to promote his book “Murdoch’s World” in an interview for the latest edition of The Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists. He tried the usual line that Rupert Murdoch deserved a whole book on his scandals because he’s so “unique.” (Read: somewhat conservative tycoon in a liberal media.) Folkenflik said he was…

The liberal media have made much of a recent United Nations committee report insisting that the Vatican needs to ditch centuries of orthodox Christian doctrine as part of its effort to combat child sex abuse. But as Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies noted yesterday in an op-ed published February 10 in the Wall Street Journal, the UN has been curiously quiet about…

With rapidly rising debt and an unprecedented credit downgrade, Puerto Rico is facing a looming default with terrifying implications on American bond markets, though you would never know about it watching broadcast news. The leading credit rating firm Standard & Poor’s Rating services downgraded Puerto Rican debt to “junk” status on Feb. 5, with further downgrades likely. Despite Puerto…

On Saturday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted how the New York Times had made a critical change to a story about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's possible knowledge of lane closures in the area of the George Washington Bridge. The initial story was that a Port Authority official "has evidence" in the matter. A short time later, that claim was watered down to a far more speculative "…

After opening the day at about the same level as Friday's close, the three major U.S. stock indices fell by over 2 percent Monday (DJIA, -2.08%; S&P 500, -2.28%; NASDAQ, -2.61%). About half of the rout took place in the first 30 minutes after the 10:00 a.m. release of two reports, one on manufacturing activity and the other on construction spending. The former, from the Institute for…

You really have to listen to Mika Brzezinski's voice rising as if in a question as she pronounces the very last word in an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal column—and watch the expression on her face—to appreciate how utterly baffled, befuddled and bewildered she seems by the simple notion that increasing the cost of hiring motivates employers to automate their operations. The column, "The…

A search at the national web site of the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, on the name of Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker (not in quotes) returns only two recent relevant items. One relates to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, where Walker is described as saying, in AP's words, "that (last week) he didn't know enough about the situation to comment ... (and) has…

On Tuesday a federal appeals court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) overstepped its legal authority in 2010 when it imposed so-called net neutrality regulations on broadband companies -- cable and fiber-optic Internet providers like Comcast or Verizon FiOS. The FCC had done this despite language in federal law which forbade the regulations under a "common carrier"…

While trying to win elections, the Democratic strategy is often perceived as combining several minorities -- including African-Americans, feminists, global warming alarmists and members of labor unions -- to pull together a winning total over Republicans, who usually try to draw more than 50 percent of the general population, a strategy that has often been hammered by liberals and members of…

The Obama administration today revealed that more than half of the sign-ups for ObamaCare are aged 45 and older, hardly the sort of young, healthy insurance pool the White House was hoping for. On their websites, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and New York Times all focused on the older/sicker skew of the Healthcare.gov signups. The Washington Post, however, tried to accentuate the…

Print, broadcast or web, the media sure aren’t Nostradamus. In spite of their best attempts, the news media have gotten it wrong prediction after prediction on a wide range of business and economic issues in 2013. Just in the past year, reporters warned of “economic doomsday,” thought Healthcare.gov was going to be “easy” just like Amazon.com, and warned of melting polar ice, even as a new…

Earlier this morning, Joe Newby at NewsBusters posted on the Denver Post's scrubbing of the word "socialist" from a fellow student's description of Karl Pierson, who police say shot two other students and then took his own life at Arapahoe High School on Friday. The Post story originally said that classmate Thomas Conrad described him as "a very opinionated Socialist." Sometime later, the Post…