Wire Services/Media Companies

Friday morning, the government reported that the economy grew at a pathetic annual rate of 0.7 percent in last year's final quarter. As it did in covering the disappointing Christmas shopping season, the business press partially blamed yesterday's awful result on the weather, i.e., warm weather.

This afternoon, Catherine Herridge at Fox News reported that "the intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails 'too damaging' to national security to release under any circumstances." This eighth "smoking gun" — on top of the seven an Investor's Business Daily editorial identified last week — wasn't enough to move the Associated Press Bradley Klapper from the AP's default…

The Associated Press may be down to one person in the whole wide world who will tell its economics reporters what they want to hear when the federal government releases economic data. That's what you almost have to conclude after reading the wire service's reports on two of Thursday's major releases, namely last week's initial unemployment claims and December's durable goods orders and shipments…

The hype machine was in overdrive at the Associated Press on Wednesday as economics reporter Josh Boak covered the government's mid-morning release on new-home sales. Boak opened by writing that "Americans rushed to buy new homes in December at the strongest pace in 10 months." Good heavens, we're talking about only 38,000 individuals or families, or about 0.031 percent of the nation's roughly…

Critics who warned in 2010 that the odious Dodd-Frank law's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would become a rogue agency which would become a largely unaccountable behemoth on a mission to create problems where none exist could not have been more correct. Sadly, searches on terms relevant to one of the agency's latest controversies involving the distribution of funds in a two year-old auto-…

Barely making the Associated Press's top 10 U.S. stories list shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern Time is a story about the arrest and indictment of Samy Mohamed Hamzeh in Milwaukee. With informants posting as co-conspirators, Hamzeh intended to carry out a massacre of "at least 30 people" at "a Masonic temple in Milwaukee," intending to kill "everyone they saw," and to then "walk away from the scene…

Over the past several months, economics reporters at the Associated Press have told us time and time and time again that the U.S. economy is "largely insulated" from adverse economic developments overseas. So why is the AP's Martin Crutsinger going along with the now-shifting conventional "wisdom" that Janet Yellen's Federal Reserve may have to defer implementing additional interest-rate…

On January 26, 2006, former Vice President, current climate alarmist and centimillionaire Al Gore told the Associated Press's David Germain that "unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return." Tuesday, as DC and much of the Northeast finishes digging out from a serious and possibly historic weekend snowstorm,…

These people play the press and the courts like a fiddle. At 2 p.m. Friday — just in time for a slow-news weekend and the onset of what is supposed to be a serious blizzard in the Northeast — the State Department asked a federal court for an extension of time to February 29 to complete its interagency review and release of Hillary Clinton's private-server emails. But State didn't merely use the…

It would appear that the incurably leftist UK Guardian can be tougher on a Democratic Party presidential candidate than the U.S. establishment press. The Guardian, the perch from which Edward Snowden exposed the activities of America's National Security Agency in June 2013, had reporter Adam Gabbatt at Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's Iowa City campaign appearance. The couple of…

When the Associated Press issues a brief unbylined report on an obviously important matter, one's first instinct should always be to ask: "What are they deciding not to tell us?" More often than not, the answer is "Plenty." An example justifying the need to look further appeared this morning when the wire service published a five-paragraph report on inflation in Venezuela's economy:

On December 28, the headline at a conveniently unbylined report at the Associated Press screamed: "HOLIDAY SPENDING UP 8 PERCENT; ONLINE SALES SURGE." As I noted in a post later that day, this was odd, to say the least, given that even the incurably optimistic National Retail Federation had predicted an increase of only 3.7 percent. It turned out that the reported growth rate was based on the…

Poor President Barack Obama. Juan Williams, in a Monday column at The Hill, insists that "the president is not to blame for the rancor and polarization that have characterized his presidency," and "is not responsible for the unprecedented obstructionism employed by (Mitch) McConnell’s Senate Republicans." Why, In Williams's world, Obama has apparently been the very model of civility, while…

On Tuesday, a federal judge who was appointed by President Obama himself ordered the Obama/Lynch Justice Department to turn over documents related to the "Fast and Furious" gunwalking scandal which the administration was claiming were exempt from congressional review because of executive privilege. None of the Big Three broadcast network evening newscasts so much as mentioned the development.