Wire Services/Media Companies

The establishment press's performance in Ferguson has certainly been disgraceful, especially its role in turning one local death into a national obsession. One element of that buildup involves Shawn Parcells, one of two men hired by the family of Michael Brown, the 18 year-old man who was killed in an altercation with Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in early August, to look into his death…

Lisa Bloom describes herself as a "Fighter for justice at my law firm, The Bloom Firm," and is "legal analyst for NBC News & Avvo." NBC and Avvo should seriously reconsider their relationships with Ms. Bloom. In a series of tweets on Tuesday, she seethed over the grand jury's failure to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, she's been…

To grievance-mongers in the fever swamp, Trayvon Martin will always be a cute little kid who had just bought Skittles and iced tea, and then got shot by a bloodthirsty racist on neighborhood watch. The truth — that Martin bought Skittles and AriZona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail, two of the three key ingredients in a mind-altering, dangerous concoction known as "lean," and that Martin's autopsy…

In a Tuesday column originally appearing at RealClearMarkets.com (found in more readable form at Economics21.org), the Manhattan Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth tore into the hypocrites at OUR Walmart, the union-backed effort to intimidate the nation's largest retailer into paying all employees at least $15 per hour. In the process, Furchtgott-Roth noted a particularly important fact which I…

It's amazing how any reporter can cover the deepening economic crisis in Venezuela without saying a word about how the country got there. But Associated Press reporter Hannah Dreier was up to the task. In a bizarre, sickening November 20 report on how its people are having to get "creative" in the face of chronic shortages of basic goods to get by, she acted as if those shortages — and the over…

An Associated Press story late this afternoon has New York Senator Chuck Schumer saying the darnedest things, with only a tiny bit of pushback from reporter Charles Babington. In the wake of a midterm election rout which saw Republicans win at least eight Senate seats, increase their House majority, and take gubernatorial races in at least three deep blue states (MD, MA, and IL), Schumer now…

It looks like the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is choosing to become an active participant in the covering for the failure by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to carry out his most basic duty as the state's chief executive in a timely fashion. The AP's unbylined three-paragraph report published at 2:12 PM ET this afternoon acts as if the Guard had a meaningful presence in…

While it is indeed nice that the Associated Press did a fact check on President Obama's Thursday night immigration address — an item P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters covered on Saturday — it would have been even nicer if the wire service better described as the Administration's Press had fact-checked Julie Pace's and Josh Lederman's awful Friday evening backgrounder on the speech. The AP pair couldn…

As of 5:30 p.m. ET today, a search on "Koningstein" at the Associated Press's national web site returned no results. That's an indication that the wire service's globaloney-believing pseudo-science reporters are still trying to figure out how to respond to a November 18 article in the IEEE Spectrum by Ross Koningstein & David Fork, a pair of Google engineers tasked by the company in 2007 to…

Even if you like your Obamacare insurance plan, Health and Human Services may move you by default into a different one — often with a different network of providers. In such situations, you wouldn't get to keep your doctors and other providers unless you acted. That's what HHS's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Service has indicated in a 300-page proposal dumped yesterday so it would get minimal…

Old habits die hard at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press — especially when those old habits help Dear Leader's regime look better, or less awful, than it deserves. It's been eight days, but it's still worth a look. On November 13, the government released its Monthly Treasury Statement for October, showing that Uncle Sam ran a $122 billion deficit. In his coverage of that…

Brett M. Decker is a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors and "consulting director at the White House Writers Group." Early this evening, he effectively did double duty for the paper, both as a columnist and a journalist. Decker appears to be the first person to report visibly in a national publication that "influential gay rights advocate and top Obama donor" Terry Bean was arrested on…

Today at the Assocated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Martin Crustsinger covered the Census Bureau's report on new home construction in the usual way. Regardless of whether a given month shows improving or declining data, the wire service's overall message is almost invariably, "Things are really getting better. No, really." The sentence promoting that point of view in Crutsinger's…