Blog: Beat the Press

Today is the last day that Beat the Press will be appearing on The American Prospect’s website. You’ll have to go to Beat the Press’ new home page (or new RSS feed) from now on to read it. Thanks again to TAP for hosting BTP and exposing it to its well-informed and thoughtful readership over […]

That might have been a good question for reporters to address when they reported on the February trade data released yesterday. The data showed that royalties and licensing fees had increased by $883 million from January, a rise of more than 40 percent. This has occasionally happened in prior months and presumably reflects one-time payments […]

That’s effectively what the Washington Post told readers in another front page editorial highlighting the need for deficit reduction. The article said: “But by suggesting the deficit may have peaked, administration officials are taking a political gamble. If the favorable number does not hold up in coming months and the budget shortfall surpasses the $1.4 […]

A new Pew poll of reporters and editors found a great deal of pessimism about the prospects for the newspaper industry. At one point, the article reports the poll’s finding that: “about three-quarters of the editors who took part said they would have serious objections to accepting direct support from either the government or interest […]

In an article reporting on the debate over extending unemployment insurance benefits the Washington Post told readers: “on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned that growing budget deficits imperiled the economy’s long-term stability.” It is worth noting that in his capacity as a Federal Reserve Board governor from 2002 to 2005, chief economic […]

Paul Krugman asks in his column this morning why Texas managed to largely escape the worst of the housing bubble while Georgia leads the country in the number of failed banks. Both are states in which the major cities have relatively few zoning restrictions or natural barriers, which allows for easy sprawl to meet new […]

Those are the questions that readers of the WAPO’s Sunday Outlook section must be asking. The Post told readers that: “this year, China’s economy is expected to produce about $5 trillion in goods and services. That would put it ahead of Japan as the world’s second-biggest national economy, but it would still be barely one-third […]

The NYT notes that interest rates have recently risen and are generally predicted to continue to rise. It then told readers: “That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession.” Okay, what are they smoking […]

This would have been a better headline for the Washington Post article on the testimony before the crisis commission of Fannie’s former chief executive as well its top regulator. The discussion before the commission was apparently whether Fannie and Freddie were motivated by profit when they moved into Alt-A mortgages in 2005 and 2006 or […]

We need reporters to do this? In the course of the report NPR assured listeners that there was nothing that could be done about AIG’s explosive issuance of credit default swaps (CDS) because it was an insurance company that operates in hundreds of countries. And furthermore, the federal government doesn’t even regulate insurance, states do. […]