Blog: Beat the Press

It is not the job of reporters to just report what partisans to debates say about events. The vast majority of readers do not have the time and background to assess competing claims. When one party says something that is not true, the news is that this person is lying, not their lie. Therefore when […]

NPR gave us classic financial markets as sports event reporting this morning, pointing out how the markets moved on the words spoken by Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke. The correct response to these moment by moment movements should be: “who gives a damn?” There are a small number of rich speculators who stand to […]

The number of unemployment claims filed last week jumped by 22,000 from the prior week. USA Today told readers that analysts expected that claims would fall by 19,000. It is hard to understand why anyone who analyzes economic data for a living would have expected unemployment claims to fall from the prior week. In that […]

The headline of a Washington Post article told readers: “Economists surprised as new-home sales fall to lowest level in nearly 50 years.” The first sentence explained: “sales of newly built homes unexpectedly plummeted in January to their lowest level in nearly five decades, providing more evidence of the housing market’s fragility.” Actually, economists who understand […]

The WSJ told readers that Democratic senators claimed that the employment tax credit in a job bill passed by the Senate would create 1.3 million jobs. It then added: “but some independent economists said they expected it would have less impact than that.” It would be surprising if any independent economists believed the tax credit […]

The NYT had another blogpost complaining that the government pays more money to rich investment bankers like Peter Peterson than it does to poor children. Actually, the column didn’t mention how much money rich investment bankers get from the government in the form of interest payments on the government bonds that most of them hold, […]

Some folks at the NYT seem to think so. The paper published a blogpost telling readers: “Mr. Obama has directed the commission to recommend by Dec. 1 how to balance the budget by the fiscal year 2015, not counting interest payments on the debt, as well as to propose long-term changes in revenues and entitlement […]

The Obama administration has proposed a new program that would give $30 billion to banks at below market interest rates. The Post briefly discusses the merits of this program, noting that many businesses are not borrowing because they don’t have demand for their product, however the article does not include the views of anyone who […]

The headline told readers that: “Thailand GDP Grows 3.6% in the Fourth Quarter.” How many readers knew that Thailand’s economy had grown at an impressive 15.2 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter? Yes, the NYT once again reported a quarterly rate of growth. It is unlikely that many readers recognized that this was a […]

Except the NYT headline said the opposite: “President of San Francisco Fed Sees Slow Recovery, Especially in Jobs.” According to the article, Janet Yellen, the President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, expects that the unemployment rate will fall to around 8.0 percent by the end of 2011. By contrast, both the Obama administration […]