U.S. News has a story posted April 28 by Kent Garber titled “In Climate Change Debate, It’s All About Jobs: Many in Congress worry about the economic impact of curbing emissions”. The story repeats the Environmental Protection Agency’s remarkably low expected cost per household from draft “global warming” legislation, despite the fact that the bill actually provides no specifics to use in any such assessment. Key details missing include how industry would obtain emission “allowances” (for free, or sold by the federal government), what sort of “offsets” would qualify, or how much (if any) consumers would receive in energy … Continue Reading

Reporting on President Obama’s speech at the National Academy of Sciences on April 27th, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times accurately reported the administration’s proposals for new federal spending on science, technology and STEM education programs:

The president laid out an ambitious plan to invigorate the country’s pipeline for innovation, from grade-school classrooms to corporate, government and academic research laboratories.
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He provided fresh detail on an initiative, already included in the economics stimulus bill, creating a $5 billion “Race to the Top” fund available to states doing the most to increase the ranks of trained science and math teachers. Mr.

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The Denver Post’s Tim Hoover and Jennifer Brown have done a disservice to their readers with their weakly reported April 22 story “Federal funds will help enroll more people in Medicaid.”

First, the Post reports that a new hospital fee “would be matched by an equal amount of federal funding.” Simply false. The fiscal note done by the Colorado legislature shows the fee will raise $629,365,211 compared to $508,827,172 in federal funds. Do Brown and Hoover wish to pay to make up that more than $100,000,000 gap?

Second, the Post claims “the bill says hospitals can’t explicitly pass the fees … Continue Reading

Happy Equal Pay Day! According to much of the mainstream media, this is the day that women have finally earned enough money to make up for last year’s wage gap. The press regularly repeats the misleading statistic as evidence that women suffer from systematic discrimination in the workplace when reporting on workplace issues or potential government legislation. Yet this Cleveland Plain Dealer article by Janet Cho is particularly one-side and misleading.

The first line offers readers a tremendously inaccurate picture of what this statistic—and the feminist-manufactured holiday—of women’s experience in the workplace: “Tuesday is Equal Pay … Continue Reading

In the New York Times week in review published on April 25, 2009, William Broad long-time science writer for the paper discusses the debate over the effectiveness of the North Korean missile launch on April 5. The article purports to represent the state of debate on North Korea missile developments. The analysis ignores basic facts known about the test.

In a recent public address, Lieutenant General Patrick O Reilly, director of the Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency stated that the most recent analysis of the North Korean flight indicates that the first and second stage … Continue Reading

Tuesday April 28 is the feminist invented pseudo holiday, “Equal Pay Day,” so prepare yourself for a rash of misleading articles about systemic workforce discrimination against women. One such article was already released by the Associated Press on April 23, in anticipation of an event being today to mark the occasion.

As almost all of these articles do, it parrots Equal Pay Day planners press releases without providing readers with almost any context or critical analysis:

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney will join cultural and civic leaders to mark Equal Pay Day on Friday and push for passage of the state’s

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An April 21 BBC article, “‘Quiet Sun’ baffling astronomers”, by Pallab Ghosh tries to blame the sun for the fact that doom-saying computer modelers haven’t been able to predict the past 15 years of no warming and a decade of cooling. The article begins:

The Sun is the dimmest it has been for nearly a century.

There are no sunspots, very few solar flares - and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time.
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Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a

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On April 20, Politico posted a softball interview by Patrick Gavin with outgoing National Organization for Women (NOW), president Kim Gandy. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with having light interviews that may reveal a personal side of a public figure. Yet it’s frustrating that almost inevitably these interviews give a platform for misinformation that goes unchallenged.

For example, Gandy responds to a question about the one action she’d take as President by describing an executive order “prohibiting employment discrimination”: “My EO would require that every Cabinet department and agency, as well as federal contractors, establish a job evaluation, … Continue Reading

Covering Vice President Biden’s “Middle Class Task Force” meeting in the Washington Post, reporter Michael Fletcher rightly points out the problem that ever-rising college costs are creating for middle class families:

Pointing out that the cost of a four-year college education has more than doubled in the same time that middle class incomes have crept up by just 10 percent, Biden said that an unprecedented effort is being mounted to address the growing gap…”This is something we are genuinely, genuinely committed to changing.”

The Post story then reviews the Obama administration’s plans to expand and reform federal subsidy programs for college … Continue Reading

One of the most consistent errors of logic in the dominant liberal media is their willingness to blame anything and everything on man-made global warming even when the very same article contains evidence to the contrary.

An April 16th, 2009 article by Andrew Revkin in the New York Times is a perfect example. Here are some highlights of the article entitled “Study Finds a Pattern of Severe Droughts in Africa”:

• Droughts have consistently “seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa” for over 3,000 years, typically “every 30 to 65 years”.
• “The last such drought, persisting more than three centuries, ended around 1750,

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Felicity Barringer’s April 8 New York Times article “In Areas Fueled by Coal, Climate Bill Sends Chill” asserts:

Even residents who endorse wind and solar energy have grown accustomed to the benefits of state policies that favor coal by putting a premium on low-cost electricity. So the idea of federal climate legislation that could increase electricity bills by putting a price on emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide is unsettling.
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Here in Missouri, economic incentives built into the state’s laws, history and habits encourage burning as much coal as possible.

But a thorough reading of the entire article fails to identify … Continue Reading

Here’s a form of media malpractice that must stop: Describing judicial and legislative victories for same-sex marriage proponents as  “legalizing” same-sex marriage, voiding “bans,” or “allowing” marriage for all. An April 4, Washington Post headline read: Iowa Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage, and the reporter, Keith B. Richburg, opened his article with this: “Iowa became the third state in the country and the first from the rural heartland to legalize same-sex marriage when its Supreme Court yesterday unanimously struck down the state’s decade-long ban.” The April 3 New York Times had a similar headline: Iowa Court Voids Gay Marriage … Continue Reading

In their April 7, 2009 article “Military Budget Reflects a Shift in U.S. Strategy,” New York Times reporters Christopher Drew and Elisabeth Bumiller describe the Pentagon’s plans to scale back its budget. Yet while describing the context of the new agenda, they write that:

Military experts said Mr. Gates seemed to be mounting a determined effort to rein in some of the most troubled programs after years of record military spending…

The myth that U.S. has been engaged in “record military spending” is repeated so often that few bother to verify it. Many accept it as fact, when it is clearly … Continue Reading

In an April 6 segment highlighting the revelation that National Economic Council director Larry Summers received millions in compensation from financial companies that are now receiving bailout money, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow repeated some reasons that many liberals aren’t big fans of Summers to begin with. Included in her list of the grievances is this:

In the 2000s, Mr. Summers expanded the peanut gallery of people who root against him no matter what he does when he served as president of Harvard. …at a conference, Summers famously hypothesized that maybe there were fewer women than men in the sciences because

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The April 6, William Broad article “North Korean Missile Launch Was a Failure, Experts Say” in the New York Times diminishes the scope of the threat posed by the North Korean ballistic missile program by omitting some key facts.

Analysis of the Taepodong-2 missile flight path does indicate that a payload was not delivered into earth orbit as the North Koreans claim. In this respect, the effort as a “space launch” did fail. Broad’s conclusion, however, that “[a]nalysts dismissed the idea that the rocker could represent a furtive, calling the failure consistent with past North Korean fumbles,” is both based … Continue Reading

The April 8, New York Times had a fairly straight article on how the recession has stalled the expansion of state-funded pre-K programs, which had been on the rise in recent years. But as with just about every news story discussing early education, the reporter repeats claims about the huge payoffs associated with money spent on these programs without exploring any of the actual data. Reporter, Sam Dillon, writes:

Mr. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan say their enthusiasm for early childhood education is based on research showing large paybacks for every dollar spent on the careful nurturing

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A large Arctic ice mass loss in 2007 was widely reported as proof of man-made global warming, even though NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories attributed it instead to unusual winds. Now, as a April 7, Associated Press story by Seth Borenstein affirms, the massive 2008 gain of Arctic ice mass is being presented not as recovery, but used to perpetuate the meme of a melting Arctic.

That piece, “Arctic sea ice thinnest ever going into spring”, opens with “The Arctic is treading on thinner ice than ever before.” Outside of the improper use of “ever” in the two spots that … Continue Reading

On April 4, the Washington Post published a story by Maria Glod covering the release of a new Department of Education evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, which currently helps 1,700 low-income children attend private schools in the nation’s capital.

As the Post’s story accurately reports, the academic evaluation found that, after three years, voucher students were outperforming their peers who remained in public school in reading; specifically, by about four months of learning. Like previous evaluations, the new report also found that parents of voucher students were more satisfied with their child’s school.

Glod’s report fails to … Continue Reading

Media malpractice most often stems from what they don’t tell you. Ramesh had a nice example of this last week regarding Alzheimer’s disease. Arielle Levin Becker provides another example in the April 3rd Hartford Courant with a story titled: “State Earmarks $100 Million To Fund Stem Cell Research.”

It notes that “State officials established the grants in 2005 in response to a federal ban on funding for human embryonic stem cell research, allowing Connecticut researchers to continue their work in a field that scientists believe could hold the key to treating a host of diseases.”

It then reports that “The … Continue Reading

A March 31 AP article entitled “Sebelius calls for action now on health care” repeats the claim, pushed by proponents of government run health care, that there are “48 million uninsured Americans”.

Numbers in the 40-million range regularly used by proponents of health care “reform” are based on reports from the Census Bureau which show, for example, over 45 million people “not covered” in 2007. However, these numbers are extremely misleading for several reasons, and the difference is critical not simply as a debating point but as a context for appropriate government policy changes.

• The Census Bureau itself says that

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The March 31, Washington Post does a fairly responsible job today when discussing the Social Security trust fund and its implications for the federal budget. In an article entitled, “Recession Puts a Major Strain on Social Security Trust Fund,” reporter Lori Montgomery explains:

With unemployment rising, the payroll tax revenue that finances Social Security benefits for nearly 51 million retirees and other recipients is falling, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. As a result, the trust fund’s annual surplus is forecast to all but vanish next year — nearly a decade ahead of schedule — and

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