Anyone wishing to understand why leftist bias pervades US “mainstream” media reporting will benefit from reading Steve Boriss’s May 18 column (”Is the Associated Press Good for America?”) at Pajamas Media.

Boriss quickly runs down the history, and gets right to the point: The self-described “not-for-profit cooperative” has a history of acting as a monopolist:

Marshall Field III, grandson of the founder of the department store of the same name …. tried to launch the Chicago Sun in 1941, but struggled because AP member Chicago Tribune blocked his membership, freezing him out of the ultra low-cost news available to members. Field took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the AP in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Court in its decision quoted legendary appellate judge Learned Hand, who wrote of the dangers of AP’s monopoly: “In the production of news every step involves the conscious intervention of some news gatherer, and two accounts of the same event will never be the same. … For these reasons it is impossible to treat two news services as interchangeable, and to deprive a paper of the benefit of any service of the first rating is to deprive the reading public of means of information which it should have; it is only by cross-lights from varying directions that full illumination can be secured.”

Unfortunately, the AP’s legal defeat led to no discernible increase in competition among newspapers.

The result? In most cases, one version of “the news”:

….. in any other business, if there were a highly successful paper in one city, it would be natural for it to expand to a nearby city to dethrone the leader. But as members of the same AP network, papers assume their cities belong to them, and no other member has the right to invade it. Even if a neighboring paper did invade, the AP network makes it nearly impossible for them to succeed through competition because all papers are essentially running the same stories anyway.

The end result of the AP network has been the creation of a news supply chain that reliably turns out monolithic, center-left news.

Now, the AP is taking steps to cut out the middlemen, i.e., their member publications (internal links added by me):

….. the AP, which was created by its member papers, has turned on its masters in at least three ways. First, while its members’ businesses are shrinking, the AP has used their fees to mushroom into a huge, full-service news outlet with more than 4,000 employees working in more than 240 bureaus worldwide. Second, last September after AP members made the foolish complaint that Google News was not paying them for words in the brief synopses linking to their articles, the AP made a deal with Google News (link is to Boriss’s Future of News web site — Ed.) to feature the AP’s version of the story, and ignore similar stories at the members’ own sites — a move that, no doubt, has cost members a good deal of online traffic. And just recently, the AP launched a program to make its stories available on iPhones, preempting its members’ necessary efforts to restore their ability to generate and deliver their own, valuable original content.

The comments that follow Boriss’s column are instructive, including but not limited to these:

• In one comment, Boriss himself predicts that AP might evolve into a BBC-like entity. He also “justifies,” to a point, leftists’ perception of media bias against them: “The Press isn’t actually ‘Left’ — they are center-left and establishment friendly. And they only speak in that single voice. So, if you are left of center-left they seem right and if you are middle to right they seem left. And for all those who don’t agree with the establishment position, they are pro-establishment.”
• Another commenter who says he is a longtime AP staffer noted big changes: “When I started (late 1970s) and for most of my time there, we were the Joe Friday of journalism — the “just the facts” guys/women. Opinions and columns were clearly marked, and we were told, in no uncertain terms, that our opinions were not to go into news stories.” No one can credibly argue that this is the case today — not while Jennifer Loven, Jeannine Aversa, Scott Lindlaw, or Martin Crutstinger ply their trade.
• Yet another notes that AP staffers “HATE bloggers.” Well of course they do. I would suggest that many of them see it as their duty to “offset” what those eeeeeevil center-right talkers and bloggers are saying and writing — which would explain why AP’s content has drifted relentlessly further and further leftward in the years I have been following it, and why, during a Republican administration, they “cling to recession” when there hasn’t been even one quarter of negative economic growth.

The solution to this unhealthy near-monopoly is the creation of a viable, comprehensive, competitive alternative news-gathering organization at the source level. There are signs that something like that may evolve, but there are also indications that the growing friendliness between AP and info behemoth Google that Boriss alluded to will work to stop anything that might spring up dead in its tracks.

(Disclosure: Yours truly is a weekly Pajamas Media columnist.)

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

….. But Misses Chance to Refute “Jobs Slashed” Claims.

It’s good to see that someone else is on the case of the recession-obsessed Associated Press, particularly reporter Jeannine Aversa. But even the estimable James Taranto, in his Best of the Web column yesterday, let Aversa’s most obvious and repeated error go by without comment.

Aversa started out her report yesterday (”When economy revives, how will we know?”) by presuming to speak for all of us, and tinged it with a bit of brattiness:

With any luck, the second half of this year will be better than the so-far rocky first half. The Federal Reserve chief hopes that is the case. So does President Bush.

For the rest of us mere mortals, it feels like the pain is getting worse.

When the economy begins to snap out of its funk, how will we know?

Taranto pounced (links in Taranto’s original were replaced with other links expected to be accessible for a longer time period):

….. as we’ve noted in the past, “mere mortal” Aversa was more certain when declaring there was a recession:

- February: “In a shower of pink slips, U.S. employers cut jobs last month for the first time in more than four years, the starkest signal yet that the economy is grinding to a halt if it hasn’t already toppled into recession.”

- March: “Dangerous cracks in the nation’s job market are deepening. Employers slashed jobs by the largest amount in five years and hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the labor force–ominous signs that the country is falling toward a recession or has already toppled into one.”

- April: “It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long.”

He then went on to note that Aversa acknowledged the uncertainties involved in declaring a recession in late paragraphs in one of her reports. But despite that acknowledgment:

….. she was willing to disregard the uncertainty principle and declare a recession.

So, how will the AP’s readers know when the economy revives? One predictor may be the presence of a cat from Illinois in the White House.

Taranto’s critique is great, as far as it goes. But somebody, and that will have to be me for now, will have to keep beating on the “pink slips” and “slashed jobs” myth, because Taranto didn’t.

Once again: The job-change numbers that are announced every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are seasonally adjusted. Seasonally adjusting employment data is useful and necessary, but it doesn’t reflect the actual changes in the number of people employed in any given individual month. In reality, employment went up in February, March, and April, as it typically does — just not by as much as it has in recent years:

(Source - Bureau of Labor Statistics; go to this BLS link and select “Total nonfarm - Not seasonally adjusted.”)

The above is not good news, and I’m not pretending that it is. But that doesn’t change the fact that the verbiage routinely employed by Aversa and others in the business press describing “showers of pink slips” and “employers slashing jobs” has been demonstrably false for at least three consecutive months. Show me the bodies thrown out on the streets, Jeannine; the fact is, you can’t.

Even in months like January, which typically shows a big reduction in employment (and, unfortunately, a bigger one this year than in the previous couple of years), there’s a difference between people returning home after seasonal work, retiring, or just moving on to something else, and “employers slashing jobs.” Someone making claims such as these should be backing them up, and I’m not seeing that. All I’m seeing is lazy negativity.

Taranto, who did very well nuking Aversa’s recession obsession, had a chance to go further and missed it. Given Aversa’s aversion to economic positivity, there’s little doubt he’ll have other opportunities.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Note: This was originally posted at Pajamas Media on Thursday under the title “California Draggin’: Golden State’s Economy Hurts America.”

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There is talk that John McCain actually has a chance to take California in November’s presidential election.

Don’t count on it.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have endorsed McCain for president, but his economic stewardship will likely be fatal to the Arizona Senator’s chances of winning the Golden State.

California’s economy is performing so poorly that it is singlehandedly making the rest of the nation’s economy look worse than it really is.

Take just one measure, unemployment (Source - Bureau of Labor Statistics; the seasonally adjusted “sum of the states” unemployment rate of 4.92% varies from the nationwide rate of 5.0% because of differing data collection methods):

The Not-So-Golden State has almost 12% of the country’s workforce, but 15% of its unemployed. Without California, the nation’s unemployment rate would be almost 0.2% lower, and the press wouldn’t be obsessing about the supposed recession (or at least not as much).

Worse still, less than five years after California’s historic recall of sitting Governor Gray Davis and Schwarzenegger’s landslide election to replace him, the Golden State is once again in a serious self-inflicted budget crunch:

Unlike previous summer standoffs during (Governor Arnold) Schwarzenegger’s reign, the state this time could run out of cash. The latest projection is that the till could run dry in early September.

The Governor wants to close a $15 billion budget gap by, of all things, convincing Californians to gamble more — a lot more:

Schwarzenegger last week called for the state, in essence, to borrow against future revenues generated by a massive expansion of the lottery. The state would receive $15 billion over three years from Wall Street investors and pay it back from lottery proceeds over 30 years. Lottery sales would have to double for the plan to work.

How did it come to this?

There are many reasons, but the state’s 12-year refusal to get with the program on Welfare Reform is certainly among the biggest.

The nation’s landmark Welfare Reform law went into effect in 1997. By any reasonable measure, it has been a resounding success. Nationwide, as of December 2007, the number of welfare recipients was 68% lower than 11 years earlier.

During the first six years of reform, welfare rolls came down in California at about the same rate as the rest of the nation. By the end of 2002, the number of families in the state on TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Family Families (the new name for the deservedly stigmatized AFDC, Aid for Families with Dependent Children) was down 47%, compared to 52% for the rest of the country, and total caseload was down 55%, compared to 57% for the rest of the US.

But California’s welfare rolls have for decades been twice as high, as a percentage of the population, as the rest of the country. The declines should have been even more dramatic, and weren’t.

Now the situation is getting worse. Despite having so much room for improvement, and a golden opportunity handed to him to do something about it, welfare rolls in California on Schwarzenegger’s watch have gone up, while the rest of the country has continued to enjoy significant declines.

Here are the raw year-end numbers of recipients and families on welfare in California and the rest of the country since 2002:

These graphs illustrate just how bad things are:

(Sources: ACF’s Office of Family Assistance for families and caseload; Census Bureau for population.)

Taking them one at a time:

1. The percentage of residents on welfare in the Golden State is now more that triple that of the rest of the US. If it reflected the rest of the country, California would have 800,000 fewer people receiving welfare.
2. While caseloads in the rest of the US have dropped over 30% in the past five years, California’s has gone up about 6%.
3. As a result, though it has only about 12% of the total US population, California’s share of the welfare caseload has risen from 22% in 2002 to over 30%.
4. There are more welfare recipients per family in California, and that number has crept upward in the past couple of years, perhaps indicating that California welfare mothers are bearing more children that those in the rest of the US.

Governor Schwarzenegger and his state were very fortunate during his first few years in office. The economic growth created by the Bush tax cuts came at just the right time. The state also received some lucky onetime windfalls, including the hundreds of millions of dollars founders and insiders at Google coughed up when they cashed in their stock options.

Unfortunately, it appears that the good fortune enabled the state to avoid serious expenditure reform in welfare, and surely other areas, that Schwarzenegger should have aggressively undertaken when he took office.

Now the party’s over. Because of that, the chances that John McCain will be partying over a November win in California are nowhere near as good as they should be.

From Coldwater, Ontario:

May 08, 2008

One local pooch is a hero.

Freddie, a three-year-old German shepherd from Coldwater, was one of five dogs inducted into the Purina Animal Hall of Fame Monday in Toronto. His heroic efforts saved the life of owner Michael Hambling.

It was during a trip to the family’s Coldwater cottage in January 2007 that Hambling says his life almost came to an end but, thanks to the courageous efforts of the family pet, he survived to tell the tale.

Hambling’s cottage is located across a small body of water, which in the winter, means crossing the frozen water.

“We crossed Friday night, and everything was fine,” he tells The Mirror. It was the next day, on the way to visit friends, that he fell through the ice. Trying not to panic, Hambling remembered something he had seen on a television program, and tried desperately to get himself up onto the ice, but the ice kept breaking.

It was on his third attempt that things went from bad to worse as he slipped under the water and began to lose consciousness.

“I went under … I couldn’t stand up because the water was too deep, and I couldn’t swim to surface because my clothes and boots were too heavy from the water. I can remember being in the water and thinking I was finished, I can’t get out. The next thing I know, I can feel something pulling on my arm … I had forgotten I was still attached to Freddie by his leash, which was wrapped around my wrist.”

Prompted by encouraging shouts from his wife Debbie, who was stuck helpless on shore, Freddie tugged and tugged until he managed to pull Hambling out of the water and finally to safety on shore. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.