Heading to the holiday ….

1. Remember the issues with Trump and Latino’s? Well Latino unemployment is at a record low of 4,7%.  Hear that?
   
   
2. Black Unemployment? At a 17 Year low? Did you know that? 
   At 7.3 percent, the black unemployment rate still needs to improve, but not since hitting 7 percent in 2000 have things looked this good, most especially after nearly two decades of double-digit unemployment.
   
   
3. Real economic growth:
   After an unexpectedly high growth rate of 3.3 percent in the third quarter of 2017 (and that is with two devastating hurricanes), projections for the fourth quarter have edged into the magic number closer to 4 percent.
4. Economic Optimism in the American economy.
   This leads to investor confidence and consumer spending. That drives manufacturing and shipping of products needed to fill those needs. This leads to a booming economy.
   For the first time in more than a decade, a majority of Americans see our economy as “good or excellent.”
   In fact, a near record of 41 percent believe 2018 will see an even better economy and their home values rise; 42 percent believe their wages will increase.
5. The stock market boom.
   Today millions of working and middle-class Americans invest in the stock market through various retirement accounts. Every announcement of a new record is like a cash register ringing for them.
6. Jobs:
   America now enjoys an unemployment rate of just 4.1 percent, the lowest since 2000.

7. The increase in Manufacturer jobs.
   In the final year of the Obama presidency, America lost a net of 16,000 manufacturing jobs.  So far in 2017, a full 171,000 manufacturing jobs have been created.
   In fact, manufacturing unemployment rate is just 2.6 percent, the lowest ever recorded.
   Remember what Obama said?
   “When somebody says like the person you just mentioned who I’m not going to advertise for, that he’s going to bring all these jobs back. Well how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s uh-uh no answer to it. He just says. ‘I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how? How exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer”.

   There you are seven things to think about and the MSM won’t mention, even in this season of good cheer. At the bottom of the ratings we reprinted a story about the media if you want to read it.

The Ratings

Below are the ratings for Saturday, Sunday, Monday and the week of December 11.

Total Viewers SATURDAY. Once again Fox dominates the weekend night.

• Total day: FNC: 1.279 | CNN: 613 |  MSNBC: 573 | HLN: 288
• Prime time: FNC: 1.795 | CNN: 553 | MSNBC: 492 | HLN: 335

Total Viewers SUNDAY. Another Fox dominant night.

• Total day: FNC: 1.279 | CNN: 613 |  MSNBC: 573 | HLN: 288
• Prime time: FNC: 1.795 | CNN: 553 | MSNBC: 492 | HLN: 335

EVENING NEWS RATINGS for the week of Dec. 11: ABC wins total. NBC wins demo group.

• Total Viewers: ABC: 9.323 M / NBC: 8.882 M / CBS: 6.711 M
• A25-54 viewers: ABC: 1.914 M / NBC: 2.071 M / CBS: 1.405 M

Reprint of Article:

“Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good,” legendary reporter Carl Bernstein recently claimed. Pretty good? If there’s a major news story over the past 70 years that the American media have botched more often because of bias and wishful thinking, I’d love to hear about it.

Four big scoops recently run by major news organizations, written by top reporters and, presumably, churned through layers of scrupulous editing, turned out to be completely wrong. Reuters, Bloomberg and others reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office had subpoenaed President Trump’s records from Deutsche Bank. Trump’s attorney says it hadn’t.

ABC reported that candidate Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. He didn’t (as far as we know). The New York Times ran a story claiming that K.T. McFarland, a former member of the Trump transition team, had acknowledged collusion. She hadn’t.

Then, CNN topped off the week by falsely reporting that the Trump campaign had been offered access to hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails before they were published. It had not.

Forget your routine bias. These were four bombshells disseminated to millions of Americans by breathless anchors, pundits and analysts, all of whom are feeding frenzied expectations about Trump-Russia collusion that have now been internalized by many as indisputable truths. All four pieces, incidentally, are useless without their central faulty claims. Yet there they sit. And these are only four of dozens of other stories that have fizzled over the year.

If we are to accept the special pleadings of journalists, we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be. But a person might then ask: Why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes is prejudiced in the very same way? Why hasn’t there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story? Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats?

Maybe the problem is that too many people are working backward from a preconception. Maybe newsrooms have too many people who view the world through an identical prism — which is to say they believe he stole the election with the help of Russians.

For instance, the CNN reporters who wrote the DNC story contend they had two sources who told them Donald Trump Jr. was offered encryption codes to look at hacked DNC emails. They both must have lied to them about the same date on the same e-mail. CNN says that the duo followed “editorial process” in reporting the piece. This brings three lines of questioning to mind.

First: Do news organizations typically run stories about documents they’ve never authenticated? Can they point to a single story about the Obama administration CNN has written using a similar process?

Second: Why would two independent sources lie about a date on the e-mail to Trump Jr. if they didn’t want to mislead the public? And how independent could they really be? How many stories regarding the Russian-collusion investigation has CNN run from these same sources?

Three: If sources lie to you, why not burn them? There may be good reasons to avoid exposing a dishonest source. Perhaps it will scare away legitimate whistleblowers. Perhaps reporters want to preserve relationships with those in power — because they may help on other stories in the future. At the end of the day, you’re in contest for information.

But these people have put the reporters’ reputation, even their jobs, in danger. Moreover, they have engaged in a serious abuse of the public trust and an abuse of power.

Who knows how many of these mistakes, spread over numerous outlets, came from the same sources? This seems newsworthy.

When honest mistakes are found, the reflex of many journalists has been portraying themselves as sentinels of free speech and democracy. Often they will attempt to do this by contrasting their track record on truth with that of Donald Trump. Yes, Trump is a fabulist. And maybe one day Robert Mueller will inform us that the administration colluded with Russia.

What it has not done up to this point, however, is undermine the ability of the press to report stories accurately. Trump didn’t make your activist source lie.

The fact that many political journalists (not all) have a political agenda is not new, but if they become a proxy of operatives who peddle falsehoods, they will soon lose credibility with an even bigger swath of the country. They will have themselves to blame.