Mainstream Media: Shifting Economic Definitions a Reflection of MSM Woes
“Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.”
Perhaps the above Ronald Reagan quote is a good example of why the Mainstream Media is so gloomy about the economy.
If you’re employed by the MSM, job cuts and downsizing is not only a fact of life, there’s no end in sight for the members of the Media Pampered Class. It’s easy to see why the MSM talking heads are so obsessed with any bad economic news: if arrogance and conservative-bashing are no longer enough to ensure one’s continued employment in the MSM, then the economy MUST be in shambles.
Red Planet Cartoons has a good point in their latest, “Hoping for Recession”. The Mainstreamers reported unemployment of 5.4% during the Bill Clinton re-election campaign as the attainment of economic Nirvana.
Now, with unemployment having just having reached 5.1%, their reporting is anything but subtle: 5.1% is the end of the U.S. economic world.
John Hindraker of Powerline asks a question that everyone (outside the DNC and the MSM itself) already knows the answer to: “Still, it makes you wonder: is the current hysterical treatment of economic news the product of a rational evaluation of the data, or is it just one more sign of the media’s desire to put a Democrat in the White House in 2009?
Do you remember 1996, when Bill Clinton swept to an easy re-election victory over Bob Dole, on the basis of what pretty much everyone in the press considered a near-perfect economy? No “pink slip nation†in 1996!
Actually, though, the unemployment rate in November 1996, when Clinton rode a soaring economy to victory, was 5.4%. That’s right–three tenths of a percent higher than the “grim picture†of a “pink slip nation†painted by this month’s unemployment report.
Of course, that’s one component to the Mainstream’s OC economic reporting behavior. The other one is that many reporters are mistaking the economic condition of the Mainstream Media for the economy as a whole.
unemployed MSM hack reporters will continue to swell.
As we said a month ago in Mainstream Media–New Cutbacks in Jobs, Bureaus, Stock Prices, Advertising, Ratings: “The MSM tries to put the blame for their decline on the medium and hopes to counter it by creating blogs on the Internet. One suspects that they won’t be selling anything different on their MSM blogs–and the public won’t be doing any buying of their news there, either.”
Some MSM reporters are deeply partisan, Democrat Party-oriented publicity hacks masquerading as objective reporters of the news. But not all of them.
And while the U.S. economy does have some problems–as all economies do–readers who only get their news from the Mainstream Media would be completely misinformed as to the state of the economic union.
The non-stop beating of the Mainstream Media bad economic news drums offers proof that the few non-partisan MSM reporters were either asleep during Econ 101 or substituting their own personal economic worries for the U.S. economy.
If the Mainstream reporters had any economic knowledge, they’d know that when customers (readers and viewers) aren’t buying what a business is selling, that business has to change or go under. The MSM seems determined not to change: that leaves only one alternative.
Or, as Ronald Reagan might have put it, “The depression has reached the Mainstream Media.”
by Mondoreb
[Red Planet Cartoons has a nice collection of links and other sources on this MSM obsession with recession and the strangely partisan definition they use of "bad economic news", depending on who's in the White House. "Hoping for Recession"]
Sources:
* Pink Slip Nation
* Hoping for Recession
* Mainstream Media’s Recession Obsession
* Mainstream Media Cuts: Jobs, Bureaus, Stock Prices, Advertising, Ratings
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Also posted at DBKP at Blogger.
[...] When Bill Clinton is President, of course. Media folks proclaim Bush’s 5.1% unemployment is an economic collapse, but Clinton’s higher unemployment was a “booming economy?” (h/t Death by 1000 papercuts) [...]
When George took over head changed the way unemployment is counted so in reality it is much higher.
Reply
[...] at DBKP.com: * The Mainstream Media’s Shifting Economic Definitions: A Reflection of MSM’s Woes * The Mainstream Media’s Recession [...]
[...] Any proof that the Legacy Media is hopelessly corrupt can be found in how unemployment has been reported over the last 18 years. The same Mainstream Mouthpiece Media that tried to spin Obama’s dismal job results as “funemployment” and a “recession with benefits,” attacked Bush’s jobless rate of 5.1% as being near economic collapse. [...]
[...] Any proof that the Legacy Media is hopelessly corrupt can be found in how unemployment has been reported over the last 18 years. The same Mainstream Mouthpiece Media that tried to spin Obama’s dismal job results as “funemployment” and a “recession with benefits,” attacked Bush’s jobless rate of 5.1% as being near economic collapse. [...]