Once upon a time, people believed that newspapers maintained a firewall between news and editorials. The first was governed by the big “W’s,” which confined the articles to reporting What, When, Where, and Who. Only on the editorial page were readers to find the editors’ or individuals’ opinions, and they were identified as such. Perhaps it never existed in reality. Perhaps a pristine pure reporting of the news is not even possible, given the role of editorial decisions about what is and what is not included in newspapers. Even so, today’s news media go well beyond the inevitable judgments made by individual editors who must determine what information goes into the limited space at their disposal.
For years, the media and their sycophants scoffed at notions of a leftist bias and worked overtime trying to discredit them. When an insider, CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg, dared to speak publicly about it, his bosses and their competitors ostracized him. Today, Goldberg is a recognized authority on the media and does not appear in the least damaged by the mainstream’s jihad to marginalize him and his message. The American public seems reconciled to the bias. In a 2007 Zogby Poll, only eleven percent of the respondents said “the media doesn’t take political sides.” On the event of the last US Presidential election, almost eight of nine respondents told the Pew Research Center “most journalists want to see [Democrat Barack] Obama, not [Republican] John McCain, win on Nov. 4.” Eight percent said the media does not take political sides. A Rasmussen poll found a ten to one opinion that reporters are “trying to hurt [Republican Vice Presidential candidate] Sarah Palin with their news coverage.” Successive polls by the Gallup organization, Harvard and other universities, and more from Rasmussen, Pew and others come to the same conclusion.
The stock market suffered another severe loss on November 19 and, naturally, newspapers all over the country had banner headlines about the economic crisis. But there is a difference between reporting that (bad) news and purposely fanning the flames of insecurity and fear that contribute to more dire economic news. Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, for instance, led with “Stocks, Bonds Tumble to New Crisis Lows.” It also featured a prominent story on the same front page with the headline “Before the Bust, These CEOs Took Money Off the Table,” which reported on “fifteen corporate chieftains of large home-building and financial-services firms” who received over $100 million each over the last five years in compensation and profit from stock sales. Bad news? Certainly, but it was reported in a straightforward manner that did not try to move readers to any particular opinions.
Compare that with USA Today: “Anxiety surges, stocks plunge.” Stocks plunge—a fact; anxiety surges—not so objective. The tenor of the article that followed was that the US economy is headed to its worst performance since the Great Depression. Now, to be sure, things are bad. But the worst since the Great Depression? Hardly. Where are the breadlines, the executives jumping out of windows, and so forth? It is possible we could get there, but not a certainty, and individual confidence can have a lot to do with what happens. If people see the current prices as the best they will get for their investments, more will sell meaning more supply and less demand. Many Americans already are cutting back; cut back too much out of fear and more retailers will tank.
The drop in stock prices, according to USA Today, “Put Wall Street on track for its worst year since 1931, as a deepening economic gloom gave investors little reason to wade into a market that has wiped out nearly $10 trillion in wealth since the October 2007 peak.” Interesting how neither USA Today nor its other biased cronies were seen cheering the Bush Administration as an economic wonder for reaching that peak. Nor does the paper recall the “stagflation” of the Carter years—double-digit inflation, high unemployment, and low or no growth. And previous USA Today editorials and articles seemed to think it was just fine for American taxpayers to “invest” in the three blind mice from Detroit.
At the close of its article, USA Today has a little box with five time periods and the percentage of value lost by the Standard & Poor’s 500 during those times. The text in the box says, “The benchmark S&P 500 index is on track for its worst year since 1931.” But what it means by “on track” or even a year varies wildly. The worst drop was September 7, 1929 to June 1, 1932 (-86.2 percent); then March 6, 1937 to March 31, 1938 (-54.5 percent); the most recent one, March 24, 2000 to October 9, 2002 (-49.1 percent), which began in the Clinton administration but the media seems to have ignored that for the past eight years; this one October 9, 2007 to November 19, 2008 (-48.5 percent); and January 11, 1973 to October 3, 1974 (-48.2 percent). Considering that the periods are 33, twelve, 30, 13, and 22, it is difficult to know what USA Today means by a “year.” In fact, ten percent of the value lost in the current period measured by USA Today occurred after the one year mark, making the one year drop since October 9, 2007 43.6 percent. This sort of phony comparison would not pass muster in a freshman economics class; yet, USA Today is comfortable putting it on its front page.
Nobody today is looking for feel-good reporting about the economy, but neither do they need deliberate fear mongering. It appears that media bias, however, has trumped quality. The mainstream media is intent on doing all it can to lay the current crisis at the feet of the Bush Administration. We can expect them to engage in a chorus of “Happy Days are Here Again” once Barack Obama is inaugurated in January. This way, they can help Obama indemnify himself against public disappointment in his (likely) inability to fix the ailing American economy by doing what the Democrats and the media have been best at over the past eight years: blaming George W. Bush, saying he left Obama with an economy in its “worst crisis since the Great Depression.”
The media and the Democrats did not mind a crisis that would be laid at the feet of the party in the White House—so long as that party was Republican. But the midterm elections will be upon the American people all too quickly, and is not likely that things will be too much better by then; and they certainly will not improve with the big government policies promised by Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress. The last time this scenario played out was in 1992 when Americans elected Bill Clinton to the White House on a promise of change (sound familiar?); and in 1994, when public revulsion at his policies brought in a wave of Republicans in midterm elections. Just as they shilled for Obama and the Democrats in the last elections, the media are hoping for to repeat their victory in 2010—and in 2012 when Obama will be asked to account for ongoing problems, and the media again will tell us to just blame George Bush.
