excrementoccurs: May 2011

Monday, May 30, 2011

Dinner

Obama: US Military Is ‘One Of The Finest’?!

Surprised by Obama Recovery Stats

Reporters Surprised by Anemic Obama Recovery

Posted by B. Daniel Blatt at 12:59 pm - May 29, 2011.
Filed under: Economy,Media Bias,Obamania

Puttering around the apartment this morning beginning my day, I wondered how, without Lexis/Nexis I could test a particular theory of mine, that many economic reporters always seem to find a silver lining in the somewhat dark clouds hovering over our economy in this brave new Obama era while in the previous administration, they always found a dark lining in those silver economic clouds.
Then, just moments later, while munching on my cereal and reading Instapundit (often the first blog over than this one I check every morning), I find this link to one of my favorite pundits exploring another aspect of media bias on the economy;

MICHAEL BARONE: Pro-Obama media always shocked by bad economic news. “I’m confident that any comparison of economic coverage in the Bush years and the coverage now would show far fewer variants of the word ‘unexpectedly’ in stories suggesting economic doldrums. It’s obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists — the president’s re-election — if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there’s still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover’s phrase, prosperity is just around the corner. . . . We tend to hire presidents who we think can foresee the future effect of their policies. No one does so perfectly. But if the best sympathetic observers can say about the results is that they are ‘unexpected,’ voters may decide someone else can do better.”

Read the whole thing. It’s not exactly the post I had in mind, but does address the biased coverage of the economy. Maybe with a little legwork, I’ll be able to track down economic reporting which puts a positive gloss on negative economic numbers. Do recall the Anchoress did some posts on how economic coverage in the Bush years skewed negative even before the economic downturn that followed (by a year) the election of a Democratic Congress in 2006 – at a time when the economy was growing, jobs were being created and unemployment remained low. (Here’s one of her posts on the matter.)