Reporters with pom-poms

posted at 11:36 am on June 5, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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With unemployment hitting its highest rate in more than a generation and the Obama administration’s predictions falling flat, watching the media reaction today should be rather … interesting.  In a Republican administration, the least little hiccup in unemployment would generate scads of human-interest stories about hardships, families on the brink, and so on.  Dean Baker at Counterpunch scornfully notes that the national media has rushed to put the most positive spin possible on grim economic news during the Obama Era — and even some impossible spin as well:

Last week we got a whole series of bad reports on the state of the economy. New and existing home sales both remain near their lowest level for the downturn, as house prices continue to drop at the rate of 2.0 percent a month. New orders for capital goods, a key measure of investment demand, fell by 2.0 percent in April. Excluding the volatile transportation sector, new orders were still down by 1.5 percent.

On Friday, the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index fell by more than 5 percentage points from its April level, approaching its low for the downturn. The employment component of the index did hit a new low.

These reports might have led to gloomy news stories, but not in the U.S. media. The folks who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble are still determined to find the silver lining in even the worst economic news.

For example, National Public Radio told listeners that the new home sales figure reported for April was up from the March level . While this was true, the April figure was only 1,000 higher than a March level that had just been revised down by 5,000. April new home sales were 4,000 below the sales level that had originally been reported for March. USA Today touted a “surge” in durable goods orders, which was also based on a sharp downward revision to the prior month’s data.

The media have obviously abandoned economic reporting and instead have adopted the role of cheerleader, touting whatever good news it can find and inventing good news when none can be found. This leaves the responsibility of reporting on the economy to others.

In fact, Baker reports, there are no significant signs of recovery yet in the economy.  The media wants to spin any signs of life as proof that the administration’s economic policies have begun to succeed, but at the moment it’s still vaporware.  Not only are people losing their jobs, the ones who still have them have lowered wages and declining buying power.  The most significant asset for most Americans — their homes — has lost a great deal of its value.  Baker says these two points have combined to cripple consumer confidence and consumption, a rational and completely understandable reaction, and not just an attitude problem as most of the major media has painted it thus far.

Steve Perry at MinnPost, not exactly a conservative bastion, agrees:

My question is, who thought it could be otherwise? Frankly I’m surprised that the mainstream coverage of the economy has been as strong at times as it has. The press’s troubles in reporting on the economy are just a specialized variant of the press’s troubles in reporting on politics and business. They rely entirely too much on top-down institutional sources, and wind up carrying their water. Nothing exactly revelatory about that.

What’s worn on me since the bear market rally and the green shoots blather is the short shrift given to the street-level impact of the lousy economy and the even worse employment picture. Now that the whiff of recovery is in the air, illusory as it may be, that coverage seems to have fallen off dramatically.

I’d buy that explanation if George W Bush had gotten a free ride on unemployment.  Does anyone else remember the media’s incessant harping on the “jobless recovery” in 2003, just before the economic expansion hit?  Care to recall what the unemployment figures were in 2002-3 that prompted all of those critics?  It peaked at 6.3% in June 2003.  All during the resultant expansion, while unemployment dropped to less than half of what we have now, the media focuses on “inequalities” of the economy and pay disparity between workers and CEOs.  If they gave Bush any grudging credit at all for keeping unemployment low, we heard nothing but tripe about “McJobs”.

Baker has it right; the media is in the tank for Obama, probably more so on the economy than anywhere else, as they know that will be his key vulnerability.  Some of it comes as sunny optimism, and some — like the NPR example, amounts to government-funded propaganda, as Baker demonstrates.  That does leave the reporting of the economy to others, and expect the market reaction to produce far more credible voices in the alternative media.

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