[rellimpank]

--a look at the bright side--

[Trust but Verify]

There's a bright side?

[carumba]

This past Sunday's Parade magazine featured the latest attempt by the mainstream media to deny the self-evident truth that the American economy right now is booming.

Doom and gloom reporting undermines President Bush. Bad economic news is bad for the incumbent. So don't bother just reporting the facts if they don't fit your agenda. Spin that topic so that the result you want comes out of the dryer. Then count on the gullible public to lap it up without asking any critical questions. Aka plan b.

[marktwain]

The article captures the reality well. The economy is booming, and most people are living in luxury compared to 50 years ago, due to technological advances and improvements in productivity.

Most people believe, however, that lots of nasty stuff is happening to the "other guy" because they are constantly bombarded by "doom and gloom" from the main stream media that is trying to destroy the Republican administration.

[Accygirl]

If your at the lower end of the $ spectrum (ie 30s to lower 40s), it is fairly hard to keep from being squeezed if you live somewhere like Chicago, NYC, or LA. I've been looking for an apartment in my price range (the upper 600s to the low 700s), and it's basically impossible to find something that isn't a closet and is in a safe area. So I could see how parents who might want to live in a safe area and send their children to a good public school could be living paycheck to paycheck.

However, that being said; the main culprit is the government. If I didn't have to put money into the government pyramid scheme (aka Social Security), then at the end of the year, I'd have enough $$ to put a down payment on a new car or perhaps to spend an extra hundred $s per month to get a decent apartment.

[wolfcreek]

The people who listen to MSM's gloom and doom message are the one who will never have a positive effect on society. Exactly the folks the Libs target.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

. . . the apparent problem isn't one of economic hardship, but of lifestyle choices and changed cultural expectations. What once would have seemed luxurious now feels, to many middle-class Americans, to be almost an entitlement.

All of which helps explain why, with the national economy booming to an incredible degree, President George W. Bush seems to receive no credit for the good news: Americans don't realize just how good things are.

It's especially hard for them to realize it when the mainstream media keeps using pretzel-twisted logic and misleading headlines to convince them that their livelihoods are frighteningly imperiled. But the truth is that the American Dream isn't merely alive and well, it's actually not even a dream. Instead, the beautiful dream is reality right here and now -- no matter what the headline writers say.

. . . Memo to Mr. and Mrs. Media: No matter how many times you report that the American middle class is getting "squeezed," you're just flat-out wrong.

Journalists claim that journalism is not partisan but objective. The conceit that journalism is nonpartisan depends not only on the perception that journalism is accurate, but also on the conceit that the lead story and all the other stories on the front page select themselves. They do not; editors decide what is the lead story, what is on the front page, and what is in the rest of the paper. And, within the artificial reality within the paper, whatever they decide not to report might just as well never have happened.

Editors select the stories, but they do have guidelines which explain their selections: "If it bleeds, it leads," and "'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man.'" They brandish those rules as the ironclad defense against charges of political tendentiousness in story selection. And those rules do have validity; it is easy to understand why the attention of potential customers would be attracted by sensational or unusual stories, and thus why those stories would predominate in journalism.

But to say that those rules have commercial utility for journalism is merely to say that the particular private interest known as journalism is served by the publication of bad news. Therefore journalism is served by the existence of bad news. It follows as the night the day that journalism is a special interest. A special interest which, like any special interest, puts up a facade of public spirited disinterestedness. But in fact there is no claim which is more partisan than the claim to be above politics.

Journalism's affinity for bad news inherently suggests that the institutions and people upon which we-the-people depend are unreliable. Within the artificial reality of journalism, things couldn't be worse. And that is not an objective or neutral attitude, but in fact a radically anticonservative attitude.

There is a saying that "You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Well, that applies to journalists and partisanship. If there were such a thing as a journalist who wasn't interested in politics, politics would still be interested in journalism. Journalists have a powerful incentive to claim independence from political parties, but they simply lack the motive to seperate themselves from the tendency which inheres in journalism.

Politicians, OTOH, have plenty of incentive to associate themselves with the tendency of journalism. The less principled the politician, the more closely s/he will adhere to the radical tendency of journalism. In fact, the idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters but PR.

Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate

[Dilbert56]

Some of the people we know in the $30-99K/year range (near the top), spend every dime they get as soon as they get it. They buy a large screen TV, an SUV, a 3+Ghz computer, whatever. When an unexpected bill hits them they're caught unprepared. Yes, they're living paycheck to paycheck. But it's because they've chosen a lifestyle at the upper bound of their means.