Posted on 04/01/2008 9:15:16 PM PDT by garyhope
The 'Recession' Is a Media Myth Tuesday, April 01, 2008
By John R. Lott, Jr.
E-Mail Respond Print Share: DiggFacebookStumbleUpon During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn’t realize that the country was in a recession. Although the economy started shrinking in July 2000, most Americans through the entire year thought that the economy was fine.
But over the last half-year, the media and politicians have said we were in a recession even while the economy was still growing.
Gas prices are going up. The economy is slowing. Talk of recession is seemingly everywhere. While the majority of people rate their personal finances positively, consumer confidence in the economy has plunged to a 16-year low, well below what it was during the last year of the Clinton administration when we were in a recession.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
The MSM switched to the economy as soon as the surge started working in Iraq. MSM and the Dems talking are the same.
Of course at one time the MSM prided themselves in objectivity. They have thrown that out the window.
The "MSM" actually is IMHO better characterized as "Big Journalism." Journalism, and not fictional movies or TV dramas, has an obligation to be objective.Of course it is nonsense to purport to be objective, but journalism has the obligation nonetheless because journalism is a monopoly. There are of course many "different" news outlets, some of which actually were strongly independent in the distant past - but in reality the telegraph and the Associated Press (1848) actually created journalism as we have known it all our lives.
There were of course newspapers in the Founding Era, but they had no sources which were not in principle available to the general public without reading a newspaper. Newspapers were highly opinionated; for example Hamilton and Jefferson waged their partisan battles by sponsoring newspapers to promote their own ideas and criticize each other's ideas. Some newspapers published weekly, and some had no deadline at all and went to press when the printer was good and ready.
That is mentioned diffidently in encyclopedias today with embarrassment, since it is not politically correct to recognize that no one is objective, and that applies to the Associated Press and the organs which it absorbed in the Nineteenth Century. The claim of journalistic objectivity traces back to the AP's response to criticism of the AP's role in monopolizing the use of the telegraph to transmit news. The AP systematically insinuated itself into the business model of any telegraph line, along with the telegraph's more fundamental role in providing command, control, and communication for the railroad as its first priority, in exchange for the railroad's provision of the right of way needed to run the wire.
Whereas in the Founding Era the newspapers were primarily ideosincratic, florid opinion journals which were independent of each other and in slow communication with each other, the Associated Press transformed the newspaper business into journalism - the reporting of local incidents (available to local citizenry independently) but also, and especially, the reporting of incidents from distant places of which the local citizenry could independently learn only after a long delay. Suddenly the local newspapers across the country were cooperating through the medium of the Associated Press, and carrying rewrites of each others' stories with little delay. Suddenly the newspapers needed each other - and the idea of substantive ideological competition between newspapers became a fiction. Suddenly newspapers had a gusher of stories on the AP wire, and you weren't a newspaper unless you published daily. Newspapers segregated their editorial opinions into explicit editorial pages, positioning the rest of the paper as being "objective." Whereas in prior times of actual competition individual newspapers would have ridiculed the idea that any other newspaper was objective, suddenly the business model of every paper depended on the perception that all newspapers were objective.
Obviously the fact that journalists have a need to convince us that journalism is objective, and the fact that they have, since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary, had the opportunity to propagandize the public with the idea that journalism is objective, is a better argument that the claims of journalistic objectivity are propaganda rather than that journalists are or ever in the past actually have been objective. Very well - but if journalism is not objective, it should have an identifiable perspective - and it does.
The perspective of journalism is that journalism is more important than it actually is. Journalism inherently constitutes criticism and second guessing of those who actually do things. That is the planted axiom of the well-known dictum of journalism: If it bleeds, it leads. Journalists are on the lookout for bad news. They will therefore put a negative spin on whatever news comes across the transom - and that makes them functionally cynical about the people who are trying to get things done. And that has predictable political consequences:
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.Journalists systematically promote critics over people who commit to actual action; they are cynical about working to a bottom line. They are cynical about the police because the police have to decide to take action, risking charges of police brutality if they act or of laxness if they do not act in a particular situation. Ditto for the military. They are cynical about the businessman, criticizing him pollution if he produces, and for inadequate supply (high prices) if he does not produce enough - and sometimes for both simultaneously. In short the attitudes which are natural to the journalist are attitudes which are associated with the political left.It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . . Theodore Roosevelt
And no knowledge gained by experiencing it.
BTTT
Thanks for the ping. Thanks for the post. Great thread. Educational. Thanks to all posters.
April 2000 to be exact...lost a lot of money that month.
Don't tell that to 90% of the population who also thing getting money back on their taxes is also a good thing.
Just like the “worst economy in 50 years” in 1992 and the “best economy in history” of 2000, the recession is nothing more than an attempt to elect dims. Both were lies, the conomy eas growing strongly in ‘92 and sliding into recession in ‘00.........
CHANGE???? DIMS DELIVERED!!!!!!!!
This is a good reminder of just how the Demograft Party delivers on the promises of their candidates!
A little over one year ago:
1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high;
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon; (Hillary, and the Dem’s were going to “fix” this, remember?)
3) the unemployment rate was 4.5%.
Since voting in a Democratic Congress in 2006 we have seen:
1) Consumer confidence plummet;
2) the cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon;
3) Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase);
4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate (stock and mutual fund losses);
5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars;
6) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure.
7) The value of the U.S. dollar has plummeted.
8) oil price, doubled.
9)job expansion? OVER, and now going backward.
)10Groceries up 70 dollars on average per month.
America voted for change in 2006, and we got it!
You are so right. The media has been hyping this fake recession for YEARS now. I wish someone would do a Nexus search to find even one month since 9/11 that the media hasn’t made significant references to being in a recession or being on the verge of a recession.
It reminds me of what a hypochondriac requested on his tombstone:
“75 years sick and dying. Finally proven right.”
Lott is right.
I know the textbook definition is negative growth rates for two consecutive quarters. But by that definition, the economy could contract 99.9% in one quarter, then grow by 0.1% the next quarter, and that’s not a recession... even if it contracts in a third quarter by 99.9% again.
The point is that the contraction should last at least two quarters, so that a single fluke statistic doesn’t define a recession. And in the time period from Q1 2001 until Q3 2001, the economy shrank. Given the anemic growth in late 2000, it’s certain that the economy began to shrink within Q4. And an observation of monthly data confirms that.
Definitions are always generalizations. Saying there was no economic recession makes no more sense than saying that your parakeet is no longer a bird just because you plucked all its feathers.
Bravo! You don't hear it, but I am applauding...
The 1992 Recession was a myth and the spineless GOP did not respond then. It was a myth because in 1992 we had positive economic growth.
THe Drive Bys (like in 1991) saw a small blip or “mini recession” and have decided to try the old “worse economy in 50 years garbage” again and it’s working. And what is the GOP doing. Laying down spineless again.
Like the old saying goes about history repeating itself.
I agree but polls do not show his accuracy. CNN today says 69% of its respondants thing we are in a recession now and 22% think we are close to it. Still, if one just watches people spending dough in the malls, movies, restaurants, big ticket items, cars etc. , one is hard to see just how this recession is national.
Thanks to President Bush we pulled out of recession very very quickly. Since 911 happened in the 3rd qtr this is enough of a miracle to saint the man.
I was under the impression that sainthood required three miracles. But I could be mistaken; I'm not Catholic.
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