there are revisions to the GDP growth data. I did check and find a contemporaneous source showing no negative GDP until 2001:Q3, 2000:Q3 and 2001:Q1 must be due to revisions.
I clearly recall that some "rosy scenario" numbers came out of the Clinton Commerce Department in mid-2000 which got revised downward after the election, if not before.
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