Free Republic

As Big Sandy sets her eyes on New Jersey to deliver Mother Nature’s October Surprise to the nation’s east coast, a political perfect storm may have already hit the nation. Unlike Hurricane Sandy whose every move is tracked and then predicted by a host of computer models, this political perfect storm seems to have formed under the radar of daily tracking polls. The week before the presidential election sees the economy topping the list of voter concerns, with jobs, or the lack of them, sitting right in the center, just like a spider. U.S. labor secretary Hilda Solis (www.dol.gov/_sec/welcome.htm#.UImEtmfh-So) did...

In a windowless room at the Westin Hotel in downtown Denver, leading business journalists and editors explained how the media “blew it” in covering the economic meltdown. They admitted, on one hand, to falling under the sway of free-market ideology and celebrating risk-taking financial leaders and, on the other, to missing the complex story of the rupturing system by only reporting it in parts and to almost no effect for the past decade. Although not planned as confession, the discussion, which kicked off the annual conference of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW), quickly descended into an...

This might have been the statement that cost John McCain the election: "The fundamentals of our economy are still strong but these are very, very difficult times. I promise you we will never put America in this position again." It was a statement that a leader would make. Then candidate Obama's response was the equivalent of screaming, "OH MY GOD WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE" Obviously the Obama Campaign was trying incite greater panic in the marketplace. And the rest of the campaign both Obama and the Press ridiculed McCain for that comment. Today White House economic adviser Christina...

If Sen. Barack Obama loses the presidency or wins by far narrower margins than the double-digit lead some mainstream media polls predict, his weak performance will not be the result of the so-called “Bradley Effect,” which holds that black candidates underperform at the polls due to latent racism. Rather, the true culprit will be something public opinion scholars call the “Spiral of Silence Theory.” In the 1970s, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann introduced a provocative and startling theory of mass communication she called the “Spiral of Silence.” Noelle-Neumann argued that when mass media create an impression that the majority of...