The Hill Street Blahg

This from Frank Strategies: The Blog

By the middle of 2003, a mild recession had ended and the economy turned around big-time, with the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs and whopping GDP growth of 7.5% in the third quarter. Yet month after month, the national media downplayed the good economic news with the dreaded “but,” as in “Positive economic indicator X was released today, but the economy is still in the toilet…” (Oh, by the way… George W. Bush was President back then.)

Of course, with President Obama now in the White House, the media’s economic coverage is the mirror opposite. As the unemployment rate skyrockets and hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every month, the bad economic news is spun by Obama’s friends in the media: “Negative economic indicator Y was released today, but it’s not nearly bad as we’d expected, and besides, unemployment can be fun!“

As I watched more and more of this massive change in the tone of economic reporting recently, I decided to produce a little compare-and-contrast video. I did so not in the hope that the media will now start talking down a possible economic recovery the way they so obviously and unfairly did a few years ago, but just to shine some light on the almost cartoonish nature of media coverage both then and now. And maybe to convince a reporter or two to not ask Obama how enchanting it is to be President, and instead maybe ask him how in the world we’re going to deal with this chart.

16 YEAR UNEMPLOYMENT RATE CHART

Via Bureau of Labor Statistics

h/t: The Gateway Pundit