Newt Gingrich
Why the suddenly shy press corps?
By: Newt Gingrich
Examiner Columnist
June 12, 2009
Here’s a riddle: In the midst of what is being called the worst recession since the Great Depression, why is the press being so timid about President Obama’s economic policies?
I ask because the May employment figures are out. The new jobs data blatantly, unambiguously contradict the claims made by the President earlier in the year when he was justifying the stimulus bill. But the silence from the mainstream media over the difference between President’s promises and his results has been nothing short of deafening.
Back in February, President Obama repeatedly argued that the need to pass the $787 billion stimulus bill was so dire that there was no time from members of Congress to read it first. Things would get worse before they got better, we were told. But without the stimulus bill, America would suffer economic Armageddon.
To make their case, the Obama Administration produced a chart showing that with the stimulus bill, unemployment would reach 8 percent by June of 2009. Without the $787 billion infusion of taxpayer funds, we were told, unemployment would hit 8.7 percent.
In fact, the May jobless data put the actual unemployment rate at 9.4 percent.
If an enterprising White House reporter bothered to do the math, he or she would reach this startling conclusion: Since the passage of the stimulus bill, the U.S. economy has lost one million more jobs than President Obama assured us we would lose if we had done nothing at all.
Of course, economic analysis is a tricky business. The press that covers the President must know this. They must have given George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt when he reported jobless numbers, right? They gave Pesident Bush the benefit of the doubt, right?
Wrong. Throughout the Bush years, the mainstream media showed slightly more skepticism of the administration’s claims. Even when the Bush White House reported actual (not estimated) steady or improving employment figures, many reporters usually found a way to either ignore the news or put a negative spin on it.
Then-CBS news anchor Dan Rather’s response to June, 2004 unemployment figures was typical. The data showed the unemployment rate remaining steady at 5.6 percent, with 248,000 new jobs created.
But Rather managed to find some bad news in this improving economic picture. He reported that “while the jobs picture is improving nationally, there are still some problems locally” and highlighted a factory in Ohio that was closing down, causing 1,300 workers to lose their jobs.
Fast forward five years later and the same press corps that valiantly covered 1,300 local job loses despite steady national employment under the Bush Administration has now turned its back on the 1,000,000 Americans who are unemployed despite the billions in taxpayer dollars being spent by the Obama Administration.
The problem goes way beyond media bias. The Obama Administration is engaged in an ongoing con job when it comes to its policies on the economy. The stimulus bill, sold to the American people as the last great hope for economic recovery, is being revealed for the giant pot of political payola it was.
The administration is trying to muddy the waters by its constant use of the meaningless metric “jobs saved or created” – as President Obama did yet again when he said that the stimulus bill would result in 600,000 jobs “saved or created this summer.”
But the May unemployment numbers put the lie to this slippery formulation. The administration told us that with the stimulus bill we would have 8 percent unemployment and without it we would have 8.7 percent unemployment. In reality, we have 9.4 percent unemployment. How did the stimulus manage to “save” jobs when there are a million less jobs today than there would have been if Congress hadn’t passed it?
Maybe the administration’s fuzzy math is great politics, but it is meaningless economics. Isn’t discerning the difference between the two what the White House press corps exists to report?
The press corps has gone to great lengths – from publishing top secret information to ruining lives and careers – to let the American people know when they think they’re being duped. So where are the exposes on the Obama Administration’s budget trickery? Where is the question being asked: If government can so easily control the economy, can’t it hurt as well as heal?
Where is the network news feature on the 1,000,000 Americans who would have jobs today if it weren’t for the Obama stimulus act?
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has published 19 books, including 10 fiction and nonfiction best-sellers. He is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation and chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future. For more information, see newt.org. His exclusive column for The Examiner appears Fridays.
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