Since some time during the final phases of the Clinton administration, news media are less and less presenting unemployment and jobless statistics and federal budget data. During the Clinton administration, this may have been because of the economic good times: unemployment across the US was something under 4% for a while there (though, of course, in the San Joaquin valley it was still close to 10%), and the federal budget was in surplus.
But now, those data would seem to be important again as evidence for claims about the health or illness of the economy and the federal coffers. No? But what's the current jobless rate in the US? And how high is the budget deficit now?
I don't watch TV news, for a variety of reasons, so I don't have a complete picture of mainstream news media these days. I do, however, read newspapers (online, that is), and listen to NPR with some frequency. So on balance, I believe this is an accurate observation.
I think the absence4 of hard data in the media currently is just a kind of whistling in the dark. They're willing to report that economic conditions are gloomy, but presenting the numbers would be a leeeetle too grim. Then again, I don't watch the TV newz these days either.
ReplyDeleteI don't buy it (pardon the pun). In the early 80s, which was a lot worse in a lot of ways, the hard data were always front-and-center. I don't disagree that the nooz media are whistling in the dark - so is the administration, after all. Dunno. Maybe it's more of the "some say the world is flat; others disagree" phenomenon.
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