As I commented on the APA story, this is not really surprising, (it actually smacks soundly of common sense) but the disturbing part of this is the deciededly left bent or bias of the reporting agencies themselves having this type of coersion at their fingertips.

Media: "The economy is bad. The economy is horrible. This the next Great Depression. ... By the way, how do you think the economy is doing?"

*sigh*

www.rhjunior.com Great comics with a hefty dose of Christian and anti-nutjob goodness.

"With your mind as high as Mt. Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things near to you." -Miyamoto Musashi

interesting:

Not only are gas prices an easy story to spot, they also represent an
easy story for the media to tell and perhaps also for the public to
understand. There are no confusing sets of conflicting data or complex
economic jargon to parse, no indices made up of multiple elements to
explain. Instead, “pain at the pump” is easy to illustrate visually and
easy to connect to consumers. There are the person-at-the-pump
interviews with frustrated drivers and handy visual gimmicks—such as
the oil barrel, with its changing price tag, that was a staple of the
CNN morning show.

All this, however, suggests that the media tend to cover the economy
unevenly. They cover some aspects in real time—gas prices—because they
are easy to see and touch consumers in obvious ways. They cover others
late, and more abstractly, because those elements are measured in data,
and released after the fact. The press, in a sense, is seeing parts of
the story, but describing the whole can be elusive. (e.m.)

Indeed, it is much easier to exploit the fear factor in those types of stories. 

Great post Mr. Sheffield.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

Don Marquis 1878-1937

I agree with sarc in that I think this isn't a conservative/liberal bias thing. Instead, I think this is a general news bias (if it bleeds, it leads, right?).

And the fact that people believe messages repeated to them several times doesn't shock me. That's media 101 for any topic. 

I do agree there's a tilt towards the negative, but I think it would be challenging to ascertain it as liberal in this case. 

if the media had done their job properly, they would have relentlessly tagged this obvious and impending crisis years ago. 

if the media had done their job, they would have attempted to dissect the crap spewed from the bush admin, when then led the american MEDIA and people into an illegal, devestating, expensive war.

but to suggest that this economic crisis is due to the media reporting it, is simply laughable.

i suppose it was the MEDIA that ran a $500,000,000,000. budget deficit this year? oh and the MEDIA has been borrowing money from china and telling people to spend their way out of debt? come on folks. 

i do agree the media made the iraq war unpopular. why? because they shamefully had to be told to do their jobs. in doing so, they reported on all sorts of nasty things like abu graib, gitmo, no WMDs, the outing of CIA operatives, corruption, deceit, lies and on and on.

 the reporting on so many of these things didn't make the war in iraq unpopular. it was the events they reported on that made the war unpopular. don't confuse the two.

This story, wondering exactly which big US bank's likely to go tits up next, is currently featured prominently on Drudge, who is not known for lefty bias. Should the story just not be covered? Should Drudge try to bury it among his various other links because it's bad news? How should/can a story like this be covered positively, when it looks to me & so many others like such a fiscally negative thing? IMO there's a fine line here between legitimately pointing out media bias and simply blaming the messenger. 
JMR

The tax & spend drug war looks racist in the real world.