CNN's 'In the Money' Beats Dobbs's 'War' Drums Over Weekend

Last Wednesday, CNN aired Lou Dobbs's special "War on the Middle Class." Three days later, CNN's "In the Money" continued the network's pitched battle for more government regulation of the economy with the program's uncritical treatment of guest Barbara Ehrenreich.

Here's a bit of what my colleague Julia Seymour noticed from her review of the October 21 program. Her full article can be found here.

The financial program devoted just under five minutes to what amounted to a free advertisement for United Professionals (UP), a new organization co-founded by “Nickel and Dimed” author Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich is also author of “Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.” She said the organization’s current function is “providing a way for people to come together, share their experiences and talk about what they’ve been going through” at a cost of $36.50 in annual dues.

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The segment was long on talk, like Ehrenreich’s new organization, but short on relevant facts. Facts like:

The low unemployment rate of 4.6 percent.

• A recent ABC News poll that “found 89 percent of Americans satisfied with the quality of their own [health] care, and nearly 60 percent content with cost.”
• A “surge in wage-and-salary income” for the first half of the year, up about 7 percent after inflation adjustment, reported by the August 31 New York Times.

Host Jack Cafferty chimed in asking, “What about the fact that the forces that are driving the middle class out of business are all emanating for the most part from Washington, D.C.?”

Cafferty continued to push Ehrenreich’s liberal talking points, suggesting “that the government in collusion with the big corporations are seeing to it that there is no increase in the minimum wage, that illegal immigrants are allowed to drive down wages overall in this country, that corporations are allowed to do away with their health insurance plans?”

Ehrenreich said her group will represent people who “could be a marketing executive one day, and you could be working in Wal-Mart the next day.” She did not offer statistics on a segment of the population that supposedly was making such extreme transitions.