Economy

There are credit cards out there for subprime borrowers, too - it's not just mortgages. That means a new class of supposed victims for reporters like ABC's Chris Cuomo to defend. Cuomo's segment on the March 27 "Good Morning America" hammered away at the credit card industry, claiming consumers were "getting sucked in by attractive offers" and being "trapped" by "fee-laden cards." He said to him…

Want an even clearer picture of how media are intentionally reporting economic data in a way that makes the public feel things are much worse than they are?Consider the different adjectives the good folks at the Associated Press use to describe a 0.6 percent change depending on whether or not it's an increase or a decrease.As reported by NewsBusters two weeks ago, when the Commerce Department…

If there was ever an obvious conflict of interest in economic reporting, this may very well qualify. NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell evaluated the housing crisis solution proposals of both Democratic presidential hopefuls Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) on the March 25 "NBC Nightly News." "Clinton was the first of the two to sound alarms about the…

Yesterday's Existing Home Sales report for February issued by the National Association of Realtors had better than expected news: On an annualized basis, sales were up. They were expected to go down. Someone interested in getting to the bottom of things would have found that the improvement reported by the NAR may be an early indicator a broader recovery in existing-home unit sales and sales…

It's not Ben Bernanke's fault, according to CNBC's Maria Bartiromo. Bartiromo appeared on NBC's March 23 "Meet the Press" with CNBC's "Street Signs" host Erin Burnett as the program's featured guests. "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert asked Bartiromo and CNBC's Erin Burnett if Bernanke was "up to the task" to take on problems with the U.S. economy. Bartiromo didn't blame the Fed chief for…

Do you think the federal government guaranteeing $29 billion in a loans for JP Morgan Chase to take over Bear Stearns is a good idea? It really doesn't matter what you think, according to CNBC's Jim Cramer. Cramer defended the move by the Fed from any potential public scrutiny on CNBC's March 24 "Squawk on the Street." "The American public don't know jack," Cramer said in response to a…

As media continue to report current economic conditions as being almost Depression-like, they conveniently forget which political party has controlled both chambers of Congress since January 2007 as well as who was in the White House when key financial services deregulation was enacted.Such a well-timed amnesia hit ABC's Claire Shipman Sunday when during the panel discussion segment of "This Week…

With Eliot Spitzer gone, Chuck Schumer moves to the head of the list of smugly self-righteous New York pols. So it was particularly satisfying to see Sen. Jon Kyl [R-AZ] put Schumer is his place on This Week with George Stephanopoulos today. A guest with Kyl for purposes of discussing the economy, Schumer clearly came in with a game plan: to analogize President Bush to the man who presided over…

A recent AP story about 50-year-olds moving back into their parents homes because the economy is so bad is one of the best examples of taking anecdotal evidence and stretching it into a universal truth that I have seen for a while. Filled with the sadly common "many say" and all based on the tale of one person who moved back home at 52, the AP magically discerned a national trend. This is the…

A fairly common media meme during the past year or so has been that the continually declining value of the dollar is driving up oil and gas prices (image courtesy Slate).In the past three months alone, there have been over 100 stories involving this very subject, including this March 10 piece from U.S. News & World Report entitled "Why Gas Prices Rise as the Dollar Falls (emphasis added):…

It's a common trick the media employ when reporting on "skyrocketing" gas price stories: show photos or B-roll of price marquees that bear prices way above the actual average price.MSNBC.com's front page this morning is no exception, as the screen cap at right shows regular unleaded for $3.979, or 21 percent higher than the national average of $3.27.The article's headline reads, "Rising gas costs…