CNNs Serwer: Bush Isnt Getting Word Out on Hot Economy

     Why doesn't the president and the Republican Party also talk about the economy? It's just right there in front of them, CNNs Andy Serwer asked University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato on the April 29 In the Money. The economy is doing pretty darn well. There's job growth, GDP growth. Yet they just don't seem to be able to get a handle on that.

     Yet CNN, and Serwer in particular have frequently painted the economy in a pessimistic light during President Bushs tenure in office.

     For the second day in a row the stock market took a drop, CNNs Miles OBrien noted on the October 6, 2005, American Morning. And I think its what do we need, those Whip Inflation Now buttons, maybe. Serwer agreed: Back to the 70s. Turn your thermostat down, get your cardigans out.

     Weeks before Christmas, Serwer ladled out coal for his viewers stockings, focusing on recent layoffs at Ford. The American Morning business brief for Dec. 2, 2005, was for Serwer a litany of bad news, really. Plant closings and layoffs, declining sales, its sort of adding up to a very gloomy holiday season.

     Serwers pessimism showed up again on the Dec. 8, 2005 American Morning as the business contributor warned of how 800,000 jobs might be lost if the housing market would collapse. Even this was too much for colleague Carol Costello, who talked him down: maybe its not so much the bubble is going to burst, but things are just readjusting to where they should be.

     CNNs pessimism goes back even to election season. None of the media studied did a good job of covering the economy consistently, the Business & Media Institute found in its October 2004 study One Economy, Two Spins. While CNN was the best of the networks studied, with balanced coverage of the Clinton economy in the summer months of his 1996 reelection campaign, with President Bush, that balance went out the window. Of the five stories on the economy in a similar time frame in 2004, only one was positive, the BMI study found.