1115.org

Keeping the Wall Street Journal honest would entail more work than I’m willing to do for free, but sometimes their transgressions transcend the normal shilling and rise to a level that just can’t be ignored. This abortion of a column is a perfect example of “who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes.”

The paradox of the year is why so many Americans tell pollsters they feel bad about an economy that’s been so good, with solid job growth and corporate profits, rising wages and home prices, and a huge decline in the budget deficit. Perhaps one reason is because the media keep saying the economy stinks.

That’s the conclusion of a study to be released today by the Media Research Center, which finds that so far this year 62% of the news stories on the Big Three TV networks have portrayed the U.S. economy in negative fashion. The “negative full length TV news stories on the economy outnumbered positive stories by an overwhelming ratio of 4 to 1,” the MRC reports.

Job growth in most months has fallen short of population growth(and is far behind other recoveries), corporate profits have come from productivity gains, wages haven’t kept pace with consumer prices, and the decline in the deficit is nice, but can’t be taken seriously for what it doesn’t include: the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the actual cost of making the tax cuts permanent and fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax.

And speaking of the tax cuts, the Journal is upset with network coverage:

Media coverage of President Bush’s tax cuts has been particularly slanted. During the 2003 tax-cut debate, three of every four major TV network news stories were negative. The favorite criticisms were liberal echoes that it would bust the budget and favor the rich.

Not sure what they are trying to say here; the budget is busted, the tax cuts overwhelmingly favored the richest 1%, and the biggest favor the media did to the administration was actually calling their policies “tax cuts.” Cutting taxes and not cutting spending is a tax shift because, unless we’re talking voodoo economics, someone is going to have to pay at some point.

The Journal isn’t alone in relying on statistics to back up their ideology, but in this case they are missing the real story because it doesn’t fit their agenda.

Last week, 11,000 people applied for 400 jobs at a Wal-Mart in Oakland, CA. Whether a fan of Wal-Mart or not, it can’t be denied that jobs there are at or near minimum wage, offer few or no benefits, and little opportunity for advancement. In the Bay Area, where the cost of living is much higher than the rest of the country, working at Wal-Mart isn’t enough for most people to keep their head above water. Yet 30 people applied for every job opening they had. That simply doesn’t happen under conditions that the Journal describes.

It also is hard to believe that 11,000 people in Oakland were already working but decided that Wal-Mart was a step up. Long-term unemployment is a huge problem in this “recovery,” and it is highly likely that a large percentage of these applicants were discouraged job seekers: those whose unemployment insurance had expired because they were out of work for so long. These people aren’t counted in the unemployment rate, making the numbers look better than they actually are.

The Journal may be protecting the Bush administration, but they are doing a disservice to their readers. So in short, nothing new here.