Don't Be Fooled by Media 'Experts' on the Economy

We've already lost 3.4 million jobs but journalists keep reporting the economy is better than

consumers think it is. Huh?

What goes up must come down. Unless it goes down further, sideways or moves

some other way that no one really predicted.

That's the way economics really works and no matter how many talking heads -- right, left and center

-- tell you otherwise, most don't have a clue what direction things are headed.

From gas prices to the stock market to jobs, the people who act like they know everything often know nothing.

Sure, many economists -- Greenspan, Geithner, Krugman, Zandi -- are brilliant.

Then there are the media types like Williams and Couric and before her Rather.

None of them could find prosperity even if it were just around the corner.

Here are the facts. Most of those so-called experts have been wrong about the major

economic moves of the past several years. The left treated the robust economy of

the George Bush years like it was a Michael Vick puppy mill .

I bet Obama would trade in every czar he owns for a number even approaching

the unemployment rates found under Bush.

Two million new jobs were created in 2005, and the average unemployment rate

was 5.1 percent. That didn't stop the press from trying to make it look bad. More than

half the stories about jobs on the evening news shows were about losses and layoffs.

CBS even opened the new year pessimistically. "With big business struggling,

unsteady interest rates and signs of a recession, the best some forecasters are

hoping for in 2006 is an average year," said reporter Sharyn Alfonsi on Jan. 1, 2006.

Bush got abused almost daily when unemployment was almost half what it is now.

Joblessness never went about 6.3 percent in all eight years -- even including one recession.

Contrast that with 2009. We've already lost 3.4 million jobs and the year is barely half over.

But Dow Jones tells us that journalists keep reporting that the economy is better than

consumers think it is. The Dow Jones Economic Sentiment Indicator, which analyzes

media coverage of the economy, "continued its longest improvement trend in more than four years."

So consumer confidence continues to drop because we're dropping jobs faster than

Obama makes promises. And the media are reporting that things are better than they

seem to the public. Dow Jones shows what any news consumer knows already -- media

economic coverage has been getting more and more positive throughout the Obama

presidency. The index has gone up each of the last five months.

That, despite the endless reminders from liberals that things will continue to get worse

economically. In his weekly radio address on Aug. 2, Obama said the new numbers

out this week are "likely to show that we are continuing to lose far too many jobs in

this country." Only last month, Vice President Biden underscored that "we misread

how bad the economy was."

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