In an economic columnist face-off, The Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson declared Paul Krugman of The New York Times wrong about inflation history.
Samuelson said that Krugman’s Jan. 5, column made a “glaring error” when it claimed President Ronald Reagan had little to do with getting double-digit 1980s inflation under control. Samuelson said it was the first time he could recollect devoting an entire column to rebutting another person’s column.
<div style="float: right"><object width="240" height="194"><param name="movie" value="http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=ydaGkU4zSU&c1=0xFB9006&... name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=ydaGkU4zSU&c1=0xFB9006&... allowfullscreen="true" width="240" height="194"></embed></object></div>Appearing on the June 3 "America's Newsroom" program, Graham discussed Newsweek economics columnist Robert Samuelson's gripe that the media's "Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time." <p>Samuelson "is a reasonable guy" who "has got to know that we've had years of pro-Obama bias, and certainly in the pages of his own magazine, where there are syrupy pictures of Barack and/or Michelle almost weekly," Media Research Center (MRC) Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham told "America's Newsroom" host Bill Hemmer. [<a href="http://media.eyeblast.org/newsbusters/static/2009/06/2009-06-03-FNC-Grah... target="_blank">audio available here</a>]</p><p>Graham added: </p><blockquote>
After leading Friday's CBS Evening News with Morgan Stanley's prediction of $150 barrel of oil by the 4th of July and reporter Anthony Mason citing the “runaway price of energy,” anchor Katie Couric delivered a short item on how “today the Senate gave up on legislation to fight global warming.” Couric explained that “faced with a Republican-led filibuster, Democrats withdrew their proposal to cap carbon emissions from power plants and factories,” but she failed to make the connection to how the “cap and trade” bill would raise the price gas and other energy.You reap what you sow.
Nothing could be truer when it comes to the American economy. According to CNBC "Closing Bell" host Maria Bartiromo, if the media continue to push doom-and-gloom economy stories, they will make the economy worse.
"[T]he truth is, ["Today" co-anchor] Meredith [Vieira], it doesn't matter if we're in a recession," Bartiromo said on NBC's February 6 "Today." "We can talk ourselves into a recession, and that seems to be what we're doing right now and that certainly begets more weakness."
The media coverage has apparently affected voters. According to the February 6 Washington Times, an exit survey from the "Super Tuesday" primaries showed 47 percent of Democratic voters and 40 percent of Republican voters said the economy was the most important issue in making their choice at the polls.
Only days after Newsweek was embarrassed when its own columnist, Robert Samuelson, excoriated the magazine for a “fundamentally misleading” and “highly contrived” cover story meant to defame the global warming “denial machine,” Wednesday's NBC Nightly News aired an equally distorted story which smeared “deniers,” a term no doubt meant to conjure a similarity to dishonorable Holocaust deniers. Reporter Anne Thompson began her crusading piece with “In Denial” on screen over video of the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels. She fretted about “interest groups fueled by powerful companies, including oil giant ExxonMobil.” Citing the far-left Union of Concerned Scientists, she highlighted their claim that “ExxonMobil gave almost $16 million over seven years to denier groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute.” But as Marc Morano, of the minority staff of the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works, disclosed in a posting, “proponents of man-made global warming have been funded to the tune of $50 BILLION in the last decade or so,” not even counting the impact of one-sided media reporting, “while skeptics have received a paltry $19 MILLION.”