PBS Bias in Economic Reporting

I wrote this note some time ago without posting it, but it is such a clear example of media bias that it is worth posting, particular since PBS is widely believed to be unbiased.

One Friday evening, the PBS Lehrer News Hour reported bad economic news, holiday retail sales were apparently down that year; consumers were not spending as they had in past years. Things were pretty bad.

One segment showed empty stores and aired gloomy interviews with shoppers. The reporter told us of how depressed retail shopping for the holiday seemed to be. The reporter gave some data for previous years but left us waiting for the facts for this year's holiday spending, and with no data, the report left viewers with the message of gloom.

Well, there were numbers available for spending that holiday season that could have given viewers an idea of just how bad that year was compared to the year before. Sales the day after Thanksgiving were 3 percent higher, yes, higher, than last year reports George Will. Over the weekend, 172 million 
people, shopping in stores and online, spent an average of $372.57, a 7.2 percent increase over a year ago, when 147 million shoppers spent $347.55 per person.

Personal consumption, which normally is 70 
percent of economic activity apparently was quit robust. How could the PBS report this economic
situation as gloomy news? Did the PBS reporter know the overall strength of the economy, e.g., that more than 93 percent of those who wanted work were employed, and more than 93
percent of mortgages were being paid on time? Why exactly would the PBS
News Hour paint such a gloomy picture enabled by omitting any obvious and actual
data when those data were available and they directly contradicted 
their report?

It could be an evil plot against free markets or a grand conspiracy against the right wing but more likely it is simply another example of how ideological frameworks organize people’s thoughts to produce their observations and explanations. ideological frameworks shape what people see and what they see with. In this case the ideological framework clearly works to suppress some facts, overemphasize other anecdotal information, and use these to present a gloomy view of the economy.

The Clearisy’s Belief in Presidential Mandates and Changes in Presidency

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President Trump’s election and presidency, and politics are all viewed by the clerisy as lacking legitimacy and certainly as no mandates from the electorate. But recalling the clerisy’s view 8 years earlier, I remember talk from President Obama supporters who seemed to think then that his election did indicate a sort of mandate from the people.

Even if there was one or two issues of widespread concern to the electorate, the nature of any mandate by the people regarding an issue is always unclear. Since there many sub-groups in society operating more or less independently of other sub-groups, the norms, values, and rhetoric varies among subgroups, and no so called consensus, common will, or mandate can possibly exist among citizens.

It is misleading and sometimes perhaps quite harmful to believe in such unity of political goals. Concern for the environment may well be of primary concern among a large number of voters but that illusory consensus in the face of actual policies; it is unlikely a large percentage of citizens don’t want to government to take over the energy industry. Some may favor taxing carbon emission or trading carbon quota’s but the divide between the two approaches immediately revealed the huge divide between the pro-government and the pro-private policy methods. The same is true in health care. The divide between pro-government and pro-private methods appears in the debates over single-payer and health savings accounts.

When we dig into people’s belief’s about methods of change in society, those underlying frameworks reveal just how incompatible pro-government and pro-private problem-solving methods are. That is why policy discussion inevitably run into the ideological problem of the two incompatible approaches to societal development and problem-solving that undergird most peoples view of public policy issues. It also accounts for why progressives remain consistently pro-government and anti-free market across issues in opposition to libertarians who remain consistently pro-private problem-solving and anti-government across issues.

The respected polling firm Rasmussen periodically asks Americans if they favor fewer government services with lower taxes, or more services with higher taxes. In late September of 2007, the public—once again—favored smaller government and lower taxes by a 57% to 31% margin. That difference reflects ideological frameworks at work and is about 20 points more than Obama's victory margin over McCain. If this election was a reaction to a very unpopular president, any mandate for change simply means throwing the bums out. We are left and certainly with no idea of exactly what change that might be.

Today, of course, the clerisy no long use the idea of a president having a mandate. The truth is that presidents never have a mandate.