Topic: Media Research Center
In a Dec. 8 CNSNews.com column, the MRC Business & Media Institute's Dan Gainor writes:
A year into what we just heard is an official recession, unemployment hit 6.7 percent. That’s the highest for the Bush presidency. At this rate, it will soon get as bad as it was in 1993 – when Bill Clinton was president.
Reporters are leaving out that reality of the “staggering” job losses, as CBS called them. Journalists rarely point out that total unemployment isn’t even as high as it was during Clinton’s term (and when they do, the Clinton name is conspicuously absent.)[...]
The last time unemployment was at this level wasn’t 1974 – it was October 1993 under Clinton. Unemployment peaked at 7.1 percent during the Big Dog’s term.
What Gainor doesn't tell you: Clinton inherited this high level of unemployment from his predecessor, George H.W. Bush. According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that 7.1 percent peak occurred at the beginning of Clinton's presidency, in February, April and May 1993. Nor does Gainor mention what the unemployment rate was in the last full month of Clinton's presidency -- 3.9 percent.
And yet, Gainor has the chutzpah to complain about how "[j]ournalists manipulate statistics."
Gainor further fails to mention that unemployment was on a largely uninterrupted decline during the eight years of Clinton's presidency, from the aforementioned 7.1 percent to 3.9 percent.
Gainor goes on to write, "Journalists rarely point out that total unemployment isn’t even as high as it was during Clinton’s term (and when they do, the Clinton name is conspicuously absent.)" But he fails to note that the vast majority of the actual job losses that resulted under his prececessor.
Indeed, George H.W. Bush's name is, to coin a phrase, conspicuously absent from Gainor's article.
