Topic: NewsBusters
Noel Sheppard is joining the right-wing crowd eager to baselessly blame President Obama for the stock market downturn.
In a March 6 NewsBusters post, Sheppard touts Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal articles detailing the decline of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since Obama was inaugurated, asking: "will media ever blame current economic conditions on Obama, or will they continue to point fingers at George W. Bush despite his residence being in Texas?"
But as Media Matters details, Bloomberg and the Journal (not to mention Sheppard) ignored long-term trends -- specifically, that the Dow was on a downward trajectory months before the election and inauguration. Further, Sheppard, like Newsmax and CNSNews.com before him, ignore events not related to Obama that have driven the market lower.
Indeed, Sheppard seems quite desperate to blame the recession on anyone but President Bush; he starts by stating that "Obama was inheriting a recession that some believe began as far back as December 2007." Sheppard neglects to mention that among those "some people" placing the recession's start at that particular point are the committee of economists responsible for dating the nation's business cycles.
All of which, unsurprisingly, runs counter to what NewsBusters have written. For instance:
- A Jan. 14 post by Jack Coleman was offended by the idea that President Bush, "who served in neither the presidential administration before his, nor the Congress, had anything to do with creating the 'mild economic downturn' that began weeks after he took office."
- A July 2008 post by Tom Blumer was even more offended that Obama said at the time the U.S. was in a recession: "Of course, we're not in a recession yet, because there hasn't even been one official quarter of negative growth, let alone two." Blumer might want to revisit that post.
But NewsBusters embraces such double standards. Don't expect Sheppard to act any differently.
