The Media Research Center spent 2023 insisting there was a recession despite data indicating otherwise, and it fervently hoped that the failure of a couple banks would destroy the economy -- all in the hope of hurting President Biden's re-election prospects.
By Terry Krepel Posted 2/14/2024
ConWebWatch has documented how the Media Research Center continually talks down the economy under President Biden, particularly when it comes to reporting on GDP. In the summer of 2022, it heavily hyped that two quarters of negative GDP that occurred meant there was a devastating recession and that other economic data should be ignored -- but when GDP turned positive in the fourth quarter, it denied that this meant anything. The MRC was still pushing that narrative at the start of 2023; a Jan. 10 post by Joseph Vazquez complained that New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman called Republicans (like Vazquez) "economy deniers," huffing that "Krugman’s elitism clearly precludes him from seeing economic danger signs that don’t comport with his leftist politics."
When the GDP numbers for the fourth quarter of 2022 showed it to be in positive territory, the MRC cranked up the spin, with a Jan. 26 post by Kevin Tober insisting that the growth was "anemic":
Forget about the recession and rampant, crippling inflation that has soared to 40-year-highs, MSNBC's All In host Chris Hayes was here to assure you that the Biden economic recovery has been "one of the most successful, remarkable recoveries in all of American economic history." Sadly for Hayes, the large eyeglasses on his face won't make him seem smart with economically illiterate comments like that. The pollyannaish host made these comments on the heels of Thursday's GDP report which showed the economy grew by an anemic 2.9 percent.
Hayes began by ironically complaining about the negative media coverage of the Biden economy: "If you've been watching the news over the past few weeks, you might get the sense the U.S. is hemorrhaging jobs, as high-profile companies from Amazon to Meta, to Goldman Sachs, and IBM lay off thousands of workers."
"But one of the constants of the Biden economy is that there's a weird, persistent gap between the media’s coverage of the economy, which is almost always everything’s terrible, and what the data show about its actual state," Hayes whined.
Apparently, when there were layoffs in major American corporations, it means nothing for the state of the overall economy, and the media was supposed to ignore the news to help Biden's electoral prospects.
He then pointed to a chart that showed a graph of the direction the economy was headed and bragged that "the U.S. economy grew by 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022."
Tober didn't mention that GDP had been in negative territory for two quarters of 2022, which mean the recovery (and positive GDP) really is remarkable. But Tober doesn't get [paid to admit that Democrats are doing a good job, so he had to cherry-pick other numbers that adhere closer to his narrative, despite having insisted just a few short months earlier that GDP numbers were the only thing anyone should be looking at.
When GDP turned in another positive number for the first quarter of 2023, the MRC had to spin further -- this time by hypocritically accusing others of spin. An April 27 post by Vazquez dropped the "anemic" line without mentioning the two quarters of negative GDP last year:
Leave it to the propagandists at The New York Times to try to sprinkle some sugar over an anemic GDP report.
The Times economics writer Ben Casselman broke out some confetti for the latest economic report showing a lackluster 1.1 percent GDP growth in the first quarter, which was notably slower than the 1.9 percent forecast. But look on the bright side, bleated Casselman in his sub-headline, “[t]he gross domestic product increased for the third straight quarter as consumer spending remained robust despite higher interest rates.” Casselman’s own headline was heavy on nuance and lacking on context: “U.S. Economy Grew at 1.1% Rate in First Quarter.” Contrast the headline with how other outlets reported the GDP story and The Times’s gambit to protect President Joe Biden’s image from the bad economic news becomes clear. Here was CNBC’s headline: “GDP report points to dreaded stagflation, but these stocks can still work in this environment.” Here was Bloomberg News: “US Economic Growth Slows to 1.1% While Inflation Accelerates.” [Emphasis added.]
Casselman’s spin might even give Looney Tunes character Tasmanian Devil a run for his money.
A post that day by Tober again repeated the "anemic" line (while not admitting last year's two quarters of negative GDP) while praising Fox News for advancing the Republican narrative:
On Thursday, Americans awoke to yet another sign our economy was barreling toward a recession caused by reckless government spending and 40-year-high inflation as the U.S. Commerce Department reported that the U.S. economy grew at a pathetic 1.1 percent in the first quarter of 2023. This was well below the two percent growth economists were expecting, and a far cry from the 2.6 percent GDP growth in the final quarter of 2022. Given this news was released just days after President Joe Biden kicked off his 2024 reelection campaign touting his belief that he's "never been more optimistic about America's future," it was predictable that the "big three" evening news broadcasts would ignore the fact that Biden's economy was teetering on recession.
While millions of Americans were struggling to afford basic necessities due to sky-high inflation, and living in constant fear of losing their jobs, ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News, all wasted time on local weather reports, and news that anti-American athlete Brittney Griner held a press conference to discuss her experience in a Russian prison after breaking the law by bringing illegal drugs into a foreign country.
In contrast, Fox News Channel's Special Report reported on the anemic GDP numbers when noting Biden's cratering approval numbers on the economy. "Fox News polls show voter concerns about the economy are more pervasive. 78 percent rating the economy negatively after today's GDP report came in below expectations with sluggish growth at an annual rate of 1.1 percent for the first quarter," Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich reported.
She then read Biden's out-of-touch statement on the economic figures: "We learned that the American economy remains strong as it transitions to steady and stable growth." These comments from Biden, according to Heinrich are "out of sync with how many really feel."
Vazquez spent a May 2 post complaining that CNN was evolving on the possibility of a recession:
CNN apparently can’t get its talking points in order after wantonly lecturing people to “chill” with the recession talk back in February.
CNN’s May 2 headline didn't mince words about the current precarious state of America’s economy. “Why a US recession is probably coming,” the headline read. That’s the exact opposite of what the same outlet pushed nearly three months prior. “It’s time to chill with all the recession talk,” read the competing Feb. 6 CNN headline. Make up your mind, CNN.
[...]
MRC Business Vice President Dan Schneider called out CNN for its 180-degree turnaround: "The narrative is changing on the state of our economy and our Republic." In Schneider's view, "The legacy media has previously been doing everything they could to protect Joe Biden for his reelection efforts. But recently, you see signs that the media is offering the backdoor to let Biden escape in place of a Democratic candidate in a stronger position to win another term as president."
Vazquez and Schneider didn't mention that the MRC's own recession thinking had also evolved: When there were two quarters of negative GDP, it insisted that this was the only possible definition of a recession, but it had to change that when GDP turned positive in order to keep up its talk-down-the-Biden-economy narrative. And they certainly didn't disclose that their job is to talk down the economy to hurt Biden's re-election chances.
Rooting for bank failures
The MRC is nothing if not a slave to right-wing narratives, and it slavishly tried to promote them in the wake of last year's collapse of Silicon Valley Bank by trotting out various right-wing bogeymen as the cause and denying that lax bank regulation that grew under Donald Trump had anything to do with it. First up was an easy layup by Joseph Vazquez mocking CNBC's Jim Cramer for promoting SVB stock a month before its failure; that was followed by a March 12 post by Kevin Tober that went into Trump defense mode:
It was only a matter of time before the left-wing propagandists at ABC's This Week blamed former President Donald Trump for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank which occurred over two years after he left office. During an interview with Virginia Democrat Senator Mark Warner, Raddatz blamed Trump’s regulatory policies for the bank’s collapse and asked Warner if regretted voting for a banking deregulatory bill.
Raddatz started off the discussion by falsely placing blame: “after the financial crisis in 2008, regulations were put into place to make sure banks could weather large losses. Under President Trump, some of those were rolled back.”
“You were 1 of only 17 Democrats who voted for the bill that rolled back some banking rules including for institutions the size of Silicon Valley Bank,” Raddatz asked.
Even Warner disagreed with her and correctly noted that “these mid-sized banks needed some regulatory relief.”
Explaining to the partisan and economically illiterate Raddatz, Warner said “no matter what the capital had been in this bank if you don't get banking 101 straight if you don’t manage your interest rate risks if you've then got a run at $42 billion in a single day,” it’s unprecedented.
Tober then embraced one of those right-wing narratives: "Since the Silicon Valley Bank was more interested in leftwing gender ideology and other woke priorities, they failed to manage their interest rate risk and as a result, collapsed." Tober offered no evidence that this was, in fact, the case; instead, he linked to a tweet by someone from the right-wing website RedState that had an alleged screenshot of a bank official's bio that called herself a first-generation immigrant who sought to "create a sense of community for our LGBT+ employees and allies." Is Tober saying that immigrants and LGBTQ+ people are unqualified to work at a bank?
After another Vazquez dunk on Cramer, Renata Kiss peddled the "woke" narrative again (with help from Fox News) in a March 14 post:
California’s woke Silicon Valley Bank went belly up last week, showing the inevitable consequence of ESG policies, according to HomeDepot co-founder Bernard Marcus.
On the March 11 edition of Fox News Cavuto Live, Bernard Marcus, co-founder of The Home Depot, slammed Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) woke practices that led to its recent collapse. “These banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is shareholder returns,” said Marcus. “Instead of protecting their shareholders and their employees, they’re more concerned about social policies.”
[...]
When asked if there are more woke banks out there, Marcus said yes adding that, “the system and the administration has pushed many of these banks into [being] more concerned about global warming than they do about shareholder return.”
Despite not offering any evidence whatsoever that being "woke" had any direct role in the bank's collapse, Kiss insisted Marcus was correct: "Marcus is right on point. Just last year, 19 state investigated six U.S. banks for working with the U.N. to deny credit to fossil fuel-related companies. More recently, the Royal Bank of Canada instituted “climate modifier” bonuses for its top executives as part of their ESG agenda." But that doesn't prove Marcus correct on anything either -- it's just an attempt to peddle the anti-ESG agenda currently in vogue at the MRC.
Vazquez angrily returned for another March 14 post, seething that President Biden got credit for keeping the bank failure from morphing into a full-blown financial crisis:
White House propaganda machine Politico wasted no time in trying to cast President Joe Biden as the savior of Silicon Valley startups by praising his ridiculous federal "bailout" plan.
Politico was off to the races in its ridiculous Mar. 13 story headlined: “How Biden saved Silicon Valley startups: Inside the 72 hours that transformed U.S. banking.” The first paragraph made the entire article sound like the plot of a Mission: Impossible script: “On Sunday afternoon, an exhausted group of Biden administration officials gathered to put the finishing touches on a hastily composed plan to stave off a nationwide banking crisis.”
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, according to Politico’s spin, “trigger[ed] a weekend sprint [by Biden officials] to contain the fallout that spanned several agencies and all hours of the day and night.”
[...]
Politico dishonestly attempted to make Biden seem prudent in his scheme to guarantee depositors' funds above the $250,000 limit by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The outlet followed the president’s lead and deflected away from his plan being labeled a “bailout.”
Vazquez didn't explain why it was a horrible thing to keep the U.S. financial system from collapsing.
Autumn Johnson complained -- under the overwrought headline "TYRANNY!" -- about the idea that social media could be moderated in order to stop a bank panic that could cause the financial system to collapse:
The U.S. government and leftists of all stripes have set out to silence speech on Big Tech platforms to protect their preferred narrative on a number of issues, and the latest bailout news following recent bank failures is apparently no exception.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) tweeted March 12 that “[a] Democrat Senator essentially asked whether there was a program in place to censor information on social media that could lead to a run on the banks.” As it turns out, there just might be. The cybersecurity branch of the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (or CISA), published a report adding financial “misinformation” and “disinformation” in June 2022 to a list of threats that supposedly pose “a significant risk to critical functions” of the federal government that it should act on.
“With every passing day it seems we learn of yet another nefarious way in which Big Tech and government are working to silence Americans,” MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris stated. “Over and over again we hear from leftist elites in both the government and private sector how they will protect us from impending doom. But how they will protect Americans, it seems, is often the same, by censoring constitutionally permissible speech online. Simply outrageous.”
Morris didn't explain how disinformation that could collapse the country's financial system could be "constitutionally permissible."
Vazquez came back for take yet another shot at Cramer, this time complaining that government intervention to the the SVB collapse from spreading meant that the economy "is on the cusp of a soft, safe landing." Kiss then returned to serve up more Fox News stenography:
Executives at Signature bank apparently preferred that their employees attend woke lectures and participate in cringey music videos instead of doing what they were hired to do: banking.
On Tuesday’s edition of his eponymous show, Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson lifted the veil on Signature bank’s woke practices that allegedly contributed to its pathetic downfall during the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) meltdown. “If the central bank handed you trillions of dollars free with no strings attached, you would... virtue signal like it was 2023,” he said. “You would spend hundreds of millions of dollars bragging about what a good person you are. And that, of course, is exactly what they did.”
He showed clips of a woke pronoun lecture put on by the Pride Council’s self-proclaimed “gender-queer, transmasculine person” in December, just months before the bank went under. But that’s not all. The bank also filmed cringe-worthy parody as far back as 2011 to attract potential employees and clients to the company.
As before, no actual evidence was offered to directly link videos made 12 years ago to the bank's collapse. Kiss and Carlson don't seem to understand that repeating partisan narratives is not the same thing as providing hard evidence.
After getting tired of pushing that narrative, the MRC then expressed disappointment that the banks' failure didn't destroy the economy because the Biden administration intervened to keep the situation from spreading. Catherine Salgado huffed in a March 16 post:
Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary bashed the federal bailout of Silicon Valley Bank depositors.
O’Leary explained his critiques on Fox Business’s Cavuto: Coast to Coast with host Neil Cavuto on Tuesdsay. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is one of several banks that collapsed last week. O’Leary accused regulators of taking an “isolated incident” and creating a “moral hazard” by applying it as an overall banking concern, guaranteeing deposits above the $250,000 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. limit. He said when the next bank fails, the federal government should just “let it fail.” O’Leary would later state during a segment hours later on the Fox News Channel's Hannity that SVB was “run by idiots.”
O’Leary told Cavuto he predicted “unintended consequences” from the bailout policy, such as signaling to banks that the Federal Reserve will rescue them no matter what.
A March 27 post by Joseph Vazquez returned to rooting for the economy to collapse over the bank failures because it will hurt President Biden:
Economist Peter Schiff blasted the media aversion to acknowledging that the ongoing banking turmoil is in fact a “financial crisis” that could be worse than 2008.
Schiff highlighted America’s record high credit card debt and the failing banks and noted that it wasn’t a coincidence that “both the borrowers and the lenders are broke.” The “reason for that,” said Schiff on the March 21 edition of One America News’ Real America with Dan Ball, “is the Fed. The Fed kept interest rates artificially low for more than a decade, encouraging people to go deeper and deeper into debt and banks to extend” credit to them. Now, Schiff said the Fed’s incessant number of missteps corralled it into a position where it is being “forced” to “raise interest rates, something that was always going to happen.” In turn, the Fed effectively “created another financial crisis,” Schiff analyzed.
Schiff then turned his sights onto the liberal media trying to gaslight people on the real severity of America’s financial situation and deflect away from the horrid memories of 2008. “The media is reluctant to call this a financial crisis. They keep saying it’s a banking crisis. The financial crisis of 2008 was a banking crisis!” According to Schiff, “nobody wants to say what it is because they don’t want to evoke memories and comparisons to 2008.” However, Schiff warned, the collapse of a number of financial institutions like Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank were a “sequel to 2008. And like all sequels, this one’s going to be worse.”
Vazquez spent a March 29 post shockingly not hating George Soros (indirectly, anyway) because a Soros-funded outlet meshed with his talking points:
A major global outlet funded by leftist billionaire George Soros actually published scathing criticism by two economists blasting the Federal Reserve’s role in creating the pretext for the bank failures that rocked U.S. markets.
Project Syndicate, which dubs itself as the “World’s Opinion Page,” published an op-ed by economists Raghuram Rajan and Viral Acharya headlined: “The Fed’s Role in the Bank Failures.” The authors iterated Silicon Valley Bank's (SVB) and Signature Bank's collapse aren't merely linked to the fact that 90 percent of their deposits were “uninsured.” The problem, said Rajan and Acharya, “may be more systemic,” and it involves the Fed’s recklessness. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Apparently Project Syndicate — which has a notorious habit of peddling radical anti-capitalist and eco-extremist views on a global scale — decided to let the truth slip out for once. Soros funded Project Syndicate with at least $1,682,390 between 2018 and 2021 alone.
The authors pointed out that “there is typically a huge increase in uninsured bank deposits whenever the US Federal Reserve engages in quantitative easing [(QE)].” The Fed kept interest rates at near zero and “purchased trillions of Treasury and mortgage bonds” for around two years to artificially stimulate the economy, according to The Hill. This served as the genesis for the inflation crisis that preceded the Fed’s aggressive interest rate hike campaign that would ultimately lead to SVB’s collapse.
Vazquez didn't mention how this op-ed discredits his anti-Soros narrative by proving he (unlike, say. the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com) is interested in promoting a diversity of views.
The next day, Vazquez was compelled to quote another commentator he normally hates because, again, only blind adherence to his narratives matters:
It’s obvious things have gotten bad when President Joe Biden’s talking points are being undercut by one of his most ardent lapdog economists.
Biden took to the press podium March 13 to congratulate himself on his administration’s wild efforts to secure the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank following its historic collapse. Biden attempted to dismiss any notion that what he was pushing was a government bailout. “No losses will be — and this is an important point — no losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Let me repeat that. No losses will be borne by the taxpayers,” Biden claimed.
Not so fast, said New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman, aka Mr. “Transitory” inflation. “[Y]es, they were bailouts,” Krugman rebutted. “I wish the Biden administration weren’t trying to claim otherwise.”
That didn't last, however, because Krugman debunked the right-wing claim that"wokeness" is what caused SVB to fail:
He then went on a tirade, flailing at some of the criticisms levied at SVB for its failures. One that Krugman couldn’t swallow was the allegation that SVB failed because of its fixation on environmental, social and governance standards (ESG). “[That’s] only marginally less ludicrous than claiming that wokeness somehow causes train derailments,” Krugman scoffed. “S.V.B. didn’t stand out from other banks in its concern for diversity, the environment and so on.”
But Krugman didn’t explain his rebuttal well. Perhaps that’s because he was wildly off the mark — kind of like his inflation calls.
Of course, Vazquez didn't offer any sort of coherent rebuttal; instead, he parroted a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Kimberly Strassel that quoted the SVB website saying that "We serve those creating positive environmental change" -- which, of course, is proof of nothing. And he even went on to concede that "there were a myriad of factors that played into SVB’s collapse, such as the Federal Reserve’s ridiculous easy money policies." Still, he insisted it was "ludicrous" for Krugman "the ESG component entirely as a legitimate factor" despite, again, offering no evidence of that purported legitimacy.
U.S. credit downgrade
When the U.S. saw a credit downgrade over the summer amid Republican efforts to shut down the federal government, the MRC tried to blame that on Biden too. Kevin Tober huffed in an Aug. 1 post:
On Tuesday, the credit rating agency Fitch Ratings downgraded the United States' credit score for the first time since 2011 due to the mounting debt and federal government disfunction that has occurred during the first two years of the Biden administration. Of the "big three" evening news broadcasts, only NBC Nightly News bothered to cover the credit downgrade.
Instead, ABC's World News Tonight & CBS Evening News were more preoccupied with a group of pedestrians getting hit by a car in NYC (ABC), and the U.S. Women's soccer team playing their first World Cup with "equal pay" (CBS). This is in addition to their obsessive coverage of Tuesday's indictment of former President Donald Trump in which ABC spent 11 minutes and 56 seconds harping on the news.
Tober wouldn't admit that Republicans are playing a big role in creating that "disfunction" (or that he should have run a spell-check on his item before posting it).
In an Aug. 3 post, Alex Christy whined that one outlet did point out Republican blame:
During a discussion on former President Donald Trump’s latest indictment related to January 6, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle went on a bit of a digression on Wednesday’s The 11th Hour to discuss Fitch downgrading the U.S.’s credit rating, which according to her was caused by “was the chaos created by the GOP” including January 6. Of course, Fitch’s own explanation was a little bit more complicated.
Ruhle was joined by former Reps. Tim Ryan and Charlie Dent, a progressive Democrat and moderate-to-liberal Republican respectively, and addressing Ryan she wondered:
The power of our democracy, the power of our economy, Tim, just yesterday, Fitch, the rating agency, downgraded U.S. credit. And one of the factors was what happened on January 6th, was the gridlock, was the chaos created by the GOP, by these falsehoods and the misinformation getting pushed. Do people realize this, and how fragile things are? And do they care enough?
[...]
With Ruhle nodding in agreement, Ryan continued, “but it's also, you know, huge tax cuts, and me and Charlie may have a conversation about, this but the huge tax cuts that blew a huge hole in the deficit after two wars and after the Bush tax cuts, yeah, of course, you know, we're running deficits that are huge.”
In their “rating action commentary”, Fitch does not use the word “wars” even once. While, it does mention tax cuts, it also mentions “new spending initiatives” and the lack of entitlement reform, “Additionally, there has been only limited progress in tackling medium-term challenges related to rising social security and Medicare costs due to an aging population.”
Fitch also mentions that a significant rise to deficit-to-GDP ratio and while citing debt-limit brinkmanship, laments that the deal that was reach was only “a modest improvement to the medium-term fiscal outlook.”
Christy censored the fact that the Fitch commentary also referenced "erosion of governance ... that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions" -- which is largely Republican-generated.
Thursday’s Morning Joe featured a defensive segment where host Joe Scarborough and President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass teamed up to shove blame on Republicans for the recent credit downgrade of the United States received from Fitch.
Seeking to promote the lie that national debt doesn’t matter and that “Bidenomics” was working, Haass and Scarborough sought out a way to blame the “dysfunctional” state of American politics and name Republicans for that dysfunction, while leaving out any mention of Democratic responsibility.
[...]
Haass thought he could just skirt over the fact that the US has an unprecedented, massive amount of debt that Biden and the Democrats recently added to with their infrastructure legislation and pandemic spending spree. Credit rating is an assessment of whether or not someone can pay back their debt, and the biggest factor into that was the size of the debt.
[...]
So even if political instability was the reason why the credit was downgraded, it was Democrats’ fault.
They spent the money. They forced the debt limit to be raised. They put America in a situation where it couldn’t pay its debts, then called it “Bidenomics” and gaslighted the country into thinking the economy was great. And now, America has begun to pay the price of their financial recklessness and irresponsibility. But you won’t hear that from the media, just finger-pointing and pandering to the far left.
Is that like how Kotara is finger-pointing and pandering to the far right?
Cassandra DeVries served up her own version of the approved partisan spin in another Aug. 3 post:
On Thursday, CNN News Central discussed President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and the even lower approval rating of his management of the economy. They subsequently covered Fitch’s downgrade of the U.S.’s credit score from an AAA to an AA+ on Tuesday because of “deterioration in governance.” Instead of linking the troubling economic conditions to Biden’s policies, CNN quoted Biden’s administration and blamed the previous Trump administration.
[...]
Like most Americans, Fitch disapproved of how Biden handled the economy and the government’s constant increase in borrowing. They distinguished between the economy's condition and how the economy was handled and subsequently lowered the U.S.’s debt rating.
Nicholas Fondacaro brought the narrative to his hate-watching of "The View" in an Aug. 4 post:
In the same week that credit rating agency Fitch downgraded the United States’ credit from AAA to AA+, partially because President Biden refused to negotiate on the debt ceiling with Republicans until the 11th hour, multimillionaire and co-host of ABC’s The View, Joy Behar whined that Biden was not getting “credit” for a “booming” economy. She falsely suggested that “inflation is down” and that average Americans were “having an easier time putting bread on the table.”
Fondacaro offered no evidence that the previous shutdown threat was solely because of Democratic refusal to negotiate. Hasn't he heard that one is not supposed to negotiate with terrorists (economic ones in this case)?
