Fox News Blames Media For Positive Public Perception Of President Obama

Fox News Blames Media For Positive Public Perception Of President Obama

With the first Presidential debate coming up this Wednesday and Mitt Romney falling behind in the polls, the GOP goons over at Fox News are on their best bullish.

Most recently, they published an article blaming the media for excessively covering the positive economic news while President Obama has been in office in an effort to paint him in a better light than his Republican counterparts.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

Judging from the media coverage, you might think that our economy was improving. You’d be wrong.

The truth is that the slowest recovery on record appears destined to set even more records for slow growth. That’s not good news for President Obama. And more bad economic news hit him this past week. Here’s a short list of indicators:

— Durable goods orders plunged 13.2 percent in August.

— Median household income has actually fallen. Income has dropped from $53,718 to $50,678 since the “recovery” started in June 2009

Durable goods and a $3,000 decrease in household income over a three-year time period, huh? We’d think they could at least find competitive statistics..smh. But wait, there’s more:

The media decided to emphasize the small grain of positive news that they could find in the report which was the slight uptick in jobs.

But the press isn’t always so consistent. You won’t be surprised to learn that when there is a Democratic president in the White House, the media tend to view things in a positive light. When Republicans are at the helm, they are more negative.

Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute and I recently studied newspaper headlines from 1985 to 2004. We looked at the percentage of newspaper headlines that were positive when new economic numbers were released. For example, after accounting for the unemployment rate and new jobs and whether those numbers were increasing or decreasing, we looked at the percentage of newspaper headlines for those stories that could be classified as positive, negative, neutral or mixed.

We’re no analysts, but, uh, we think the outrageous number of racially, morally and ethically inappropriate and downright offensive “accidental incidents” that have occurred with the GOP lurking in the background the entire time President Obama has been in office and have skyrocketed since he began his re-election campaign kind of balance things out.

Do you agree with these findings?