Yesterday on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove went on a tirade against the media for hyping the struggling state of the economy. They claimed that it’s not as bad as reports are making it out to be, and journalists are overstating the case in order to help President-elect Barack Obama:
O’REILLY: All right, so you are agreeing with me then that there is a conscious effort on the part of The New York Times and other liberal media to basically paint as drastic a picture as possible, so that when Barack Obama takes office that anything is better than what we have now?
ROVE: Yes.
Watch it:
The bad economy is not a fiction created by journalists. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, “much higher than the 320,000 economists forecast.” Presenting his report to Congress, BLS commission Keith Hall said that it was “maybe one of the worst jobs reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics has ever produced” in its 124-year history”:
For years, in fact, the Bush administration has tried Rove and O’Reilly’s strategy of insisting that nothing is wrong. Although the United States has been in a recession since December 2007, the Bush administration has continued to insist that the economy was strong. The result? A government unprepared to deal with “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
Transcript:
O’REILLY: OK, now the economy. Do you agree with me that the media is not-the economy, but Afghanistan and Iraq and every other problem the United States has spinning as negative as possible now so that they can buy Barack Obama some time and set up a thing where if anything goes right after he becomes president, they can jump on it.
ROVE: Yes.
O’REILLY: And then they can blame everything on Bush for quite a long period of time?
ROVE: You know, it’s interesting to me, this question of proportionality and consistency. I wanted to take you and your viewers back to March of 2000 when the stock market peaked out. We had a 38 percent decline in the Dow Jones. We had a 50 percent decline in the S P 500. And we had a 78 percent decline in the Nasdaq before the markets bottomed out.
Now, I don’t remember The New York Times or the national or The Washington Post or some of these national news organizations treating the precipitous decline in the markets under Clinton with the scare words that they’re using today. Similarly look, and I don’t want to diminish the challenges we face, particularly when it comes to unemployment. If you don’t have a job, it’s 100% unemployment rate for you. But the unemployment rate today was at certain times during Clinton and in most of Carter time in office higher. And, yet, we don’t see the similar scare tactics and the similar phrases and words out of the n ational media about these Democrats as we hear about the current situation.
O’REILLY: All right, so you are agreeing with me then that there is a conscious effort on the part of The New York Times and other liberal media to basically paint as drastic a picture as possible, so that when Barack Obama takes office that anything is better than what we have now?
ROVE: Yes. And watch their words when they describe the steps that he wants to take. I noticed again this past weekend, he described this enormous program of spending on infrastructure, on roads and highways and improvements in our infrastructure. And watch how they treat this when he comes into office if he actually pursues this package. And you’ll see very few of them raising serious questions about what kind of stimulative effect it really is going to have, because what we do know is on these kind of big projects, only one out of every four dollars that’s appropriated for them gets spent in the first year. The rest of it gets spent in the out year. So these are not going to have an immediate impact. And let’s see how tough they treat him on this and how much they hold him up to scrutiny.
O’REILLY: Now you know how that’s going to come down, Mr. Rove.
ROVE: We can always hope. We can always.
O’REILLY: Well, see I know hope. All I want is an honest press. I’m not hoping one way or the other.