About those unemployed (Burying the Lead)

 

Yeah, we also notice that there was very little news in the Virginian Pilot about the abysmal jobs report. Most of the people who noticed were on Wall Street, not main street because the numbers were so little noted by the non-financial press. 

 

 It’s hard to keep cheer-leading for an administration that has spent so many trillions claiming to have focused like a laser beam on jobs and has gotten so little for it. Even the obligatory “it could have been worse” is sounding even lamer than usual. So the Democrats in the media are just turning their backs on the unemployed and the poor and turning instead to gay marriage, gun control or trying to destroy the next Republican to run for public office with Democrat press releases disguised as news stories.

Bud Norman reminds us that this was not always the case.

The press will keep trying to blame heartless Republican parsimoniousness, wedded as it is to the idea that catastrophe will surely ensue if the government doesn’t keep growing at a steady 6 percent or so every year, but explaining this convoluted theory apparently requires more effort than the ink-stained wretches can currently muster.

No other explanation comes to mind for the lack of attention being to the economy, given the old media’s usual giddy enthusiasm for the suffering of the common man. We can recall times of 5 percent unemployment during our newspaper days when the editors were adamant that we find a suitably sympathetic fellow who was out of work and demanding some government action, but now the press seems far less concerned with his plight and perhaps a bit worried that all the trillions of dollars of government action that are already going on might be the reason that a much larger number of equally sympathetic fellows are out of work. If it’s not an ideological bias on the part of the press, perhaps all that down-sizing at America’s newspapers has made it difficult to find any unemployed people other than former colleagues.

The past week also brought the news that America’s poverty rate has reached a level not seen since the ‘60s, but only the most were likely to have seen it. Back in the ‘60s the poverty rate was such a huge story that a “War on Poverty” broke out, with bureaucrats funneling billions of dollars into rural backwaters and urban ghettos, but this time around the few desultory press accounts seem intent only on preserving the status quo.

I can hardly wait for a new Republican administration when the “Democrat operatives with by-lines” can begin reporting on the old, the poor, the sick and the unemployed again and blaming it on government policies.