Right Wing Finance

I’ve been noticing a trend in the repeating of big news outlets recently. I’ve noticed it for some time, but it’s just now that I’ve gotten to a point where I need to vent about it. It was an article by Laura Rowley, a personal finance writer for Yahoo! Finance that pushed me over the edge.

The problem is that almost every new outlet has picked up the narrative that the recession began in December of 2007. The problem is that it didn’t actually begin for almost a full year later!

The U.S. recession actually began in the 4th quarter of 2008, not December of 2007.

To show you what I mean, let me start with a definition. InvestorWords dictionary defines a recession as:

“A period of general economic decline; typically defined as a decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters.”

As you can see in this chart of the US GDP for 2008 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the GDP didn’t have 2 consecutive quarters of negative growth until the end of 2008.

So why is it then that so many in the media still parrot each other’s incorrect start of the recession?

Here’s an example from Reuters:

“The index is now 0.6 points above its 12-month average of 48.1 and 4.3 points above its reading of 44.4 in December 2007, when the recession began.”

…and the NYT:

“The U.S. economy officially sank into a recession last December, which means that the downturn is already longer than the average for all recessions since World War II”

.. and the AP:

“There are about 6.3 unemployed workers competing, on average, for each job opening, a Labor Department report shows. That’s the most since the department began tracking job openings nine years ago, and up from only 1.7 workers when the recession began in December 2007″

And lastly, from the Yahoo! Finance article that set me off:

” Since the start of the recession in December 2007, 7.6 million people have lost their jobs, and the unemployment rate has doubled, to 9.8 percent.”

To be clear, the article is a good one. It’s just that Ms. Rowley is passing along the same incorrect date that bugs me, and here’s why.

I can understand why the liberal leaning AP, Reuters and NYT would have a vested interest in “the Great Recession” taking solid hold in the era of George W. Bush, but Yahoo! Finance? Laura Rowley doesn’t strike me as the politically motivated type. So how to explain this?

I see 2 possible reasons for this type of erroneous reporting:

1. The media figure is a repeater, and not a reporter. They are simply parroting the facts and figures as they have learned them, no matter how incorrect they may be.

2. It’s the other media agenda. Most people are now familiar with the liberal media agenda, but a second, almost as common agenda is fear and sensationalism. Nothing sells news quite like fear and the more sensational, the better. By stating that the “recession began in December of 2007″ it makes the recession seem all the longer and more severe.

I’m not saying this recession isn’t severe, but it also didn’t technically start until late 2008.

Some may point out that recessions can be defined by unemployment, and that unemployment started to rise in December 2007. If that’s your marker, then you can proclaim that the recession is over, as many in the media today are doing, when unemployment is rocketing toward 10% and 500,000+ jobs are lost every month.

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