I guess I’m right there with him, because I not only noticed it days before he did, I noticed it during the Bush Administration.
It’s a common theme whenever you have a Republican president and a strong economy: The media go looking for economists who will predict that a recession is right around the corner, and they jump all over any indication there could be a slowdown coming.
Advertisement - story continues below
They’ll jump on troubling global indicators. They’ll tout the tiniest dip in consumer confidence, or housing starts, or factory output. It doesn’t matter what it is. If they can use it to make the case that the Republican president’s economic policies aren’t really working and everything will fall apart any second now, they’ll run with it for days.
This, of course, is part and parcel of a larger and never-ending media effort to cast aspersions on every conservative officeholder, and of the policies they implement, unless of course they go John McCain and turn on their own side. This is not a “conspiracy.” It’s just how the media operate. It has been for generations, and you’d have to be an idiot not to notice it.
But lately the media have taken to casting shade on those who don’t trust them by calling them “conspiracy theorists,” and of course Trump is their favorite target for that charge:
President Donald Trump has claimed in private conversations that opponents are conspiring against him to skew economic data and damage his chances of reelection in 2020, The New York Times reported Sunday.
Sources familiar with the matter told The Times on condition of anonymity that the president had told aides and allies that opponents were seeking to rob him of a key strength entering the 2020 election campaign — the strength of the economy during his presidency.
Advertisement - story continues below
That’s from Business Insider, but there are more headlines along the same line.
From the New York Times: In Economic Warning Signals, Trump Sees Signs of a Conspiracy
Are the media trying to talk the economy into a recession?
From the Washington Post: Trump’s scam is failing him, and he’s in a panic over it
From Bloomberg: Steel Yourself for the Trump Slump
You have to love the shamelessness of the media, who refuse to acknowledge they ever push an agenda or influence events with the way they slant their coverage.
Advertisement - story continues below
But I want to give you some insight about how you end up with such monolithic coverage, and why their defense of themselves is so vacuous.
Journalists will often scoff at accusations of bias or an agenda with sarcastic comments like, “Oh, sure, we get together every morning and plot how we’re going to slant the news! And we wait for our orders from the Democrats! Yep! That’s how it works! Idiots!”
No, that’s not how it works, because it doesn’t need to work that way. Journalist vote Democratic at a rate of about 85 percent. They’re already inclined to slant their coverage to the left without anyone telling them to. And many of them don’t think they’re biased. They just think they’re telling the truth. It’s not uncommon to hear left-wing journalists insist “the truth has a liberal bias,” which is their way of saying that if you don’t like the truth because you’re a right-wing nutjob, that’s your problem.
So when a Republican president is presiding over a good economy, they feel duty-bound to go out and prove it’s all Pyrrhic, because that’s what they think the truth is. And to the extent they’re trying to knowingly talk down the economy, they think they’re doing you a service. They think they’re exposing to you what a scam it all is before you make a mistake in the next election.
Advertisement - story continues below
They’re just here to help you.
Of course, you could lose your job as a result, but if the Democrats are elected they’re just give you everything for free anyway, so it will all be fine.
And if anyone notices they’re doing this, especially if that anyone is Donald Trump, just laugh it off as a conspiracy theory and keep right on doing it.
