OP-ED - After relentlessly covering the “Fiscal Cliff” dog-and-pony show for months, mainstream media's news-readers and newspaper editors will promote Fiscal Cliff II, the sequel sometimes laughingly referred to as 2013 Debt Ceiling negotiations, just as mercilessly throughout January and February.
Fiscal Cliff II, which has replaced the Senate Budget, will also be miraculously resolved as the politicians who created it queue their accomplices in the media that they are ready to postpone meaningful and corrective legislation indefinitely in deference to authorizing the President to borrow and print deficit dollars.
Lamestream media knew full well the last so-called fiscal cliff was a farcical political ploy; they sold it, and regardless of one’s political bent, we all know what political party the lamestream media represented.
Mainstream media has been drinking political Kool Aid for so long now, its younger, wide-eyed purveyors of content have no idea why they are increasingly referred to as “lamestream” media.
However, to many, American mainstream media has become as misleading and anti-American as one might expect of Al-Jazeera’s “news."
In fact, reports surfaced Thursday confirming Current TV, founded by global-warming climatologist Al Gore, has been sold to Al-Jazeera, which is owned by the government of Qatar. The new channel, set to reach 40 million households, is called Al-Jazeera America.
Another example of lamestream media reporting is a USA Today report out Thursday proudly proclaiming the private sector added 215,000 jobs in the month of December. Never mind that a paragraph or two after quoting the development as “very positive,” USA Today reports that unemployment claims for the current week rose by 10,000 to 372,000. That’s in one week, compared to 215,000 private sector jobs created in the whole month of February.
Do the math. Using an average of 350,000 new weekly unemployment claims in December, it means the U.S. lost about 1.5 million jobs last month, not counting the long-term unemployed who gave up searching for work. Subtract 215,000 jobs created during December in the private sector and we have a net loss of nearly 1.3 million jobs.
In the last year, private employers have added 1.7 million jobs, according to ADP. While gaining 1.7 million jobs in the past year sound might sound impressive on nightly news, it’s important to keep in mind about 1.5 million workers filed unemployment claims in December, based on unemployment filings and the country registered a net loss of about 1.5 million jobs in 2012.
‘But that doesn’t include government jobs added,’ one might say. But the truth is, while private industry has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs amid a long-term economic downturn over the past four years, the federal government has added, at best, 192,000 federal jobs as the nation’s debt topped $17 trillion. Meanwhile, state and local governments are shedding workers faster than a Twinkie factory.
At the same time, a Bloomberg survey predicts the U.S. unemployment rate will increase to nearly 8% in January after recently dropping 0.2 percentage points, reportedly due to the long-term unemployed giving up looking for work.
Mainstream media goes to great lengths to segway into the next propaganda cycle. Consider the following quote published in the USA Today piece:
The hiring reflected in the ADP report defied expectations that companies were holding back because of worries about the fiscal cliff, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, which produces the report with ADP.
``The clearest point in the data is that the fiscal cliff debate has not seemed to do any significant damage,'' Zandi said on a conference call. ``It's very positive, because there is more fiscal debate to come,'' as Congress turns from the tax bill it approved this week to considering spending cuts and an increase in the debt ceiling, he said.
Seriously?
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