Americans are well accustomed to the mass media covering for Democrats, but it is only in the last eight years that we’ve seen our nation’s journalists propagate White House lies with such utter disdain for the truth. President Barack Obama has been lying about the economy – and more specifically, unemployment – for years, and outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, and, well, every other left-of-center news organization have trumpeted his lies to the detriment of the American people.
So desperate are these “reporters” to beat back Republican criticism that they latch on to whatever numbers and figures they can to make the president’s job record look better than it really is. They do it with impunity, knowing that the economy is too complex for the average reader to find holes in their coverage. And they know that they are otherwise in the clear, since no mainstream media outlet other than Fox News will dare challenge their biased reporting.
Occasionally, of course, they will acknowledge that things aren’t quite as rosy as Obama would have us believe. In the Chicago Tribune this week, for instance, there was a short report about underemployment:
Nearly half of U.S. workers consider themselves underemployed, according to a survey of more than 960,000 people by PayScale, an online provider of salary information.
Three-quarters of those who label themselves as such say they’re not working in a job that uses their education and training. One quarter say they are working part time but want full-time work.
Now, if we had a Republican president who was crowing about bringing America back from the worst recession since the Great Depression, how much of this story would be dedicated to poking holes in those claims? Roughly…the entire thing?
But in the Tribune’s story, Obama’s name doesn’t come up once. Instead, they skip the part of the story where we might reasonably expect to find answers. They vaguely blame the underemployment on business owners who are hesitant to offer full-time positions after surviving the recession and encourage job-seekers to look for part-time work they can use to springboard into a better career. And that’s about it.
Obama’s approval numbers are startlingly high in 2016, partly because the majority of Americans believe that he led the country to a full economic recovery. The White House proudly boasts of a 4.9% unemployment rate, the media gleefully echoes this number, and it is left to conservative media to tell the truth: That the labor force participation rate is at its lowest point since 1978. If that rate had remained steady since Obama took office, his official unemployment rate would be a staggering 8.7%. That’s the real number. That’s Obama’s legacy.
Or it would be, if anyone in the liberal media had the integrity to report it.
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