Americans don’t understand that the economy is doing great because the press is biased against good news, President Barack Obama told a group of prosperous donors Tuesday.
“Frankly, the press and Washington, all it does is feed cynicism,” he insisted, despite getting six years of favorable coverage from establishment newspapers and TV shows.
“Most of you don’t know the statistics I just gave you,” Obama said, after listing a series of cherry-picked data that ignored that roughly 10 million Americans who have given up looking for work, and the $7 trillion in added debt.
“The reason you don’t know [the favorable data] is because they elicit hope. They’re good news … and that’s not what we hear about,” he declared to the roughly 250 supporters who paid up to $1,000 to attend.
“We hear about phony scandals, and we hear about the latest shiny object, and we hear about how Washington will never work,” Obama insisted.
Obama’s complaints about the media are belied by the favorable media coverage he gets.
“Polling news has practically vanished from the Big Three evening newscasts in 2014 as President Obama’s approval ratings have tumbled and the public opposes defining administration policies like ObamaCare,” the Media Research Center reported in September.
In early September, “Gallup found Obama’s approval rating at a record low of 38 percent, yet none of the three broadcast networks bothered to mention this on their evening or morning newscasts.”
In 2012, “from August 27 through October 21, 19% of stories about Obama studied in a cross section of mainstream media were clearly favorable in tone while 30% were unfavorable,” the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism said in November 2012.
For [GOP candidate] Mitt Romney, “15% of the stories studied were favorable, 38% were unfavorable,” it said.
In 2009, the Pew Research Center reported that “as he marks his 100th day in office, President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George [W.] Bush during their first months in the White House.”
“Overall, roughly four out of ten stories, editorials and op ed columns about Obama have been clearly positive in tone, compared with 22% for Bush,” said Pew.
Many other reports — and many reporters too — admit that the established media favors Democratic claims and politicians, including Obama.
