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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 10/28/10

America's Happy News Media

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By Dave Lindorff


When I lived in China back in the early 1990s, it was entertaining to read the Chinese newspapers, all of them state-owned. In them, China's government was always making excellent decisions, the economy was always improving, the leaders of other nations were always praising China's leaders, and the economic "reform" initiated by that wise elder statesman Deng Xiaoping, was producing a miracle rebirth of the nation.


These stories were jarringly at odds with what I saw when I travelled to the countryside, and found that farmers were being expected to eke out livings for their families on plots of land smaller than the footprint of some Americans' houses, that baby girls were being abandoned in orphanages when farm families bore a son, because of child-limit policies that made having a girl a big financial burden--especially since the tradition of girls going over to the family of their husband meant that not having a son could be a death sentence for parents in their old age. They were jarringly at odds too, with the misery I witnessed all the time among the tens of millions of rural migrants who flooded cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and other major metropolises looking for contract work, and with the appalling pollution of water and air (when I lived in Xi'an for five months, I could count the number of days I was actually able to see the round circle of the sun in daytime because of the perpetual smog that enveloped the city).


But say one thing about China. People there knew they were being fed a line of crap in their newspapers and on TV.


What about here in the US. We are getting fed the same line of crap by our media, but it's not owned by the state.


Take the economy. We are told almost every day that unemployment in the US is 9.6%, yet this is simply a fraud. The unemployment figure being reported excludes many people who are clearly unemployed--notably "discouraged" workers who have given up looking for jobs because the effort is pointless, workers who would like to work but can't find jobs, and workers who hold part-time jobs, but want full-time work. If we add these people to the total, America's unemployment rate today is over 17%, which is one-in-six working-age people, not the one-in-ten that you get using the more restrictive methodology that gets all the media attention.


It wouldn't be a problem if, when news organizations reported the 9.6% figure, they also reported the more inclusive number, but it never happens. That leaves Americans who have jobs thinking things are much better than they really are. The folks who are unemployed, or who have people in their families who are unemployed, know the real picture, but they are, of course, in the minority, and more often than not, they are at the lower income levels, which politicians and the media don't care much about.


There is also a misreporting process when it comes to another statistic--the weekly number of new jobless claims at unemployment offices.


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Dave Lindorff, winner of a 2019 "Izzy" Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism from the Park Center for Independent Media in Ithaca, is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper (more...)
 

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