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Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Umm - Yahoo - I don't Think That's What Obama Said

First of all, put aside all partisan political views and all opinions of the validity of the Administration's economic response for a minute.  I want to focus on simple validity of reporting.

I steamed into bajungi tilt when I saw the Yahoo headline:
"New Obama Plans "Spend our way out" of Downturn."
I'm clearly in the "you can't spend your way out of it when you're already up to your eyeballs in debt" camp. There's just one problem - according to the text of the speech released by the White House, that's not what Obama said.    What he actually said was

"Even as we have had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term, we have begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run."

I'm no fan-boy of the administration's economic policies, but I think Yahoo's headline is simply factually incorrect and sensationalistic, which is especially interesting because I feel like this administration has had better control of positive spin in the mainstream media than any other administration in history.  Obama's plans may very well still be to spend our way out of the downturn, but Yahoo quoted it as if he actually said that, which he did not.

-KD

2 comments:

Onlooker said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Onlooker said...

Kid

FWIW, blame AP, not Yahoo. It's their story. And the friggen thing is all over the place, of course, being a "news wire" story. I'm sure Obama and staff are regretting that phrase being in there anywhere now.

Another thing. I looked around (web search) to see how it was reported elsewhere. All I saw was this AP story everywhere with the bogus headline. Yahoo had apparently changed their headline from the canned one AP one that you quoted. It's not quite so bad but still misleads in the same way.

I'm with you by the way. We're going to be choking on this debt for decades wondering why we can't get our economy off it's ass, like Japan. Unless we have a currency crisis first. That will make Japan look like a picnic.