Media and Conflict

The existence of a pro-business, pro-government bias led to ineffectual journalistic coverage of U.S. unemployment during the period leading up to the 2008-2009 recession. In what has come to be known as the Great Recession because of its comparability to the Great Depression, the U.S. unemployment rate reached historic highs. The magnitude of the recession was such that economists and policy-makers should have been better prepared to manage the looming crisis, but instead were caught unawares because they relied on self-serving forecasts that minimized unemployment forecasts. The news media was complicit in its minimalist coverage of the unrealistic projections that the Bush White House and administration served up.

In that context, and given the far-reaching effects on U.S. economy, the abbreviated reports of unemployment forecasts deserve closer scrutiny. This paper explores reasons the news media rarely challenged the consistently inaccurate unemployment forecasting, projections that should have informed...
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