RUSH: Danny in Atlanta, we go to you next on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I, like you, I am sick and tired of reading all these national papers, hearing on the news how bad our economy is. Now, granted I know, you know, there are some bad things and gas is going up there, but last weekend I think they said Indiana Jones is $130 million, is what it grossed. So honestly, you know, we have money, people are just choosing to do wrong things with their money. And for me personally, I am a school teacher, not ashamed to say I made a little over $37,000 this year. My wife is a stay-at-home mom to my two young daughters. Despite that, we own everything we have, includes two cars, except our house, which I just dropped down to a 20-year mortgage payment, and we have no debt, and we have money in savings. So, you know, for me, I’m tired of hearing people making excuses. It’s definitely hard work to accomplish what we have, but I think it can be done in today’s times even.
RUSH: Look, your situation is very admirable, and there are a lot of people like you in the country, and I, as commander-in-chief of US Operation Chaos, am very proud of you. Obviously you have a strong set of economic values and discipline, and you’re sticking to it, which will stand you in good stead. The idea of a recession, I’m really not sure how many people are playing along with it. These polls that put out about what people think, I am so dubious of this stuff, ’cause I, like you, I look at the real world. I look at baseball games on TV every night just to see, the stands are packed. It’s not cheap to go to a baseball game anymore. It’s not cheap to park your car there. It certainly isn’t cheap to eat there. The NBA finals, smaller arenas, but the playoffs, rather, they’ve been jam-packed. You have, like you describe, people going to movies in droves. A little cheaper than going to a ballpark or what have you, but there are still people spending money, and it’s not a recession.
I am a little bit more confident and optimistic that the majority of the American people are not playing along with that as opposed to the media reports that most of America is down in the dumps and feeling hopeless. In fact, that reminds me, there’s a story I have here in the stack about hopeless, and it regards the Drive-Bys and what we supposedly have no hope about anymore. I’ll find it during the break. I’ve got so many stacks here. There is so much show prep that’s assembled on a daily basis that if I put it in too many different stacks, I won’t remember what stack. Ah! Here we are. It’s an editorial from the Investor’s Business Daily: ‘The Economy Isn’t Hopeless; It’s The Press.’ And here’s the hopelessness list from the Drive-By Media: the war, the economy, gas prices, mortgages, global warming, summer vacation. Public schools ought to be on the hopeless list, but the Drive-Bys never bring that up. But all these things we’re supposed to be hopeless about, let me share with you some of the points of this IBD editorial when we come back because it’s excellent.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Investor’s Business Daily and a signed column by Dan Gainor, the T. Boone Pickens Fellow and vice president of the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute. By the way, Gainor I think is one of the guys who wrote that great piece that we have celebrated numerous times on this program in which he chronicles the 25-year cycles of media reporting on global cooling versus global warming starting back in the late 1800s. I think he’s one of those guys. But nevertheless, ”The Economy Isn’t Hopeless; It’s The Press’ — One look at statistics — from GDP growth to the unemployment rate — and it’s obvious this isn’t the worst economic time in US history. But it might be the worst journalistically. The major media give us only two degrees of economic news — close to ‘apocalyptic’ and worse. They are so outlandishly negative that coverage of the Bear Stearns buyout was vastly worse than reporting of the 1929 stock market crash. As the stock market reeled from the Bear Stearns collapse back in March, ABC News asked: Is the ‘economy heading over a cliff?’ Journalists made it seem so, calling the American financial system everything from ‘bleak’ to in a ‘meltdown.’ ABC, CBS and NBC made comparisons to America’s worst economic turmoil — the Great Depression — more than 40 times in the first four months of 2008.
‘Compare that with how the New York Times summed up its own market outlook in an Oct. 30, 1929, story after billions of dollars were lost in record trading. ‘Despite the drastic decline, sentiment in Wall Street last night was more cheerful than it has been on any day since the torrent of selling got under way,’ wrote the paper. Words like ‘optimism’ and ‘hope’ shouted off the pages of major newspapers. The Oct. 31, 1929, Times described the devastating six-day decline: ‘The market quickly regained its poise and stability. The same day, the Washington Post discussed ‘the passing of the crisis.’ The difference between how the media handled a crisis in 1929 and 2008 was astounding. Network news was four times more negative about the Bear Stearns buyout than major newspapers were about the 1929 crash, which many historians link to the beginning of the Depression.
‘Nearly 80 years later, the crash and the depression that followed are viewed as ‘the great American trauma,’ as economist Murray N. Rothbard wrote in his book America’s Great Depression. … It’s no surprise that with 22 million Americans exposed to that just on the evening news, so many fear another depression. The Business & Media Institute analyzed two much-discussed weeks in America’s stock market history — the crash in 1929 and the week of the Bear Stearns collapse in 2008. BMI compared stories in the 1929 Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post with daily reports on ABC, CBS and NBC in 2008.’ We know what the results were. ‘The modern news media had no such ‘confidence’ in the markets. ABC found a dark cloud for every silver lining, saying: ‘And everywhere you look, it’s bad news.’ On network news, that statement was accurate.’ And so we have a hopelessness list: the war, the economy, gas prices, mortgages, global warming, summer vacation, hopeless. The Drive-By Media portraying your country as hopeless. I’m not convinced as many Americans are buying into it as the Drive-Bys would like.