Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Bleak outlook for press accuracy

This is among today's headlines in NYTimes:


I was wondering if "unusually gradual and prolonged period of recovery" is new Fedspeak for a "big, terrible depression". So I searched the speech, which was helpfully linked off the same headline:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20090218a.htm.

The speech contains no words "unusually", "gradual", or "prolonged". It does contain the word "and".

1 comment:

BadTux said...

This reminds me of when the Washington Post reported on the Florida recount in 2001. They reported, "AP/Washington Post recount shows Bush won." And then you read about four paragraphs down, and find that if all votes were recounted rather than just the ones Gore wanted recounted, Gore won. It irritated me more that they buried the lede that way than the actual contents of the story. Of course, this was September 12, 2001, so they had other things on their minds too...

Anyhow, Pravda on the Hudson, like Izvestia on the Potomac, has the Party line to uphold... nevermind that a different branch of the Party is in power today. Meanwhile the following quote pops out at me from that speech: However, banks are choosing to leave the great bulk of their excess reserves idle, in most cases on deposit with the Fed. So much for bailouts... they're just shoving the money under (virtual) mattresses, where it does no good in the real economy (the economy of goods and services, as vs. the economy of funny-shaped pieces of green toilet paper).