Huh?
Unemployment is outrageous and the economy has not recovered.
But if you're willing to use The Great Depression as the baseline, when unemployment in the US was at 25%, you can spin today as 'improved.' You can ignore the fact that unemployment rose in the last years and that we have a crisis in the United States, if you're willing to spin.
So far the press has been far more honest with regards to the economy than they have to the Iraq War.
With the Iraq War, where violence has risen in the last two years, the press loves to disguise that fact by repeatedly using the ethnic cleansing of 2006 and 2007 as the baseline for violence.
When they should be reporting that violence has risen, that violence is increasing in Iraq, they instead tell you that it's 'down' from a period of over five years ago.
By repeatedly using that 'baseline,' they lie and obscure the realities of Iraq.
That they continue to get away with it is appalling and says a great deal about so-called antiwar outlets which are too busy these days obsessing over the GOP primary to actually weigh in on the Iraq War.
Stupid on the small things, stupid on the big things, the US press once again demonstrated that they couldn't be counted on to cover the Iraq War as so many outlets announced that it had been decided there would be NO immunity for Iraqi troops (see C.I.'s "They bungled the SOFA coverage as well" for a critique of The New York Times' mis-reporting). Later that day, Parliament would explore one option to grant immunity -- thereby demonstrating that no blanket decision had been made and that, yet again, The New York Times can't grasp simple facts.
Why does the Iraq War continue to drag on? Because so damn few American outlets pay any attention to it and those that do seem to wallow in their own errors.
