FAIR: What the Dow isn’t

Pub date March 8, 2009
SectionBruce Blog

fair.gif

Media Advisory from the media advocacy organization called the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

The media is misusing the Dow as a ‘scorecard’ of White House policy

3/5/09
To hear some in the corporate media tell it, you judge a president by how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is performing–and, thus, Barack Obama is not doing a very good job.

As NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory said (3/1/09):
The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That’s $2.3 trillion. Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people–what people think of that government intervention? The Dow is one metric. It closed on Friday at its lowest level since 1997, just over 7,000.