Bloomberg on the Government Dole?
June 07, 2009
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This was a great catch by Chris Martenson. Shortly after the payroll numbers were released on Friday, Bloomberg released an article that talked about 'skepticism' over the governments numbers. A short while later, however, the article was changed and spoke of the 'optimism' that the numbers produced. Hmmm...I'm wondering if the journalist who wrote the original piece received some 'encouragement' to rewrite the article. Here's an excerpt from Chris' find:
...Even funnier is that when I first went to a Bloomberg article on this subject, I found this:
June 5 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks retreated, erasing an early advance, amid skepticism that a better-than-estimated report on payrolls signals that the worst of the recession is over.
“People are coming around to the realization that the payroll report wasn’t all that good,” Dan Greenhaus, equity analyst at Miller Tabak & Co., said in an e-mail. “There are, as always, questions surrounding the birth-death model estimations and as that talk continues, people are focusing in on the unemployment rate and the other negative parts of the report.”
(source)
Yay! I thought. Finally, some mainstream questioning of the Birth-Death model.
Unfortunately, that article has been "modified" since the release, and now reads like this (see if you can spot the not-so subtle differences):
June 5 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks rose, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average higher for 2009, as data showing employers cut fewer jobs than forecast last month boosted optimism the recession is ending.
“It’s a heck of a lot better than almost anyone was expecting to see,” said Douglas Cliggott, the Greenwich, Connecticut-based money manager whose $83 million Dover Long/Short Sector Fund beat 97 percent of peers last year. “Clearly lots of people want this market to go up. They’ve gone long and they don’t want this party to stop.”
(source)
Yikes. Maybe it's just me but I see an enormous difference between those two versions.
In case anyone is wondering if I am somehow making this up, I assure you I am not. Luckily, I can still search the original text of the article in Google, because it has not yet refreshed its cache. Here's an image I just snapped off of Google of the article in question:
As you can see, the original wording of "skepticism" and the birth-death are all in there, (but are clearly no longer in the article). Most aggravatingly, there is no indication that the article has been seriously altered. Usually there is at least an "Update" warning. Took me a while to figure out that what I was seeing was real-time content-swapping to reflect an entirely different set of views from the original.
I think it's important to track the ways in which media seeks to manipulate impressions and convey opinions and beliefs under the guise of objective reporting.
Oh well, at least the mainstream media expressed some skepticism about the birth-death model, even if only for a few minutes before it got yanked and replaced with a diametrically opposed statement of optimism and belief.
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