What Media Bias? Part 108
When I went to Yahoo’s main page, under “In the News” is the headline, “Shopping Season Expected to be Weakest in Years”. Now, given that I saw people lining up at Best Buy at 8pm yesterday for a 5am opening today, I thought the headline a bit off-center. There are two reasons for this:
1. Stores have been packed when I’ve been in them over the past few weeks.
2. How in heck would anyone really know what people will do on a subjective thing like Christmas shopping?
So, I clicked on the link, and this is what I got:
Stores usher in holiday shopping season
By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO, AP Business Writer
19 minutes agoNEW YORK - The nation’s shoppers — who have been hibernating in recent months because of worries about rising gas prices and falling home values — jammed malls and stores for pre-dawn discounts on everything from TVs to toys on the official start of Christmas shopping.
The aggressive tactics — bigger discounts and expanded hours like midnight openings_ apparently worked. Based on early reports, Macy’s Inc., Toys “R” Us, K-B Toys Inc. and others that were noisy with discounts reported bigger crowds for the early morning bargains than a year ago. And electronic gadgets, particularly the hard-to-find Nintendo Wii, topped shoppers’ wish lists, though frustrations were high among shoppers who couldn’t get their hands on the limited bargains.
With the economy relying heavily on the consumer, however, it’s crucial that the Black Friday euphoria lasts throughout the season, expected to be the weakest in five years.
Expected by whom? Well, as it turns out, over the past few days I’ve actually been subjected to some MSM reporting - waiting for the Macy’s parade to come on and while waiting for the football games to start. I heard story after story about how bad the shopping season was going to be and how everything was going to heck in a handbasket…it seemed to me that the MSMers were certainly expecting the season to be the weakest in years. But what did they base this expectation on? Officially, on rising oil prices and the slack housing market - as if we hadn’t had rising oil prices for the past 5 years and as if our economy was based on selling our house for a higher price every other year.
But then fact comes in - people are jamming the stores. What to do? Well, can’t just wait for the facts to come in and then report them - have to pre-make some facts, and then when real facts come in, we still have to fit them into a pre-selected narrative. And thus you get the above quoted story - which has only the fact of surging shoppers, but is laced with the supposition - reported as fact - that it will be a bad year in spite of all that actual shopping going on.
This is what we can expect from now until November next year - the MSM latching on to anything it can spin in a negative manner (from which, of course, only a Democrat can save us), and keeping at it until it is proven wrong, but then just going on to the next supposition of impending doom.
18 comments November 23rd, 2007
