AP Economic Wisdom

The Republic is truly doomed. I was with some relatives yesterday who are pretty well informed. Not news junkies or blog fiends, but good, average-American, read-the-papers-watch-the-news types. They discussed how bad the economy is and the evils of predatory lending.

The lead Yahoo/AP headline today is pretty instructive: "Economy sputters with 0.6 percent growth"

I suppose you can call < 1% sputtering -- but I read it and thought "well, that's not recession." And when you get to the fourth paragraph, the AP confirms:

Under one rough rule, the economy needs to contract for six straight months to be considered in a recession. The government will release its estimate for first-quarter GDP in late April.

Under another rough rule, Zero degrees Celsius is considered "freezing," and 4 + 7 is generally considered to be around 11.

An instructive article would have pointed that out in the lede. 0.6 is sluggish but a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Instead we get speculation:

WASHINGTON - The economy nearly sputtered out at the end of the year and is probably faring even worse now amid continuing housing, credit and financial crises.

We speculate in the lede, provide a poor definition of recession in paragraph four, and put a negative headline on it -- yup, it's an AP story. Kind of surprising they didn't mention Abu Ghraib...

Media and Blogging Posted by jk at March 27, 2008 10:44 AM