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All three newscasts chipped in with hard times features. By coincidence, both ABC's Gigi Stone and NBC's Michelle Kosinski settled on Boston to illustrate the weak economy. Kosinski found home heating oil prices in New England failing to fall as rapidly as crude costs on global markets: an average household will pay $500 more this winter compared with the past five years. ABC's Stone took A Closer Look at the costs of healthcare--deductibles and co-payments and prescription drugs--rising so quickly that even patients with insurance are skimping on preventive health and medications. Over at newsbusters.org, our conservative news-monitoring colleague Brent Baker found it amusing that these "heart-rending anecdotes of people in pain thanks to the awful Bush economy" should emanate from the "veritable liberal nirvana" of Massachusetts. Yet neither Stone nor Kosinski mentioned George Bush, the Republican President, nor Deval Patrick, the commonwealth's Democratic governor
A hard times federal program that was singled out--for praise--is the Individual Development Account. Seth Doane showed us how the IDA works in his CBS series The Other America. IDA subsidizes $2000 in annual savings by working poor families--up to $40,000 annual income for a family of four--by matching their IDA contributions two-to-one. Doane introduced us to Richelle Durham, a participant in Washington State, who became homeless with her three children when she broke up with her abusive husband, yet manages to put aside that $2000 out of an annual income of just $20,000.
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