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The Government Accountability Office was a newsmaking machine. The office filed a trio of reports at hearings on Capitol Hill. CBS led with the GAO's analysis of the first five months of the $787bn program to stimulate the economy. ABC selected an expose of laxity by the Federal Protective Service, the government building security force run by the Department of Homeland Security. A third GAO report scrutinized bottled water; it was covered by all three newscasts. NBC did not fall under the GAO's spell when it picked its lead; it chose coordinated Denial of Service attacks on American and South Korean Websites. The fiscal stimulus study was Story of the Day as Michael Jackson, at last, appears to be yesterday's news.

Considering that CBS decided to make the fiscal stimulus story its lead, its coverage created more confusion than clarity. Anchor Katie Couric introduced Nancy Cordes' report by citing Republicans criticism of the $787bn package as a "costly failure." Yet Cordes' story on the GAO report emphasized the lack of spending not the excess of it: so far only 11% of the funds for infrastructure projects have been disbursed. She quoted the Democratic argument that funds had been expedited for the social safety instead: "The money spent to backfill state budgets has saved teaching jobs, covered Medicaid payments, boosted unemployment benefits and increased funding for food stamps."

Next CBS turned to Jill Schlesinger (at the tail of the Cordes videostream), the editor-at-large of its moneywatch.com. Yet Schlesinger could not decide whether Keynesian deficit spending represented economic wisdom during a deep recession: "When we talk about the stimulus, we are talking about taxpayer money and right now we are borrowing to try to stimulate the economy. That means we have to pay back in the future so we must think very clearly about what that means," she told anchor Couric, without sharing the results of that thinking. Later Schlesinger hinted that the Paradox of Thrift was no big concern, so we guess that moneywatch.com has a Chicago School editorial slant: "If people live responsibly and take control of their financial lives we will have a stronger economy."

At ABC, This Week's George Stephanopoulos does not reject the Keynesian option out of hand: "A lot of economists are saying now that a second stimulus is going to be necessary because of this high unemployment right now," he told anchor Charles Gibson. On NBC, Lisa Myers suggested that the public works component of the $787bn spending had "created or saved 150,000 jobs since February. The problem is that that number is dwarfed by the almost 2m jobs lost over that period."

Andrew Tyndall 7/13/09 6:53:17 pm

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