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A single statistic from the Commerce Department was Story of the Day: 3.5% was the rate at which the Gross Domestic Product grew in the year's third quarter, the economy's first sign of growth since the summer of 2008. The Great Recession may be over. CBS and NBC led with the economy, even though NBC anchor Brian Williams was in Kabul for Day Three of his Afghanistan field trip--he split anchoring chores with David Gregory in Washington DC. ABC led with the cost of war, as Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama made a midnight trip to Dover AFB to salute the return of 18 military coffins.

NBC covered the GDP story from the White House. Savannah Guthrie found the President "hardly triumphant" about the renewed growth and heard his aides "tread carefully…Advisors know the economic indicator that matters most to middle America--jobs." CBS' Anthony Mason had one calculation of the damage of the recession: a loss of 7m jobs. Betsy Stark at ABC had another: 26m unemployed or underemployed.

Both ABC's Stark and CBS' Mason were more ready than the White House itself to credit federal deficit spending with the GDP's expansion. "The $787bn stimulus package may have ignited a recovery," declared CBS' Mason. "The government's fingerprints on this rebound are hard to miss," was how ABC's Stark put it. Both mentioned federal subsidies for automobile purchases--Cash for Clunkers--and for first-time buyers of homes.

Chip Reid, CBS' man at the White House, reminded us that many Republicans do not subscribe to the notion that deficit spending has a stimulative effect: "They do not understand how some stimulus projects will create any jobs." As the Obama Administration prepares to document how jobs were "created or saved" by federal government spending, Reid warned that Congressional Republicans will call the report "a world-class example of government obfuscation." He reminded us that a previous version of the jobs report had been scrutinized by the Associated Press and was found to contain "hundreds of errors."

Andrew Tyndall 11/1/09 6:22:41 pm

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