On Sept. 30, new national economic figures were trumpeted in a front page story in the New York Times, reprinted in a page one P-I story with the cheerful headline "Good economy `seeping down'; minorities share income gain." It sounds like great news...until you read the story. Instead, it's a nearly perfect example of propaganda, U.S. style. In one story, we get the misleading headline and lead, the details that put the lie to the headline, and the reason why the story is misleading. It's a self-contained media literacy class.

Here's the lead paragraph:

Brightening economic fortunes are increasingly extending to racial and ethnic minorities and reaching farther down the economic ladder as the nation's recovery moves briskly through its sixth year...

Cool. (Though the wording does imply that those "brightening fortunes" are still concentrated among whites.) We go on to learn, in the second paragraph, that "in the last three years, economic prospects for nearly all households have risen, and that the gains among minorities have in some cases reached unprecedented levels"--though if not all non-whites are sharing yet, does this mean they don't live in households?.

In para. 3 and Clinton takes credit for the good news. We then read that for the second year in a row there was a "small increase in median household income"; and, in the following paragraph, that "the median income for full-time working women was 74 percent of that for men last year, the smallest earnings gap ever recorded between the sexes." Wow!

Oh, but those details. Space doesn't allow full analysis of why the above quotes are bogus; fortunately, much of the information needed to figure it out is in the same article. For example, we learn farther on in the article--after many have stopped reading--that this was only the second median income gain since 1989, the figure having been stagnant or dropping in all other years (so we're still far behind where we were a few years ago); that gains were confined almost entirely to one region, the South; that gains for the richest 20 percent, by percentage, outpaced all other groups, and levels for the lowest 20 percent dropped 1.8 percent (in other words, the rich continue to get richer, and the poor poorer--a phenomenon hidden by median income, which is the level at which 50% have higher and 50% have lower incomes, without specifying how much higher or lower); that minority gains in these studies were among people working full time (a declining share of the work force), and so on. For every piece of good news, there are three invalidating disclaimers.

Most remarkably, that narrowing gender gap, we learn, isn't because women are making more--it's because men are making less. (Umm...if men's wages are declining, and women's aren't rising, what other genders are out there basking in economic prosperity?) The catch is that only about a quarter of all women work the full time, permanent jobs measured here. That, in turn, suggests that the slight increase in middle class household incomes comes from people without such jobs. They're adding second (and third and fourth) jobs--without benefits, health care, or a future--to make ends meet, as personal debt levels continue to grow. Some prosperity. The upshot isn't, as Bill Clinton claims, that his trickle-down economics is helping more of us. It's quite the opposite: the class chasm deepens, the middle runs harder to stay in place. Statements like the one about economic prospects improving for "nearly all households" are flatly contradicted.

Why, then, the misleading headline and summary? Well, we learn in the 16th paragraph (of 19) that "...White House officials worked [unusually] hard to ensure that reporters played up the upbeat facts in the studies..."

The proof is in the first 15 paragraphs. Is our country's Pravdaesque, self-styled "newspaper of record" so secure in its ability to fool people at the White House's request that they can flat out tell us they're doing it, and most people still won't notice or care? Like income levels, the gap between reality and the official news gets ever wider.

--Geov Parrish