Backdating the Recession: A Report by Media Matters for America; Release date: May 3, 2004
May 01, 2004 4:41 pm ET
Even before President George W. Bush took office in January 2001, his surrogates began to suggest that the Bush administration was inheriting an economic recession from the Clinton administration. Over the last three and a half years, the media has been awash in false references to Bush "inheriting a recession" from Clinton. A recent Media Matters for America poll found that 62 percent of Americans hold the false belief that the recession began under Clinton.
In March 2001, the U.S. economy went into recession for the first time in ten years, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER.) NBER -- the private, nonpartisan organization whose business cycle announcements have long been considered the definitive word on the topic -- announced its determination on November 26, 2001:
The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began. The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER's chronology.
NBER's president, Martin Feldstein, was a Bush campaign adviser who has long been close to the Bush family, as the National Review's Lawrence Kudlow recently noted:
Conventional thinking has Greenspan departing in 2006 and Bush appointing Harvard economist Martin Feldstein as his successor. The former Reagan economic adviser has strong ties to the administration, dating back to Papa Bush and extending through Bush Jr.'s presidential run, when he sat on the campaign's economic policy committee. Since then he has frequently briefed both the president and vice president. As president of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a prolific writer, he enjoys considerable credibility inside the economic establishment.
In short, NBER is widely respected, long recognized as the arbiter of recessions, and is headed by a Bush ally; so if NBER says the recession began in March 2001, the recession began in March 2001.
Why, then, does a clear majority of Americans think the recession "definitely" or "probably" began under Clinton? In a poll conducted for Media Matters for America, pollster Geoff Garin asked respondents if the following statement is true: "Statistics show that the current economic recession actually began during Bill Clinton's administration, before George W. Bush took office." The results:
Definitely true: 34 percent
Probably true: 28 percent
Probably not true: 15 percent
Definitely not true: 16 percent
Not sure: 7 percent
Sixty-two percent of Americans think the recession began under Clinton; a plurality says it is "definitely true." Only 16 percent are certain of the fact that the recession began on Bush's watch. How can so few Americans know who was president when the most recent recession began?
The answer is simple: Conservatives have waged a successful three-and-a-half year media campaign to convince the public that the recession began under Clinton. The effort began before Bush took office; Vice President-elect Dick Cheney kicked it off with a December 3, 2000, appearance on NBC's Meet the Press:
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Otherwise, the "inherited recession" line lay relatively dormant -- appearing once every few months -- until August 2002, when it was suddenly unavoidable. Then-Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mitch Daniels declared on FOX News Channel, "He [Bush] inherited that recession from the previous administration. Case is closed."[6] On CNN that same morning, Daniels announced, "The recession this administration inherited last year is over."[7] And he was back on CNN that afternoon to add, "It was the recession that he [Bush] inherited and the cost of the war and repairing the damage from last September that put us in deficit."[8]
None of Daniels's false comments were contradicted by his cable network hosts, despite widely available facts about when the recession actually had begun. Suddenly the Republican line that Bush had "inherited" a recession was everywhere: Conservative guests on news programs repeated it with impunity and were almost never corrected by their hosts; meanwhile, TV news reporters routinely quoted or paraphrased Republican officials, almost always failing to correct them.
On September 18, 2002, for example, CNN's John King told viewers:
The administration acknowledges the economy, as our poll shows, is the number one issue. That's why the president, in almost every speech, tries to remind voters he inherited a recession. [9]
