CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Suzanne Malveaux falsely suggested at the beginning of the week that Bush's poll numbers were improving, with Blitzer excitedly exclaiming, "Mr. Bush's approval rating is up -- up! -- to 46 percent." But in order to claim that Bush's approval rating is increasing, Blitzer compared polls conducted by different news organizations using different methodologies -- a dubious comparison, at best, particularly in light of the fact that every recent poll has shown dismal results for Bush. As the week continued, it became increasingly clear that the rosy picture painted by Blitzer and Malveaux wasn't based in reality; new polls by Fox News, CBS/New York Times, and NBC/Wall Street Journal, among others, all showed poor results for Bush.
While CNN was putting a happy face on dismal poll numbers, CBS and Rush Limbaugh gave Bush credit he didn't deserve for steps taken by state and local leaders. CBS reporter Peter Van Sant repeated already debunked claims that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco was slow to declare a state of emergency. (She made such a declaration before Katrina even hit, contrary to the false claims made by the Bush administration and repeated by The Washington Post.) Van Sant also repeated a baseless claim similar to one made by Fox's Brit Hume and others that Bush "convinced" Blanco to order an evacuation.
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Fox News, of course, did its part. The "news" channel displayed a "timeline" of key Katrina events that curiously omitted two key details. The timeline included declarations of emergency by the Republican governors of Mississippi and Alabama but omitted Blanco's declaration, in keeping with the Bush administration's attempts to pretend that she was late to issue one. And the timeline indicated that three New Orleans levees broke on August 30 -- but omitted mention of two levees that broke on August 29, triggering catastrophic flooding. Coincidentally, a key (though false) Bush administration talking point has been that nobody anticipated the levee breaches and that, as of Tuesday August 30, everybody though New Orleans had "dodged a bullet." It is presumably nothing more than a coincidence that the Fox
timeline left out two key details and that, in each case, the omission works in Bush's favor.
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CNN contributor Joe Watkins said on CNN's Paula Zahn Now that "under Bill Clinton, 15.1 percent of the population was poor; under President Bush, 12.7 percent of the population is poor. That's a reduction, that's a good thing." But that was a distortion, and that's a bad thing. The poverty rate was 15.1 percent when Clinton took office; it decreased every year during his presidency, falling to 11.3 percent in his last year in office. Since then, it has increased every year of Bush's presidency, to 12.7 percent now. The "reduction" Watkins referred to occurred entirely under Bill Clinton -- and has been reversed under George Bush.
Apparently the Republican Party was handing out misleading poverty talking points, because Watkins was joined by Bill O'Reilly, who noted that the poverty rate "halfway through President Bush's tenure" is "a full point lower" than it was "[h]alfway through President Clinton's tenure in office in 1996." But O'Reilly, like Watkins, was crediting Bush with a reduction in poverty that occurred before Bush took office, while Bill Clinton was still president. Incredibly, after Media Matters pointed out the dishonesty of this comparison, O'Reilly defended it, saying "That's the only fair comparison. You gotta go real time," adding that "[t]he poverty under Bush is down 1 percent."
There's more. Click through and read the whole article. And do you wonder that I no longer get my news from television?
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