Now It’s a Recession, Now It’s Not: Media Parrot White House Talking Points on Economy

On Tuesday, Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, took the podium in the White House briefing room to perform the magnificent feat of bending reality to his will.

Echoing Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, Deese explained that “two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession. It’s not the definition that economists have traditionally relied on.”

“There is an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research and what they do is they look at a broad range of data in deciding whether or not a recession has occurred,” he continued serenely. But that doesn’t free the Biden administration of the political burden of recession the way Deese would like it to. In fact, the NBER has recognized a recession even in cases where there is not two straight quarters of economic contraction. In an added benefit, NBER determinations are typically released nearly a year after the conditions they’re describing have abated, leaving the White House plenty of breathing room.

But unfortunately for Deese, his protests were contradicted by his past self. When in the employ of Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, with Republican George W. Bush in the White House, Deese acknowledged while talking with reporters that “economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.” Where Deese stands on the matter seems to depend on where he sits.

Deese’s talking points have been happily adopted by a press that has historically accepted the definition of recession which Deese himself articulated in 2008.

Upon this morning’s announcement that the economy has contracted for the second straight quarter, many outlets put on their unofficial hats as White House spokesmen.

The Associated Press claimed that the disappointing numbers might raise “fears that the nation might be approaching a recession,” before elaborating that “consecutive quarters of falling GDP constitute one informal, though not definitive, indicator of a recession.”

Similarly, CNN declared that the numbers — GDP contracted by 0.9 percent annual rate after falling by 1.6 percent in the first quarter — were “fueling recession fears” before noting that “that decline marks a key symbolic threshold for the most commonly used — albeit unofficial — definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.” The article goes on only to quote economists articulating the view that Thursday’s numbers do not constitute a recession in and of themselves.

The New York Times followed CNN and the AP’s lead, allowing only that Thursday’s numbers are “fanning fears” of a recession while assuring readers that “most economists” — a group left as undefined as a recession — “still don’t think the economy meets the formal definition of a recession.” The Washington Post joined the party as well, stating that the decline might “raise concerns that the country may be heading into a recession.”

Economist-turned-New York Times columnist Paul Krugman denied the existence of a technical definition of a recession altogether, citing Goldman Sachs’s characterization of one being “a judgmental mix of levels and rates-of-change across several variables, most of which continued to expand in the first half of the year.”

John Harwood, CNN’s White House correspondent, retweeted Krugman on Thursday (he also retweeted pundit Matt Yglesias’s assertion that “Democrats are good”) and a number of accounts offering the same opinion in the days leading up to the announcement. But that stance marked a divergence from Harwood’s previous position, which he presented matter-of-factly in 2019.

The White House has doubled down on its communications strategy since Thursday morning’s release, with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying the economy was undergoing “a transition into stable and steady growth.”

Biden himself tweeted that “after historic economic growth — regaining all private sector jobs lost during the pandemic — we knew the economy would slow down as the Fed acts on inflation. Our job market is strong, spending is up, and unemployment is down. We have the resilience to weather the transition.”