Rich get richer

That was the top headline in our local paper here. The completion would be of course "the poor get poorer". The media expects their gullible public to be just like Pavlov's dogs ... "What goes up"? ... well, of course "must come down". But what did the article REALLY say?

Well, it said that there are MORE "rich". Households earning $100-150K went from 4,444 to 7,409, and those earning over $200K went from 1,397 to 2,399. But wait, it DOESN'T say that "the rich got richer", it says there are "more rich". How about at the other end? Well, here they do some slight of hand, so we can't really know. They DO say that there are LESS in the under $10K category. 2,580 in '99, dropped to 1,985 in '05. Wouldn't that be GOOD news? One would think so, because it would seem to be that their implied headline is completely false, the poor DIDN'T get poorer, which of course they ONLY implied, not said.

The median income locally went to $57,667, it went to $52,024 in MN, and $46,242 nationally. I guess is it is "bad" that both MN and the local community have higher incomes than the next level of comparison. Would it be better if MN was LOWER than the national, and we were lower still than the state? I suspect not, I guess it is just "bad no matter what".

They did say that "the % of families whose income was below the poverty level" went up from 3.8 to 4.9%, BUT, they fail to mention what that level is, I imagine because that level almost certainly went up. They also don't mention "why", which looking around locally is almost certainly due to immigration which they are strongly in favor of. There are more immigrants, they generally take lower paying jobs, so the % below the increased poverty level goes up. We can't know that from their story.

Bias is a wonderful thing. A story that essentially all good news is characterized as bad news. Other than the obvious political reasons, what purpose does that serve?