The stock market plunged at the end of the second quarter, blotting out a whopping $9 trillion worth of Americans’ wealth. But the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows completely ignored the news on Tuesday night.
“Americans’ holdings of corporate equities and mutual fund shares fell to $33 trillion at the end of the second quarter, down from $42 trillion at the start of the year,” CNBC acknowledged in a Sept. 27 story. To put that in perspective, U.S. GDP in 2021 was roughly $23 trillion, according to The World Bank, meaning that an equivalent of almost 40 percent of U.S. GDP just disappeared from Americans’ collective pocketbooks.
To emphasize this point further, counting $1 every second and stopping at $1 trillion would take approximately 31,688 years. As a result, it would take 285,192 years to count from $1 to the $9 trillion that hemorrhaged from Americans’ stock portfolios last quarter.
This makes omissions of the sinking stock market news by the major news networks all the more egregious. ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News — CNBC’s sister network’s evening news show zeroed out coverage of the critical story on their Sept. 27 broadcasts.
The same Big Three evening networks also downplayed the S&P 500’s worst start “ever” in January.
Go figure.
Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi reportedly told CNBC that the stock market drop “could reduce real GDP growth by nearly 0.2 percentage points over the coming year,” adding to an already difficult year for Americans struggling under high inflation. But not a word of that was mentioned on the Big Three evening news shows last night.
Instead, ABC World News Tonight continued its drumbeat of Jan. 6th Committee coverage. CBS Evening News showed footage of NASA’s asteroid mission. And NBC Nightly News did a segment on Hispanic American Month.
With 58 percent of Americans reporting that they own stock, per a May Gallup poll, the stock market plunge is huge news for the millions of Americans potentially at risk. But apparently, for the scoffing liberal news networks, this news wasn’t important enough for any evening coverage.
NewsBusters Analyst Kevin Tober contributed to this report.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News 818-460-7477, CBS News 212-975-3247 and NBC News 212-664-6192 and demand they report on the $9 trillion stock market plunge.
