TV reporters usually love to publicize any gaffes made by presidents or presidential candidates. In Houston on March 11, Vice President Al Gore incorrectly stated that the Bush-Quayle administration’s economic record included "the worst depression since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s," but there hasn’t been a single word of criticism from any of the networks.

First, we must ask, can Gore’s assertion possibly be true? Depressions and recessions are measured by how severely a nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracts. The GDP is the total value of all of all goods and services produced in a year. During the Great Depression, our GDP contracted severely, shrinking by 12 percent in 1930, another 16 percent in 1931 and 23 percent in 1932. Those statistics are the signature of a steep and prolonged downturn, marked by huge numbers of business failures, unemployment and economic misery.

What about the Bush-Quayle years? The total length of the downturn for which they were blamed was just nine months, with the worst GDP performance coming in the fourth quarter of 1990 (October to December) when GDP shrank by a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of three percent. That’s a far cry from the pain of the Great Depression.

It’s also hardly the worst performing quarter in recent times. In fact, according to data gathered by the U.S. Department of Commerce, it ranks eighth on the list of the ten worst quarters since 1959. (See chart.) The worst performing quarter belonged to Jimmy Carter, who presided over an annually-adjusted 7.7 percent contraction in the spring of 1980 -- a brief but nasty economic downturn that helped cost him that year’s election.

Perhaps the Vice President was referring to the unemployment rate. But on this measure, too, the Bush-Quayle recession doesn’t even rate. Even though the downturn officially ended in March, 1991, unemployment continued to creep up for more than a year before it finally peaked at 7.8 percent in June, 1992. While that’s certainly far worse than the current rate of 4.1 percent, it pales in comparison to the Depression years, when unemployment peaked at 24.9 percent in 1933, or even eight years later when, on the eve of World War II, unemployment was still stuck at nearly 10 percent, according to figures provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

During several recessions since "the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s," unemployment has frequently surpassed 7.8 percent. During all of 1975, for example, the jobless rate was stuck above eight percent. In November and December of 1982, as young Gore was being elected to his fourth term in Congress, the unemployment rate reached 10.8 percent, its post-World War II high, before finally dropping below eight percent in early 1984.

Presumably, the Vice President knows all of this, yet he inexplicably chose to link the relatively mild early ‘90s recession with the worst economy in living memory. That should have made Gore a target for ridicule, but ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC all ignored the mistake, as did nearly every newspaper reporter on the campaign trail.

Only one newspaper reporter even mentioned Gore’s gaffe: the New York Times’s Katherine Seelye, and she focused exclusively on the strategy behind the Veep’s decision to target "Bush-Quayle" instead of "Reagan-Bush" in his rant against GOP economics. Amazingly, she did not question Gore’s questionable economic assertions, even as she described his strategy of attempting to undermine Texas Governor George W. Bush’s credibility on economic matters.

No editor would have permitted a reporter to make such an easily disprovable assertion about the economy, but by not correcting Gore’s gaffe, the media are allowing a misperception about the American economy to take root with the public. It’s time journalists stepped forward to correct the record.

— Rich Noyes