This doesn’t surprise me at all. My evolutionary explanation (and I think that whatever explanation there is is evolutionary, not the media, which is just reflecting viewer and reader preferences) is that women compete more on their physical attractiveness to men (men compete on power and wealth), so both men and women are acutely aware of women’s…interesting…body features (which is also why women have less of a problem being physically attracted to other women than men to men).
This is an illustration of a pet peeve, though. I hate misleading scaling of graphs and bar charts. Because they chose to use $900 as a baseline, it makes it appear that the estimates have increased by more than an order of magnitude over two years, when in fact they have only doubled. It seems to me that doubling is bad enough without playing games with graphics.
Earlier this year, the Obama White House predicted the economy would grow 3% in 2012. Today’s GDP report shows that ain’t going to happen. The Commerce Department said the economy grew at an anemic 1.5% annual rate from April through June, after a revised 2.0% in the first quarter. It now seems likely the economy will be lucky to grow at 2% for the entire year. And that’s after growing just 1.8% last year.
Check out the comparison between the Reagan recovery and the Obama “recovery.”
At this point, I think it’s fair to say that Obama built that.