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Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Clock Is Ticking

Hillary Clinton says that when her husband left office — Social Security was projected to be solvent until the year 2055. She contends that now — solvency is predicted to end in 2041 — a loss of 14 years — because of what she calls “fiscal irresponsibility” by the Bush administration.

But the Social Security Administration says that its official statistics at the end of 2000 put the solvency year at 2037 — not 2055. It says that the current figure is — as Mrs. Clinton states — 2041. But instead of it being a 14 year loss — it is actually a four year gain.

FOX News asked the Clinton campaign repeatedly Monday and today to provide the source for that claim that the projection was 2055 when Bill Clinton left office — but so far we have received no response.

Media Matters

The news media focus on presidential horse race stories over actual issues by about a seven-to-one margin. It’s a complaint heard every four years — and backed up again this year in a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard University.

It also reports some interesting results about bias in TV reporting. It says Democrats received more total coverage than Republicans — and more positive coverage. Republicans got more negative coverage.

The survey found that stories on the FOX News Channel which tilted positive or negative favored Republicans over Democrats — but that most FOX stories were neutral — favoring neither party. It concludes — “any sense here that (FOX) was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.”

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