I've had a rolling discussion for weeks now with several readers who criticize how <em>The Kansas City Star </em>has been covering the ups and mostly downs of the world economy. The common complaint: The blame game isn&#8217;t consistent &#8212; or even possible to assess accurately.</p><p>Brian in Leawood is one strong voice who thinks the paper should attribute the stock market&#8217;s troubling performance to the actions of President Barack Obama and Congress. &#8220;I&#8217;m doing my best to find articles in <em>The Star </em>that blame Obama for market downturns with equal location and clarity, as they did for some upturns around the election,&#8221; he wrote in late February. &#8220;There is a clear correlation here and to be fair, <em>The Star </em>should point this out.&#8221;</p><p>He&#8217;s not alone in making that connection, of course. Witness the item in Thursday&#8217;s &#8220;Buzz&#8221; column about &#8220;Mad Money&#8221; host Jim Cramer, who said Obama is responsible for &#8220;the greatest wealth destruction I have seen by a president.&#8221;</p><p>Or there&#8217;s the caller last week who pointed the finger in another direction: &#8220;Look, I&#8217;m a big fan of President Obama, but I believe in the market, and I acknowledge angry capitalists are pitching a fit right now. But I think (the media) need to cut him a break. He doesn&#8217;t do this all himself, and he didn&#8217;t get us into this mess. That&#8217;s the people who approved all these stupid loans and the appraisers who lost their minds and increased our property taxes.&#8221;</p><p>These are all worthy points of view on a subject that&#8217;s all but incomprehensible, especially when peering out from the eye of the storm. After all, economics is a social science that extrapolates and interprets empirical evidence in a way completely different from biology or aerodynamics. To be honest, I&#8217;m sometimes frustrated when reporters make certain pronouncements about the dismal science, because it&#8217;s a subjective discipline by its very nature.</p><p>Quoting traders and brokers is one thing, because they can speak to why they made their own decisions, but the realities of how the markets move are vastly more complex than one individual&#8217;s motivation.</p><p>And as always, specifics are absolutely vital in determining whether <em>The Star </em>has been lax in assigning blame to the government&#8217;s culpability here. While some stories haven&#8217;t attributed slides in stock prices to the White House specifically, several others have indeed drawn that direct line.</p><p>The media themselves also play into the equation. &#8220;If newspapers and TV want to scare us all to death and say the end is near, they&#8217;re doing a good job,&#8221; said one caller. &#8220;Don&#8217;t you think people dumping stocks read the paper, too?&#8221;