In covering an important and complex event such as President Obama's $450 billion jobs plan, reporters should have a game plan for how best to frame the story for their readers so it can be well understood from the get-go.

In this case, the best approach might have been to devote at least part of the story to comparing the new plan to the old plan ... the nearly $800 billion stimulus package crafted and steamrolled through by Congressional Democrats two years ago.

The old plan drew widespread criticism for putting the U.S. into enormous debt while accomplishing little to help the economy, and failing to create jobs.

So wouldn't readers want to know how the new plan ... this lesser but still gargantuan proposal ... is different from the old one? If the old one didn't work, how is the new one designed to be better?

In calling it a "jobs plan" instead of a follow-up "stimulus," Obama seemed to give the impression he was offering a new approach. Well, was he?

Pretty basic, but evidently not to our nation's press corps.

We ran Lexis-Nexis searches encompassing 137 newspapers, all the way from the Silver City Sun-News in New Mexico to the New York Times, Washington Post and other prominent, well-staffed outlets. We tried to find news stories or analyses that would include a comparison between the two plans, using the parameters of "Obama jobs plan" to search and then skimming the articles that came up for any mention of the first stimulus or allusions to it.

We gave reporters some slack, since it can be difficult to introduce critical points under deadline pressure, and after all Obama presented his new plan in an evening speech to Congress on Thursday, Sept. 8. Therefore, we allowed them three publication days to get this aspect in ... we looked for coverage not only in the next day's editions, but also on Saturday, Sept. 10, and Sunday, Sept. 11.

The results were dismal. We discovered only six stories that provided even a hazy comparison, and only one tackled it head-on.

That emanated from Zachary A. Goldfarb of the Washington Post on Sept. 10. He let the cat out of the bag by telling his readers, "the plan — for the most part — is a conventional stimulus, much like the one passed at the beginning of the president’s term."

Goldfarb went on to report that while economists he talked to thought the new plan "can help" the economy, its main drawback was ignoring the "overhang of mortgage debt created by the housing bubble that was at the center of the financial crisis of three years ago."

Erin Ailworth of the Boston Globe, Mark Trumbull of the Christian Science Monitor, Gary Martin of the San Antonio Express-News and John Fritze of the Baltimore Sun quoted critics who thought the jobs plan was just a rehash of the original stimulus, but didn't go into it further.

The AP wrote that "the newest and boldest element" would cut the Social Security payroll tax for workers and employers, but did not put this into context, i.e., what the reasoning was to include it in the jobs plan and does it represent a significant difference from the previous effort. 

Otherwise, reporters fixated on the president's aggressive demeanor as he spoke and later stumped ... seems the "old Obama" was back ... and offered horse race speculation on whether such a bill could pass. Most also noted that Obama hadn't yet explained how he proposed to pay for his plan. All that was valid to mention, but it was presented in isolation instead of hooking it up to what the nation had just been through with the stimulus controversy.

The New York Times had a chance to illuminate a comparison in a sidebar story on Saturday that focused on employers' reactions. It ably informed readers that the dismal state of the economy is why companies aren't hiring and that a tax benefit such as the jobs plan offers for companies will have little effect because the subsidized new employee would sit there at a desk with nothing to do as there's still no business. But it didn't ask these employers whether they like the new plan more than the first one and if so, why.

Obama's drive to build public support for his now-floundering scheme almost seemed jinxed before he began, as first he competed for attention with the opening of the NFL season, and next he was diluted or drowned out by massive press packages on the weekend of the 10th anniversary of the 9-11 disaster.

Of course, if he had been straight with the public and said in his speech either what went wrong with the first stimulus and how he was fixing it this time, or what was so great about the first stimulus that he was doing it again, reporters would have virtually been forced to report that angle.

Apparently the word "stimulus" has become so toxic for Obama's handlers and fallen into such disrepute that it was verboten for him to utter, and presumably administration officials even dreaming of saying it might have duct tape slapped over their mouths.

However, there was no reason for the press corps to meekly follow. They don't work for the government, they work for the readers. While Obama may think he benefits politically to pretend the earlier stimulus never happened, readers would have benefited with greater comprehension of this important matter if the reporters had dared to use that word and put it and the new plan together in an understandable context. Obama can frame issues the way he wants, but journalists should frame them independently.

(CMPA's Dan Amundson was the researcher for this article.)