While it's easy to want to find a conspiracy, it sounds to me more like extrodinarily bad timing. After Enron, it was like one huge stack of dominos falling...
Unfortunately, most voters minds work on a very simple principle: Economy Bad = Blame Current Sitting President. This is exacerbated by another simplistic principle in most voters mind, which is: Naughty Corporations = Republicans Behaving Badly.
I think the elections will be very close in many places this November...
Media spin--pure and simple. Greenspan, Kudlow, Samuelson, etc. are right--the economy is fundamentally solid and on-track. Like the general economy, most companies are fundamentally sound and many have reported higher than expected profits. Both unemployment and interest rates are low--a nice co-incidence. Those firms which are basically good companies with accounting problems will take the hit, have a couple of bad quarters re-adjusting, and bounce back in a year.
The problem is that fundamentals are slow and boring. Market technicians who have become seers and prophets are the popular talking heads of all-day cable. Throw in a few gallons of fuel on the fire, provided by the means-spirited, hateful ilk of Gephardt and Gore, and what could anyone expect?
The media, with Fox as the exception rather than the rule, is doing all it can to fan the gloom-and-doom fire. The only thing that one can do is pray that people might finally be wising up. I even heard young people interviewed on tv saying that they weren't going to sell any stocks as they know that the markets will go back up. We can only hope that they have the same circumspect attitude when it comes to separating truth from bull in November.