Preparing The Battlefield
By Mitch Berg
There’s a genuine economic crisis out there. I’ve lived through enough of them (barely, in a few cases) to know not to be excessively dismissive or sanguine about ’em; but for the grace of God, most of us are a couple of bad executive decisions or market breaks away from the unemployment line.
And yet for all the media’s carping about the dismal state of the economy, “Black Friday” sales were up three percent from last year – a complete turnabout on the media’s pre-Thanksgiving drumbeat, which called for big drops in sales on the nation’s biggest shopping day.
John at Powerline has a theory about the media’s reflexive bleakness (emphasis added):
The financial crisis is real, and we are most likely in a recession. But the hysterical terms in which the economy is discussed are unwarranted and unhelpful. They are also, I think, politically motivated. Reporters and editors like the idea of a looming depression (or, failing that, an unusually severe recession) for a number of reasons. If it happens, it will be taken as refutation of the relatively conservative consensus that has influenced government policies since the early 1980s–a consensus under which a great many people have flourished, but not, notably, reporters and editors. And if it doesn’t happen, they will give the credit to Barack Obama and the more-liberal policies they expect from his administration. So for the left, hysteria over the economy is a win-win proposition. Not so for the rest of us.
Not to mention that it sells papers; hysteria gets people tuned in and/or buying those papers.
Or so the theory goes.
Oh, yeah – read the whole thing, naturally.
December 1st, 2008 at 10:46 am
My theory of the “economic news” coming out of the MSM and newspapers in particular is a bit shorter and more direct: newspapers are doing their best to drive their business into the ground, and everyone in the business knows it.
They’re driving away customers by relentlessly publishing opinion pieces masquerading as stories, and by cutting local hard news reporting first as the money dries up.
They’re not adapting to new delivery mechanisms such as the Internet.
Their biggest advertisers (cars) are driving themselves into the ground.
So newspapers and the MSM in general are cutting far more than the rest of the economy and have far fewer recovery prospects. Journalists know this, and it affects their reporting on the rest of the economy. The “conservatives have ruled” angle may have some truth to it, but the imminent, personal feel of the axes falling all around those few left in the profession undoubtedly have more effect.