If the economy bleeds, it leads

I wish I could teleport myself back to the 1930s, get myself to a newsstand, and pick up a daily newspaper. After the crash of 1929, were the headlines relentlessly bad? Each day, was another family struggling with poverty profiled? And after Roosevelt was elected, did journalists relentlessly question the effectiveness of the New Deal?
The business press is acting like a manic-depressive. It's gone from being the biggest cheerleader of the recklessness that led to the speculative bubble that caused this economic crisis to the loudest harbingers of doom.
No one seems to remember that what reporters report on the economy has an impact on how the economy behaves. I remember being a journalist covering a thrift with an uncertain future. I reached the president of the bank one evening, and his speech was definitely slurred. He sounded like a man who was drinking his insolvency troubles away. I later interviewed that same president, and he reminded me of Nixon during Watergate. Wearing a vested pinstripe suit, he was perspiring heavily, the anxiety practically distorting his face. His pain and unease were palpable. Did I keep all this insight to myself? In the words of a famous vice presidential candidate, "You betcha." I had been schooled by more senior banking reporters who reminded me that when people lose faith in banks, banks lose depositors, and nobody wants to cause a run on the banks. Of course, I reported the what the bank president actually said, and faithfully reported what the thrift's balance sheet looked like. But I kept the drama to myself.
The time has come, I think, when the media ought to take a deep breath, and stop obsessing. Each day the stock market tanks or surges should not be a front-page story. The nightly news does not have to air each day a new feature story about one brave family's struggle with reduced circumstances. I'm not saying this because I lack empathy. I'm saying this because this type of repetitive, totally uninsightful coverage isn't helping. And I think the coverage in part reflects a new media culture that is so absorbed with itself that it fails to see beyond the day's events, and feels no obligation to measure the impact of is work on the communities it serves.
And there is the cynicism that pervades everything. It is almost as if just reporting what happened, or what Congress did, or what the President plans to do, is considered inadequate. The "news" has to accompanied by a greek chorus of commentary and critique. That wouldn't be bad if it came from people with even a modicum of understanding of how legislation actually gets enacted, or how the economy really works. But it rarely aspires to anything more than wrenching the last drop of pessimism and skepticism from any potentially good news.
I wonder whether the quality of the coverage of today's economic collapse is markedly different from the coverage of the 1930s. I know that the journalists of the 1930s were working stiffs. They experienced hard times not from a pinnacle of the privileged looking down, but on an equal footing with the average wage earner. I wonder when Roosevelt started the New Deal, whether they went out of their way to find conservative economists who said that tax cuts were the only way to go and that Roosevelt was destroying the country. I wonder if today's journalists, especially network reporters and anchors, live lives so insulated from average families, that their effort to cover this economic downturn in the grimmest terms possible is simply a gut reaction, an attempt to wrench as much drama and pathos from a news event that is really remote from their own individual reality. As a consequence, there is no reason to report hopeful news, or to tone down the drama of legitimately grave problems. If the economy bleeds, it leads.
My husband would disagree, arguing that this is the first economic downturn that coincides with the terrific wrenching happening in the news business, with newspapers loosing circulation to the Internet, and the entire industry undergoing a profound change that is leading to lots of layoffs and buyouts.
Whatever the cause, all this unrelenting bad news is not helping.
Given this funk the country is in, it is up to the President to get this vision thing going. He should not sugarcoat. But he has to give us a vivid picture of what things will look like when we've turned the corner. We know this will be tough year, but what will 2010 look like? It's like the woman on a diet who buys a dress a size too small so that she can picture how good she will feel when she can fit into it. We need that picture of the new economy. He can tell us this year will be hard and there are struggles ahead. But he has to show us in vivid terms what we're working towards.