I’ve been a little depressed lately. Not given to seeing the glass half-empty, I’ve searched high and low to discover the source of my disconsolation. Just yesterday, the light went on and now I know what the heck is wrong with me. I read newspapers every day.
My local paper, Riverside County’s Press-Enterprise, is an above-average regional daily, offending readers on both ends of the political spectrum. Unlike my P-E, the Los Angeles Times publishes within narrower confines, somewhere between The Daily Worker and Das Kapital. Political bias, or the lack thereof, is not the problem. I’ve been warned about Pravda West. Driving me to depths of despair is both paper’s tendency to find the bad news, and only the bad news, in every story. I tell ya’, it’s bringing me down.
Take, for instance, the reporting on the recent dramatic action by the Federal Reserve. Helping the economy by dropping the funds rate to 3.0%, down from 5.25% as recently as late last summer, the Fed has helped millions of average Americans purchasing homes, cars, or any big-ticket item. Credit card payments will drop. Businesses can expand at lower costs, creating jobs that will stunt the budding recession we keep hearing about. It’s all good, right? Only if you don’t read my newspapers.
“Seniors hurt by rate cuts,” screamed the front page of Friday’s Press-Enterprise Business section. One paragraph listed the cut’s benefits, but eighteen more derided the harm inflicted on seasoned citizens. “Clearly [the Fed action] hurts because the deposit rates come screaming down,” said a chief executive officer of Palm Desert-based El Paseo Bank, where the average depositor is 70 years old. “Most of [the seniors] live off the liquidity of those investments.” A Hemet resident said “she and her husband had not seen their retirement income from interest on their savings diminish, but they were expecting it will…” Fortuitously, this story reveals at least two underlying causes of negative reporting.
First, today’s media is obsessed with groups of Americans. A story simply cannot be reported without consideration of how this or that constituency is affected. Believe it or don’t, once upon a time in America there was one group — Americans. Today, we are divided into interest groups, differentiated by color, gender, income, ethnicity, religion, country of origin, political affiliation, and age. What is good news for some or most cartels is invariably bad news for other clusters of homogeneous citizens. Ever aware that bad news sells — have you ever seen a headline proclaiming “55,000 airplanes took off and landed safely again today?” — the slighted group always gets the headline. When a Republican is in the White House, the tendency to report all bad news all the time becomes a mandate.
Second, when there is no current bad news, anticipation of coming doom is sufficient to generate story after story. ”The sky hasn’t fallen yet, but it will,” said the women from Hemet, one of scores of articles predicated on approaching bad news, many predicting a recession. Here’s a bulletin for those of you in West Palm Beach. A recession “is a decline in a country’s gross domestic product, or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters,” according to Mike Moffatt of About.com. Correct me if I’m wrong, but talk of an American recession has been in the air for months. OK, quick, who can tell me how many quarters of negative economic growth have we suffered? One? Two? More than two? And the answer is…ZERO! That didn’t stop the Associated Press from reporting last Wednesday that the “Economy Nearly Stalled in 4th Quarter.” (Emphasis added) It didn’t stall, but we want you to be afraid anyway, very afraid. Not to be outdone, Reuters warned on January 10th, “Recession fears are growing.” Pinocchio is alive and well in contemporary journalism.
The economy is slowing, of course, the sole cause being the housing slump. However, as President Bush emphasized in his last State of the Union message, “America has added jobs for a record 52 straight months…wages are up…exports are rising.” Unemployment remains at less than 5%. Even the LA Times reported good economic views, albeit with the typical tinge of pessimism. “Orders to factories for big-ticket manufactured goods jumped unexpectedly in December,” grudgingly admitted the Times, unable to resist adding the increase was ”good news amid signs that the U.S. economy may be tipping toward a recession.” The negativity is nothing if not constant.
No event is exempt from journalism’s foreboding focus. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is cracking down on food-smuggling into Columbia. Good news, especially for lovers of the rule of law, right? Wrong. Chavez’s policy “is hurting thousands of his own countrymen whose livelihood” depends on the illegal activity. California’s recent wet weather is a welcome drought-ending godsend, right? Wrong. Each round of precipitation has been likened to an invading army with descriptive language approaching hysteria. “Wallop,” “deluge,” “pound,” and “blast” portray the relief most Californians were praying for scant months ago. No doubt about it, we are winning in Iraq. Good news, right? Not if you read the contrarian LA Times, which chose to report “alleged” crimes by U.S. soldiers that “may” have occurred six months ago. Published January 30th on page A-4, the accusations are so flimsy the story peters out after eight sentences! Undaunted, the Times goes on to cram as much Iraq bad news as possible into the concluding seven paragraphs. Joseph Geobbels could have learned a trick or two from Times’ editors.
Encountering the constantly negative drumbeat of contemporary journalism can actually be fun. Finding the negative twists to nearly every story brings an inner delight; we know what they’re up to, and we won’t be fooled again! As print media recedes into history, every page rivals Beetle Bailey for humor, a bittersweet epitaph for a once-great enterprise.
Posted by Jerry Pomeroy in Media