Journalists' fears could influence economy stories
June 21, 2008
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Washington -- Make no mistake, there is much malaise and worry in mainstream media newsrooms over the unprecedented economic and structural challenges facing journalism.
A related question is whether that malaise is affecting coverage of the overall economy and whether it is helping to paint a grimmer picture than actually exists. It might be impossible to quantify the embattled newsroom effect, but it's only human to wonder if it's contributing to the sour national psyche.
Unemployment is up, gas prices are rising, the stock market is down and families feel pinched by the price of staples like food and health care. And yet, as The Washington Post recently pointed out, unemployment, inflation and interest rates are not approaching the levels they were during energy shocks of the 1970s and 1980s.
Still, there is no denying that the headlines about the headline writers are particularly grim these days with traditional media companies reporting falling profits and layoffs and buyouts pummeling journalists where they work.
Traditionally, "newspapers are lagging indicators of the economy," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism. But today, he said, the news business "faces a downturn and a revolution together."
For decades, when real estate or car sales or new hires lagged, advertising for them lagged but returned when the economy rebounded. That advertising stream carried the freight for American journalism for well over a century. But even before Sept. 11 and the challenges since, advertising and news was migrating to the Internet. Traditional newspaper companies, including my employer, Gannett, were struggling for a share of this new pie.
Economist Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said that except for the late 1990s, there has been largely stagnant growth in real income since 1973. He said it was "preposterous" to suggest journalists were overstating economic doom because of what is going on in their own industry.
"People were not feeling particularly great about how well things were going even before the crisis hit the financial markets and before gas hit the roof," Teixeira said.
But newspaper people are human, too. And it would be human to extrapolate the layoffs and downsizing in their midst to the overall coverage, and shape coverage and commentary around it. Additionally, there is a spirited presidential campaign going on in which aspirants for the Oval Office have been talking economic doom and gloom for months.
These conditions, coupled with the headline-grabbing double team of rising energy and food prices, are conflating into one of the sourest atmospheres since the "misery index" of the late 1970s.
Pocketbook stories of $4 gas or $4 milk are what journalists are trained to look for to humanize the news. But there may be macro factors that mitigate these higher prices. Computers, for example, cost less for doing more than they did five years ago. And cars that get 40 miles a gallon are more abundant than they were when gas was $2 a gallon.
Rising energy and food costs provide "the kind of person-on-the-street evidence that journalists are especially sensitive over," Rosenstiel said. "But economists might say, 'well, actually."'
Rosenstiel compared what's going on in newsrooms to the difference between voters in Ohio and North Carolina. Ohioans, whose economy is worse than that of North Carolinians, might be understandably more negative about the country's direction and the economy as a whole, Rosenstiel said.
Similarly, "people in newsrooms are feeling gloomier about the economy and the future than people might be in Silicon Valley," he said.
Can journalists set aside personal worries for clear, analytical coverage of the economy? Only they can answer that. Here's hoping we'll find a way to keep asking the questions.
Contact GNS Political Writer Chuck Raasch at craasch@gns.gannett.com
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