Saturday, December 24, 2005
The Media and the Economy
How do we know the media has poisoned the public's view of the economy? It's really very simple. Opinion polls show basically that people believe overwhelming that they're doing well financially but the country isn't. And they know for sure their own economic condition. They experience it personally on a daily basis. On theother hand, what they know about the broader national economy comes largely from the media.A good article. There is a story in crisis, there isn't one in prosperity. Thus the media reports the bad and neglects the good. And of course there's always a little spice for liberal partisans to report bad economic news, since that can be used as cannon fodder against the ruling party that they oppose.
And this leads to a sharp dichotomy in the public's take on the economy. In a Gallup poll, 85 percent of Americans expressed satisfaction with the ways things are going in their own lives. But in another Gallup survey, 50 percent said they believe the economy will worsen, not stay the same or get better. And by a roughly two-to-one margin--64 percent to 33 percent in a new AP survey--Americans have consistently agreed that the country is headed in the wrong direction. The wrong track number isn't an exact proxy for negative feelings about the economy, but it is at least a partial reflection.
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