We Can't Report GOOD NEWS. We're Journalists!
Finally, though, more people are starting to notice the refusal for journalists to report on reality.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that the U.S. had added 209,000 jobs in June, lowering the unemployment rate to 3.6 percent, and recording 30 consecutive months of job growth.
And yet the headline for this excellent piece of good news was: “Against the Odds, the U.S. Economy Chugs Along, as Fears Linger.”
Fears from who?
Well, the Federal Reserve, for one, which, more than a year ago, embarked on a scheme to raise interest rates and push people out of employment in order to “stabilize the economy.”
This thinking is so backward, it should make us shudder about the life experience of the people coming up with these rules. But we don’t. Because many of us weren’t alive or sentient in 1980 when George H.W. Bush and a slew of economists pointed out that Trickle Down Economics - which became known as Reaganomics - was a scam, that defied the laws of math.
But the Reagan juggernaut was so complete that most people - and certainly most journalists - who came of age during or after his reign don’t even acknowledge that supply-side economics is a choice, not something baked into the way the U.S. works. And it’s a choice with more viable alternatives that wouldn’t have resulted in stultifying income inequality. And, ultimately, fascism.
That acceptance is so fundamental, journalists cannot fathom that the economy can be doing well if it doesn’t conform to the rules that Arthur Laffer wrote on a napkin. Rules that say, the less you tax, the more money the government will receive. This was accepted dogma even as Reagan’s budget deficit almost tripled.
Pessimism
So we get that Times headline, or this one from NPR:
“Despite infighting, it's been a surprisingly productive 2 years for Democrats”
This caveat, I think, reflects the state of pessimism we all live with.
“Despite being a girl, she’s good at math.”
“Despite being Black, she’s articulate.”
But what the NPR headline really says is, “The parties struggled in the journey to compromise. And the compromise turned out pretty well.”
I have twin daughters. When they were in preschool and early elementary, I would go in for parent/teacher conferences and say, “So, they fight.”
Each teacher would be genuinely surprised. “They don’t fight at all! They’re wonderful!”
“They don’t even fight with each other?”
“No!”
“And we’re talking about MY children?”
After a while, I stopped bringing this up with teachers, and I started listening more closely to my daughters’ fights. I stopped seeing them as a bad thing (though I did sometimes wish for earplugs, and I did give them a parameter of no ER visits).
Now, when people ask me how my kids are doing, I say, “They’re doing well.” Because, objectively, they are doing well. Even if, just the day before, they had a bruising argument. I don’t say, “Well, despite their fighting, they’re doing well.” Because, honestly, what my twin daughters are fighting over are identity issues linked to having another person by your side since birth. So I consider their fights to be, on the whole, a sign of growth.
In the same way, politics is about compromise, about balancing the needs of different constituencies. Why are journalists more interested in the struggle it took to get there than the result?
The laugh-out-loud part of the NPR story, though, was a quote from the network’s veteran “both-sides” political reporter, Mara Liasson - thrown into a story listing President Biden’s accomplishments, likely at the insistence of an editor.
"The problem,” Liasson is quoted by her colleagues, “is that they oversold and underdelivered, even though what they delivered by any normal metric would have been pretty impressive.”
Who oversold? Almost every headline I’ve seen for the last two years has been about how we’re headed toward recession, and how Biden’s plans would not work.
And how do you oversell the fact that our unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since 1969? Especially when that good news comes with a headline from Bloomberg that reads “US Payrolls Surprise as Jobless Rate Hits 53-Year Low.”
My god are we a pessimistic group!
Or maybe national journalists are just out of touch. They may not know people whose employment prospects got better. Just as they didn’t know people in 2008 who had been forced into predatory home loans.
Optimism?
There are some people who are reporting economic news accurately, and taking on the people who aren’t.
Veteran Chicago journalist Mark Jacob noted about the Times headline, “Fears always linger. You could add that to any economy story ever.”
And Jennifer Rubin, who used to be a conservative columnist, came out with another piece in the Washington Post that made me cheer.
“You might find it remarkable that outlets touting their economic foresightedness and keen analysis could be continually surprised about the economy’s strength after 29 consecutive months of job growth, inflation steadily declining, durable goods having been up for three consecutive months, 35,000 new infrastructure projects, an extended period in which real wages exceeded inflation and outsize gains for lower wage-earners,” Rubin wrote the day before the new jobs numbers came out, bringing that consecutive number to 30.
“It’s as though outlets are so invested in the narrative of failure and imminent recession that reams of positive data have had little impact on their ‘narrative,’” Rubin added.
This is a picture of an interactive data graph of how much public infrastructure is happening in the U.S. since the passage of Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (November 2021), CHIPS Act (August 2022), and Inflation Reduction Act (August 2022). This is an astonishing depiction. The white parts are made up largely of federal lands, which - by the very definition of preservation - can’t be built on. Some are rural areas, where infrastructure equals working broadband, which the Biden administration just announced they were rolling out. Check the map out at WhiteHouse.gov and look for updates as more projects get green-lighted by local governments.
The combined legislative achievements have committed over $235 billion dollars to infrastructure - putting millions of people to work in jobs that pay them better.
And contrary to the supply side orthodoxy that says public investment edges out private investment, public investment seems to be leveraging private investment - to the tune of half a trillion dollars. This is the same thing that happened in post-WWII America, when we built our interstate highway systems and sent men to the moon.
This is the era in which Biden came of age. And yet, instead of seeing him as someone who can lead us back to what works after 40 years in the trickle-down wilderness, people just see him as too old.
Even more frightening, Democrats see him as too old. As do headline writers.
I tend to think that the latter is followed by the former.
But that’s starting to change. Headline writers - and the journalists who write the stories - are increasingly writing about how good things are.
There’s Neil Dutta, the chief economist for Renaissance Macro, who wrote in Insider, “Despite the year-plus in which analysts have been arguing that a recession is imminent, none of the arguments behind the predictions stand up to scrutiny.”
Dutta’s piece is full of graphs that prove his point, but the most interesting one for me is this one on construction. Post-pandemic, office construction is going down. But post-infrastructure legislation, manufacturing construction is zooming up. I have no doubt the power line will go up in the future, as public and private investment in renewable energy kicks in.
Eric Levitz writes about “The Recession That Didn’t Happen,” in the Intelligencer, channeling Mark Twain in the process: “Reports of the economy’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Zachary Carter, who wrote the definitive book on John Maynard Keynes, penned a piece for The New Yorker on economist Isabel Weber, who went viral in 2021 for a piece she had written suggesting “a serious conversation about strategic price controls” to deal with inflation.
She was excoriated.
“The uproar was clearly about something much deeper than a policy suggestion,” Carter wrote. “Weber was challenging an article of faith, one that had been emotionally charged during the waning years of the Cold War and rarely disputed in its aftermath” during a period of post-pandemic economic fear, where “fringe fantasies of hyperinflation and economic doom were starting to go mainstream.”
Two years later, the economic elite have started to come around to Weber’s idea - especially as the reality of “greedflation” - that corporate profits are driving inflation, not wages and workers - has taken hold.
Even the Kansas City Fed took corporate profits to task, noting in a January 2023 report that “markups could account for more than half of 2021 inflation.”
The New York Times will probably never get around to writing a definitive, or positive, headline - no matter how good things get. And I have long since lost hope in Mara Liasson (and most of NPR, to be honest). But stories are being written about this administration’s economic success - and how much that success looks like our country’s previous economic success in the 20th century. Soon - hopefully really soon - people’s perceptions will follow.
The future of our country depends on realistic optimism.
I want to give a nod here to Zach Silk, who writes an indispensable weekly newsletter on middle-out economics.