Great article. By its excessive coverage of Donald Trump the press is indeed complicit in his rise. Coverage is everything, and Donald Trump is using the media to put him front and center in the news and to dictate the parameters of reporting. In this the press continues to fail in its mission.
The economy is certainly not as bad as people think, as you point out. But I think the statistics you cite miss important context. Inflation peaked last year (not in 2021) at 9.1%, higher than most Americans had ever experienced in their lifetimes. That's not something they're going to forget easily, even as the pace of rising prices has slowed, because they're reminded of it every time they go to a grocery story or buy gas (and gas prices have been rising sharply in recent weeks). And inflation has outstripped wage growth since the beginning of 2021; the recent reversal is too new for people to notice.
Crime rates may be leveling off but as with inflation, people haven't experienced crime rates like this in decades. It's not reassuring to people to say crime is less than the historically high rates of the '70s, '80s and early '90s. People got used to walking around downtowns without worrying about being shot or mugged, or accosted by a fast-growing homeless population, and now they can't do that in parts of most downtowns. Part of this worry comes from a randomness to the crimes that we didn't used to see -- more people being pushed off subway platforms or stabbed in broad daylight in good parts of town while walking their dog. Another part of this worry comes from knowing that if something happens to you, the cops may not come because police forces are understaffed and they can't staff up because the profession has been so demonized. And even if nothing happens to you, you're reminded of the rising crime every time you go to a CVS and the toothpaste and the ice cream are locked up.
Along with inflation and crime, the third thing putting Americans in such a sour mood is the flood of Illegal immigrants over the past 2.5 years. The number I'm hearing is 6 million, but some estimates are higher. Cities and school systems are being overwhelmed. Soccer fields are becoming tent cities. You didn't give a link to your statement that the number of illegal immigrants has been roughly flat since the Bush years. That number is very hard to count, but the generally accepted number 20 years ago was 12 million and then that was adjusted to 20 million in the last 2010s. Now there are six million more, though maybe they're not technically illegal immigrants because they're often asylum-seekers waiting on a ruling.
With your other examples of good news, Americans tend to discount them. The unemployment rate is back to where it was before Covid, and a large majority of jobs created under Biden were just replacing the jobs lost to Covid. People don't think about Covid much anymore, but when they do they blame the government for not pushing harder to reopen schools, mandating masks on planes long past the time that was needed, overselling the vaccine, etc.
All in all, I think people do know what's going on around them, and if that's so, then maybe the media aren't doing that bad of a job.
-- the tents are new, but they reflect not a surge at the border, but changes in policy primarily by the governors of Texas and Florida. There is no real dispute that, far from a surge at the border after the recent policy change, what we have seen is a decline in flow there, both ahead of the new policy and after it-- despite widespread predictions that the opposite would occur;
-- on crime, what you depict-- people in fear of being shot in some areas downtown-- is simply not the case in all but a very small number of cities representing a tiny part of the population. I live in the nation's largest city and frequently visit the second largest where I have family. That is true in neither place;
-- on jobs, yes, some of the jobs created under Biden were just replacing those lost under Trump, but actually all the losses were made up 13 months ago, since which nearly 4 million additional jobs have been created.
Well, we can certainly agree to disagree! Numbers can be interpreted in different ways. I'll just make one point on immigration--the conventional wisdom has been that's it stayed around 11-12 million for years. But there have been some contrarian estimates that put the number much higher. I have no idea which numbers are more accurate but given the 6 million new immigrants crossing the border since early 2021, it seems to make sense that the standard 11-12 million figure is now outdated. Here's one study from Yale that predates the surge of recent years: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/yale-study-finds-twice-as-many-undocumented-immigrants-as-previous-estimates.
And one other thing that gives people the impression the economy is bad -- high interest rates. Mortgage rates are near a 20-year high and that's preventing some people from buying homes.
Dick, thank you for this thoughtful piece with telling details. For a future piece(s) some suggestions.
1. The influence of “News” organizations that make stuff up and pretzel facts. Many people who follow these mendacious outfits mistakenly believe they are the only honest news organizations.
2. How significant is the severe decline in reading comprehension skills? The latest data shows that 54% of Americans read at sixth grade level or below and about 20% are functionally illiterate, reading at third grade level or below. And, of course, reading level has a major influence on the ability to understand concepts and nuance.
3. What role, if any, is played by the prevailing style of writing news articles in the big five newspapers, AP, Bloomberg, etc.. I would describe the style as bureaucratic interspersed with the occasional high literary value feature . If you spend a few hours looking at news reports from decades past, you will notice that there was a greater emphasis on specific facts, including the titles of government officials, then on narrative.
4. How much does complexity and everything from astrophysics to medical science to taxes encourage ignoring subtle and complex issues in favor of gut or emotional reactions?
You're assuming that the media's most basic mission is to inform the public, but that isn't the mission of our modern media at all. Their first mission is profit, and their secondary mission is to disseminate views that their owners would like disseminated (see Fox News, Sinclair, etc). Informing the public would be a great mission statement, but who decides what stories we need to be informed? On the profit model, we decide by our clicks, and we apparently don't click on good news much. That's bad enough on its own, but add in the corporate mouthpiece part, and I don't see how editors are going to start approving "Crime is historically low" stories. That's not what the owners of these outfits want us to hear.
Important and thought provoking article. It's also a failure of imagination by the press. On the day the latest CPI numbers were released, about a week ago, I watched the Evening News. I forget if it was ABC or CBS, as I watch either. Their story included an interview with someone who couldn't pay their bills, commenting on how terrible inflation was. Ok, that's the go-to inflation story, I suppose, and the producers sent someone out to cover it that way. But could they have imagined a better way to tell the story of what was happening to the economy? Apparently not, as a interview with someone choosing between food and medicine is always much more dramatic, they thought, and TV news especially tends towards the dramatic and personal. It's probably the same story choice whether inflation is getting better or worse. No imagination about how to give insight into the larger trends, at least that day.
Thanks for this, Ken. Yes, a failure of imagination, but also worse than that. When inflation is falling, good journalism requires telling THAT story, not the opposite one from a year or more ago.
Yes -- exactly !! The media addiction to doom and gloom and drama is dangerous. The only place I ever hear about any positive aspects of our government, economy or the Biden administration is Heather Cox Richardson. Im so disappointed that I’m considering canceling my subscriptions to a few major media outlets. I feel they are failing me (and us as a country).
The IMF piece? Just a week old itself and it covers the entire 2023 year, projecting ahead.
Galbraith? In-depth and just a few months old. Per my add-ons to that, I address that Russia had started reorganizing its economy in the wake of the post-Crimea sanctions and had been a net exporter of food and independent in all foodstuff staples for years. This isn't the 1970s Soviet Union of grain embargo days.
So, I respectfully disagree. I also thin the FT is probably writing from a point of motivated reasoning.
I believe the foreign exchange value of the Russian Ruble is clearly falling. That can be looked up, measured and charted. That usually says something about the economy behind it. Other numbers are harder to measure in real-time.
There is no question in my mind that the low approval ratings of Biden--whatever his shortcomings--are a product of hundreds of news organizations carrying a drumbeat of negative news. A part of this reflects the way news is consumed as journalists chase clicks in an attention economy. When I was working at my first station in Madison, the snarky alt-left publication "Takeaway" once ran this banner headline "Millions Lead Normal Lives." It was funny. They were poking fun at the same weakness you are identifying: news organizations are always looking for something different, bad, eye catching. This bias toward bad is much less amusing, for me, when I see historically low unemployment numbers, and extraordinary levels of hiring, treated as "ho hum"... barely reported. One big piece is the large sector of the news industry that is now dedicated to making anything the Dems do look like the next step to the collapse of Western civilization. I get that part. What is harder to understand is what you wrote about, Dick, namely a reluctance to acknowledge--and focus on--aspects of the economy or post-Covid American life that are, by reasonable standards, decent, if not good and improving.
Without taking issue with any of your points, I would also say that the Biden administration, most especially Biden himself, have done a terrible job of touting many of the accomplishments that you cite. No Biden in the WHU press room, no Biden from the Oval to the American people — maybe they’re afraid he will stumble or whatever, but the fact remains that this is a real info-gap as well. (And, hi Alex Wallace!)
With the greatest respect, I think that's an excuse. You are entitled to think Biden is a poor communicator. But if the people are misinformed, the press is not doing its job.
PS Reagan gave two Oval Office addresses on the economy in 1982 (when it was bad), and none in 1983 (when it was improving).
I see it as an “and,” not an “or.” I do not disagree that press coverage is poor. Re Reagan — okay, but he was (somehow) able to inspire confidence in many people. Do you think press coverage of the economy and the general state of American affairs was better at that time? Maybe it was. But, media was not nearly as fractured, either, so that is a factor. Anyway, I don’t disagree with you. I just think there are many factors that converge to create broad-brush impressions in Americans’ minds, not just actual facts reported by journalists, and in this regard I am baffled and disappointed by the poor message communication. They have a good story to tell.
As always, totally spot on.
Excellent and important points, Dick.
Insightful and succinct.
Great article. By its excessive coverage of Donald Trump the press is indeed complicit in his rise. Coverage is everything, and Donald Trump is using the media to put him front and center in the news and to dictate the parameters of reporting. In this the press continues to fail in its mission.
The economy is certainly not as bad as people think, as you point out. But I think the statistics you cite miss important context. Inflation peaked last year (not in 2021) at 9.1%, higher than most Americans had ever experienced in their lifetimes. That's not something they're going to forget easily, even as the pace of rising prices has slowed, because they're reminded of it every time they go to a grocery story or buy gas (and gas prices have been rising sharply in recent weeks). And inflation has outstripped wage growth since the beginning of 2021; the recent reversal is too new for people to notice.
Crime rates may be leveling off but as with inflation, people haven't experienced crime rates like this in decades. It's not reassuring to people to say crime is less than the historically high rates of the '70s, '80s and early '90s. People got used to walking around downtowns without worrying about being shot or mugged, or accosted by a fast-growing homeless population, and now they can't do that in parts of most downtowns. Part of this worry comes from a randomness to the crimes that we didn't used to see -- more people being pushed off subway platforms or stabbed in broad daylight in good parts of town while walking their dog. Another part of this worry comes from knowing that if something happens to you, the cops may not come because police forces are understaffed and they can't staff up because the profession has been so demonized. And even if nothing happens to you, you're reminded of the rising crime every time you go to a CVS and the toothpaste and the ice cream are locked up.
Along with inflation and crime, the third thing putting Americans in such a sour mood is the flood of Illegal immigrants over the past 2.5 years. The number I'm hearing is 6 million, but some estimates are higher. Cities and school systems are being overwhelmed. Soccer fields are becoming tent cities. You didn't give a link to your statement that the number of illegal immigrants has been roughly flat since the Bush years. That number is very hard to count, but the generally accepted number 20 years ago was 12 million and then that was adjusted to 20 million in the last 2010s. Now there are six million more, though maybe they're not technically illegal immigrants because they're often asylum-seekers waiting on a ruling.
With your other examples of good news, Americans tend to discount them. The unemployment rate is back to where it was before Covid, and a large majority of jobs created under Biden were just replacing the jobs lost to Covid. People don't think about Covid much anymore, but when they do they blame the government for not pushing harder to reopen schools, mandating masks on planes long past the time that was needed, overselling the vaccine, etc.
All in all, I think people do know what's going on around them, and if that's so, then maybe the media aren't doing that bad of a job.
John, Thanks for this extended and thoughtful comment.
You have clearly stated the counter-case, but I think it is undermined by a number of things:
-- first and most significant is the recent poll indicating that 60% of Americans think their own economic situation right now is good or very good;
-- on immigration, while numbers for '23 don't really exist, those from fairly recent years from Pew, the Migration Policy Institute and the Center for Immigrations Studies all support what I said, that the number has hovered at 11 million for many years. Here's a piece from Forbes on that: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/03/10/illegal-immigration-in-america-has-continued-to-decline/?sh=2a8fff224e14
-- the tents are new, but they reflect not a surge at the border, but changes in policy primarily by the governors of Texas and Florida. There is no real dispute that, far from a surge at the border after the recent policy change, what we have seen is a decline in flow there, both ahead of the new policy and after it-- despite widespread predictions that the opposite would occur;
-- on crime, what you depict-- people in fear of being shot in some areas downtown-- is simply not the case in all but a very small number of cities representing a tiny part of the population. I live in the nation's largest city and frequently visit the second largest where I have family. That is true in neither place;
-- on jobs, yes, some of the jobs created under Biden were just replacing those lost under Trump, but actually all the losses were made up 13 months ago, since which nearly 4 million additional jobs have been created.
Well, we can certainly agree to disagree! Numbers can be interpreted in different ways. I'll just make one point on immigration--the conventional wisdom has been that's it stayed around 11-12 million for years. But there have been some contrarian estimates that put the number much higher. I have no idea which numbers are more accurate but given the 6 million new immigrants crossing the border since early 2021, it seems to make sense that the standard 11-12 million figure is now outdated. Here's one study from Yale that predates the surge of recent years: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/yale-study-finds-twice-as-many-undocumented-immigrants-as-previous-estimates.
And one other thing that gives people the impression the economy is bad -- high interest rates. Mortgage rates are near a 20-year high and that's preventing some people from buying homes.
Dick, thank you for this thoughtful piece with telling details. For a future piece(s) some suggestions.
1. The influence of “News” organizations that make stuff up and pretzel facts. Many people who follow these mendacious outfits mistakenly believe they are the only honest news organizations.
2. How significant is the severe decline in reading comprehension skills? The latest data shows that 54% of Americans read at sixth grade level or below and about 20% are functionally illiterate, reading at third grade level or below. And, of course, reading level has a major influence on the ability to understand concepts and nuance.
3. What role, if any, is played by the prevailing style of writing news articles in the big five newspapers, AP, Bloomberg, etc.. I would describe the style as bureaucratic interspersed with the occasional high literary value feature . If you spend a few hours looking at news reports from decades past, you will notice that there was a greater emphasis on specific facts, including the titles of government officials, then on narrative.
4. How much does complexity and everything from astrophysics to medical science to taxes encourage ignoring subtle and complex issues in favor of gut or emotional reactions?
Thanks for the kind words, David. Would welcome details on your first suggestion, either here or privately.
Please send me your email… Davidcay@me.com, which I make public to everyone, because I believe Journalists should be easily reachable.
You're assuming that the media's most basic mission is to inform the public, but that isn't the mission of our modern media at all. Their first mission is profit, and their secondary mission is to disseminate views that their owners would like disseminated (see Fox News, Sinclair, etc). Informing the public would be a great mission statement, but who decides what stories we need to be informed? On the profit model, we decide by our clicks, and we apparently don't click on good news much. That's bad enough on its own, but add in the corporate mouthpiece part, and I don't see how editors are going to start approving "Crime is historically low" stories. That's not what the owners of these outfits want us to hear.
Please send me your personal email -- davidcay@me.com
Important and thought provoking article. It's also a failure of imagination by the press. On the day the latest CPI numbers were released, about a week ago, I watched the Evening News. I forget if it was ABC or CBS, as I watch either. Their story included an interview with someone who couldn't pay their bills, commenting on how terrible inflation was. Ok, that's the go-to inflation story, I suppose, and the producers sent someone out to cover it that way. But could they have imagined a better way to tell the story of what was happening to the economy? Apparently not, as a interview with someone choosing between food and medicine is always much more dramatic, they thought, and TV news especially tends towards the dramatic and personal. It's probably the same story choice whether inflation is getting better or worse. No imagination about how to give insight into the larger trends, at least that day.
Thanks for this, Ken. Yes, a failure of imagination, but also worse than that. When inflation is falling, good journalism requires telling THAT story, not the opposite one from a year or more ago.
Yes -- exactly !! The media addiction to doom and gloom and drama is dangerous. The only place I ever hear about any positive aspects of our government, economy or the Biden administration is Heather Cox Richardson. Im so disappointed that I’m considering canceling my subscriptions to a few major media outlets. I feel they are failing me (and us as a country).
Uhh, wrong about Russia, Dick. The IMF has said that Russia will have growth for a year of above 1 percent. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2023/08/russia-ukraine-update-notes-as-russias.html
Three months ago, James K. Galbraith said that sanctions have not only not crushed Russia's economy but have stimulated positive changes. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2023/05/no-sanctions-havent-crushed-russia-its.html
Please don't criticize domestic policy misinformation while with the other hand passing on foreign policy disinformation.
I said the Russian economy is deteriorating. I think it is. See this from the FT yesterday:
https://www.ft.com/content/52e2cfc3-1157-424d-bf08-1b9544c99803
And this from the WSJ today:
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russias-war-torn-economy-hits-its-speed-limit-3c807f26
The IMF piece? Just a week old itself and it covers the entire 2023 year, projecting ahead.
Galbraith? In-depth and just a few months old. Per my add-ons to that, I address that Russia had started reorganizing its economy in the wake of the post-Crimea sanctions and had been a net exporter of food and independent in all foodstuff staples for years. This isn't the 1970s Soviet Union of grain embargo days.
So, I respectfully disagree. I also thin the FT is probably writing from a point of motivated reasoning.
I believe the foreign exchange value of the Russian Ruble is clearly falling. That can be looked up, measured and charted. That usually says something about the economy behind it. Other numbers are harder to measure in real-time.
Oh, it says "something," but I don't think it says as much as Dick might think it does. And, I'd seen other reporting on that.
Completely agree.
There is no question in my mind that the low approval ratings of Biden--whatever his shortcomings--are a product of hundreds of news organizations carrying a drumbeat of negative news. A part of this reflects the way news is consumed as journalists chase clicks in an attention economy. When I was working at my first station in Madison, the snarky alt-left publication "Takeaway" once ran this banner headline "Millions Lead Normal Lives." It was funny. They were poking fun at the same weakness you are identifying: news organizations are always looking for something different, bad, eye catching. This bias toward bad is much less amusing, for me, when I see historically low unemployment numbers, and extraordinary levels of hiring, treated as "ho hum"... barely reported. One big piece is the large sector of the news industry that is now dedicated to making anything the Dems do look like the next step to the collapse of Western civilization. I get that part. What is harder to understand is what you wrote about, Dick, namely a reluctance to acknowledge--and focus on--aspects of the economy or post-Covid American life that are, by reasonable standards, decent, if not good and improving.
Without taking issue with any of your points, I would also say that the Biden administration, most especially Biden himself, have done a terrible job of touting many of the accomplishments that you cite. No Biden in the WHU press room, no Biden from the Oval to the American people — maybe they’re afraid he will stumble or whatever, but the fact remains that this is a real info-gap as well. (And, hi Alex Wallace!)
With the greatest respect, I think that's an excuse. You are entitled to think Biden is a poor communicator. But if the people are misinformed, the press is not doing its job.
PS Reagan gave two Oval Office addresses on the economy in 1982 (when it was bad), and none in 1983 (when it was improving).
I see it as an “and,” not an “or.” I do not disagree that press coverage is poor. Re Reagan — okay, but he was (somehow) able to inspire confidence in many people. Do you think press coverage of the economy and the general state of American affairs was better at that time? Maybe it was. But, media was not nearly as fractured, either, so that is a factor. Anyway, I don’t disagree with you. I just think there are many factors that converge to create broad-brush impressions in Americans’ minds, not just actual facts reported by journalists, and in this regard I am baffled and disappointed by the poor message communication. They have a good story to tell.