Saturday, March 07, 2009
The Blame Game
Whose fault is it that the economy is in despair?
According to Recession Psychology 101* in today’s Dallas News, psychology blames the media: bad news = feeling bad = spending less.
The media defends itself ("Thing is, Friday’s job report number really was awful. We’re not trying to ruin your weekend") and blames the Internet ("It’s the Internet – not necessarily journalists – that’s allowed bad economic news to ricochet around the world faster than ever before, Steele said.")
This seems pretty standard to me. Back in December the Pew Research Center released the Psychology Of Bad Times survey report suggesting just this psychological cycle of worry leading to cutbacks leading to further economic troubles. The effects tradition in the social sciences has concentrated on what media does to people, and new media is afraid of old media. Nothing new here.
The article concludes with a psychologist who suggests turning off the evening news so we don’t need to worry about what doesn’t affect our daily lives. But in this cycle of economic woes (I’m going with the flow here) won’t that lead advertisers to stop buying spots on the evening news to cut costs because no one is watching any more, thus leading to less funding for news shows and causing the collapse of news media?
As oddly amusing as all of this circling is, we can’t blame (only) the media for the culture of fear we all participate in and create. Our society looks at faults and problems. The media looks at faults and problems. It goes far deeper than than the media, but then how could things change if something that was “really awful” was not the most important fact to tell the world?
*The headline has been edited to: Barrage of bad news can get in your head, affect judgment
