A recession by any other name...

I was watching CNN the other day, and was surprised at how optimistic the coverage was. A correspondent was being interviewed about the price of gas, because the national average had just dropped below $2.00 a gallon. She raved that--when adjusted for inflation--that's how much we were paying for gas in the 1960s. She then extolled the viewers to go have fun, fun, fun in the T-Birds. The American public must be loving this drop in gas prices, she said, especially since the DOW Jones average was up 150 pts at that point. One phrase she said stuck out to me: "we earned it," referring to America as a whole deserving this lightening of the burden.

However, the burden was only lightened slightly. Although gas prices are down now, they will go back up, and however pleasant the DOW rise is, the nature of the market is that it will drop again. The silver lining of the recession is that it forces people to be more responsible, since many have been living beyond their means. This type of media coverage paints an overly rosy picture of the situation: times are lean, so fiscal responsibility is a good thing; we can't just point to a couple of positive blips on the national radar to celebrate and ignore the overwhelming burdens that dominate the larger picture. By calling for a celebration in our T-Birds, the correspondent made us feel better, but with unrepresentative 'evidence.' The media--especially television--play a tremendously large role in shaping how we interpret the world; if they say everything's alright, then people may be less conscientious in their behavior. It seems apparent that the cable news media were simply trying to make people feel good, to help them avoid experiencing anything unpleasant.No one wants their comfortable way of life disturbed. So let's go out and have a celebratory drive, because as the CNN corespondent said, "we earned it."