Sheldon Steiger

underpaidgenius:

How the Press ‘juked the stats’ and followed the politician’s mania about hte debt and ignored the average person’s concerns about unemployment:

Jason Linkins via HuffPo

One day, we’re going to look back on the late spring/early summer as a time of widespread journalistic failure. At the time, the Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop was running at maximum speed and the obsession was deeply entrenched. The absurd notion that a political party could attempt to leverage demands by threatening to send the United States into default and set off a cataclysm within the interconnected global economy therefore got covered as just another interesting point of view, rather than pure sociopathy. At the time, it was increasingly common to see ordinary Americans, expressing themselves through polls, urging action on the unemployment crisis. But it was just as common for the press to juke the stats to fit their preferred narrative — and at the time, the press was freebasing pure, uncut deficit hysteria.

The National Journal noted the extremity of this media obsession with a chart of their own:

Back then, even some people who were willing to mildly criticize the media on this score ended up choking on apologies and excuses. The best the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson could offer was: “The press was partly complicit in this fade-out effect. But it’s hard to blame the media too much for resisting to write feverishly about nonexistent efforts to fix a static unemployment problem.” Translation: if lawmakers aren’t doing anything to fix unemployment, it’s hard to make a story out of it, and we’re not willing to try.

With lawmakers diddling one another in deficit committees and members of the media denying their own agency, someone had to step up. And that someone ended up being the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their human-flesh social network took up physical space on the ground and started telling their own stories, using Tumblr as their means of aggregation.

A fumble. And the press continue their mistake by endlessly mistaking the Occupy protests as a full-fledged movement. That comes in the spring, or maybe next summer.