Has media coverage worsened the economy? Of course it has.

Posted on Sunday, December 28, 2008 by Rex Hammock

Required reading: This op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post. In it, author and former NPR correspondent Eric Weiner explores how the recession is bad enough, but a relentless news cycle has made it worse. Send your disagreements to him, not me. Although I agree with every word in it.

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About Rex Hammock

Founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., the content marketing and custom media services company based in Nashville, Tenn.
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  • http://joelanceforchattanooga.com/ Joe Lance

    I haven’t read it yet (I will), but I find it interesting that I was lying awake thinking the same thing at about 4:00 this morning. I’m not suggesting that we bury our heads in the sand, but at the same time, having our ears filled continuously with a barrage of “the economy’s bad” will, in fact, make the problem worse.

  • http://www.nashvillepost.com Tom Wood

    A fine and timely piece, worth taking to heart. That said, I have to say that my job as a local business journalist these days entails constant triage to decide which scam-implosion and business-failure stories demand immediate coverage.

    I have a surfeit of miserable tales facing me in the public records I comb every day, and none of my other sources have led me toward any big story of business success lately. Believe me, any corporate story involving successful access to debt or equity financing could now be news, and we would probably make the most of it.

    I hope my fellow reporters and I, locally and beyond, will be attuned to signs of a move toward better fortunes when they present themselves. It took a chat with an 86-year-old lady over the weekend to remind me of the Schumpeterian reality that we are in a cycle. “Things got better for us eventually,” she said of the Great Depression. “But not everyone was still around at the end to enjoy the change.”