A Painless Recession?

Any given day watching the evening news, perusing online news sites, or ruffling through the pages of your local newspaper (provided it hasn't shut down in your town yet), one would be hard-pressed to realize that we're in the midst of the worst economy and employment crisis since the Great Depression. Sure, there are plenty of reports on the trajectory of the stock market, the profits or losses of corporations, and cold numbers related to unemployment rates that have been trending sharply upward for the past year. But what we're seeing far less of, compared to past recessions in my lifetime, is tangible reporting on the human toll of our economic freefall.

In recessions past, I can recall a steady diet of heartbreaking personal stories connected to joblessness, the loss of homes, and the loss of livelihoods. In a nation with as many insensitive souls as this one, such stories are desperately needed to make real the human suffering that economic contraction produces. It becomes more difficult for a bunch of middle management stuffed shirts on the golf course to bemoan the shiftless proletariat and find an audience when the public sees what's really going on in devastated factory towns throughout Middle America.

So what accounts for the complete dearth of human interest stories about the recession's toll? Does it have something to do with the media being "in the tank for Obama" and trying not to create bad headlines for him? That might be part of it, but I think the bigger issue is apathy and laziness. I've long defended Old Media as a necessary dinosaur in the information age that is responsible for carrying the much-lauded pajama media of the blogosophere on its back, but regrettably, it appears that the Old Media is slumbering into the New Media's tabloid-esque vision of journalism.

Not even accounting for the endless nights of Michael Jackson being the lead story on the network news broadcasts, the quality of journalism in the last couple of years has been abysmal. With increased frequency, "news" has become an exercise is endlessly analyzing information that is readily available rather than doing the heavy lifting of investigative journalism. The current debate on health care is a classic example. For the few and far between stories relaying personal stories from either side of the issue, we hear 25 stories on the street fight in Washington and whether "Obama's message is getting through". In the past, journalists would have been more likely to interview individuals with hardships letting them know what the public option would mean to them.....or those living in states that have imposed a variation on universal health care (Massachusetts) or the public option (Tennessee) to warn us of potential unforeseen downsides of doing this wrong. But that would require more journalistic effort that another day of reporting on Congressman Joe Wilson.

Something like 20 states have unemployment rates of 10% or higher....yet all we ever hear about from the media is that the rate of 12.4% in California is up from 12.2% last month. Those percentages of unemployed involve tens of millions of actual people. It's about damn time we heard from some of them.