Media Villager fail: How the unemployed are ignored in the ‘Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post's Plum Line started this discussion a few days ago which has been joined by several other commentators.

Sargent writes, "The other day, I argued that we are increasingly caught in what might be called a “Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop.” The relentless bipartisan focus on the deficit convinces voters to be worried about it, which in turn leads lawmakers to spend still more time talking about it and less time talking about the economy (and unemployment). Here it is: Scientific proof of the `Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop’ – The Plum Line:

The National Journal has done us all a good turn by publishing a new study that seems to confirm that this phenomenom is having a palpable impact on our political coverage. The study concludes that major newspapers are increasingly obsessed with the deficit at the exptense of the economy:

Major U.S. newspapers have increasingly shifted their attention away from coverage of unemployment in recent months while greatly intensifying their focus on the deficit, a National Journal analysis shows.

The analysis — based on a measure of how often the words “unemployment” and “deficit” appear in major publications — portrays a dramatically shifting landscape of coverage over the past two years, as the debate over how to fix the federal deficit has risen to prominence and the question of how to handle still-high unemployment has faded from the media’s consciousness.

The Atlantic's Derek Thompson offers an explanation as to why this is:

Articles mentioning unemployment have plummeted nearly 70 percent since last summer, while articles mentioning the deficit have doubled over the same time, according to a National Journal report.

Is this pernicious Beltway loopism? Maybe. But more likely it’s the inevitable result of an election that punished stimulus-happy Democrats and opened the doors wide for Republicans who promised to focus with maniacal intensity on the deficit. The 2010 election reshaped Congress, the Congress reshaped the jobs-and-deficit debate, and press coverage shifted to the deficit.

(More about this article later).

Steve Benen weighed in at the Political Animal:

I agree with that last point about news outlets following the lead of policymakers. Indeed, there’s a degree of common sense at play — the media isn’t covering unemployment because policymakers aren’t focused on unemployment. This is nearly always how news organizations cover current events, with reporters cover what’s going on, not what’s failing to go on. As Thompson put it, “[I]t’s hard to blame the media too much for resisting to write feverishly about nonexistent efforts to fix a static unemployment problem.”

That’s true, but it’s also problematic. It’s partly why Greg Sargent calls this the “Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop” — politicians prioritize the deficit over job creation, which leads the media to prioritize the deficit over job creation, which encourages politicians to prioritize the deficit over job creation even more.

What I disagree with is the notion that Republican “promised to focus with maniacal intensity on the deficit” during the last election cycle. Indeed, I’d argue that’s largely backwards. GOP candidates had several areas of emphasis leading up to the midterms, but one of the most common refrains was, “Where are the jobs?” For many Republicans, the promise was to “focus with maniacal intensity” on unemployment, which was largely responsible for such dramatic GOP gains.

Had Republicans let the public know they’d shift the focus “with maniacal intensity” away from job creation, the GOP probably wouldn’t have done nearly as well.

The best discussion on this topic I have seen to date comes from Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post. The Media Has Abandoned Covering The Nation's Massive Unemployment Crisis:

[I]f there's a cross-section of America that's blind to this crisis, it's those who ply their trade in Washington and the people who doggedly follow them around with steno pads and frantically scribble down whatever dribbles from their mouths. And here, the media has maintained an upside down and backward viewpoint on the crises that grip our nation. That massive unemployment problem? The media has this pegged as a problem that solely impacts the relative reelection hopes of politicians. Will Obama gain a second term, or will he be forced into a life of top-dollar speaking fees, book deals and lucrative appointments on corporate and foundation boards? The question rages!

Meanwhile, they've decided that what the public really cares about is the structural federal deficit. Poll after poll shows that this is not the top concern of Americans — in fact, earlier this week, we saw Politico dress up their poll results in a way that made deficit concerns more prominent by combining them with the more resonant concerns of the unemployment crisis. But it hardly matters. This is the story the media wants to tell, and by God, they will keep telling it.

How hard has the deficit soap opera been pushed? Pretty hard, actually. And at the expense of coverage of the unemployment crisis. Here's Clifford Marks at the National Journal:

Major U.S. newspapers have increasingly shifted their attention away from coverage of unemployment in recent months while greatly intensifying their focus on the deficit, a National Journal analysis shows.

The analysis — based on a measure of how often the words "unemployment" and "deficit" appear in major publications — portrays a dramatically shifting landscape of coverage over the past two years, as the debate over how to fix the federal deficit has risen to prominence and the question of how to handle still-high unemployment has faded from the media's consciousness.

The National Journal includes a chart that puts this disparity in stark relief.

As Marks points out, the focus on the deficit is, in part, a measure of "how effective conservatives have been at changing the narrative of economic policy from one dominated by talk of fiscal stimulus to one now in lockstep with notions of fiscal austerity."

* * *

It's pretty much inconceivable that you can understand the magnitude of the unemployment problem, see that major newspapers are making passing mention of it, and come to any conclusion other than the fact that the media has massively failed in its duties to the public. But even in chiding the media for this failure, look at what The Atlantic's Derek Thompson does, in summation:

The upshot is that the production economy thawed. But the labor economy froze. And the political will to fix the labor market faded in 2010. 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.

What? Are you effing kidding me, Derek Thompson? The media can't be blamed for failing to report on a massive nationwide problem because the powerful people tasked with solving it have abandoned the effort? No, no! It's easy to blame the media for that. You were well on your way to doing so, Derek Thompson, but then you wrote that idiotic concluding paragraph.

And that paragraph is a measure of the fact that the press are held hostage to their own preference for talking to powerful and influential people and sussing out what's on their delicate minds rather than talk to actual unemployed people, who are of no particular importance and, in some cases, even "working class." As always, there's no particular value in getting "access" to random poor people in America.

Powerful people, on the other hand, want to talk about deficits all day long, and when reporters spend all day chasing after them, it colors the coverage.

* * *

Is there any way to get the media out of this rut? Not likely! As focus shifts to the 2012 campaign, the press will fall back on their standard practice of playing up the decided-upon issue narrative and then giving copious portions of the news cycle to whatever shiny pseudo-events occur along the way. And unemployment is well on it's way to being pushed off the page — let's recall that in the first of what promises to be maybe one thousand presidential debates, "joblessness was only tangentially connected to a few questions about tax policy, organized labor and the national debt."

So, I'm very sorry, unemployed people of America. Unless you happen to be more riven with concern over how your joblessness impacts the electoral hopes of various affluent politicians than you are about how your joblessness impacts your ability to get some food, I'm afraid you're going to be on your own for at least the next year and a half.

Sadly, Jason Likins is probably correct.