Is Economic Pessimism the Media’s Fault?
The jobs report released last October was a thing of beauty. Over the previous month, the U.S. economy had added 336,000 jobs. It was one of the largest gains of the year and nearly double the amount that most analysts had expected—the kind of numbers that traditionally might occasion some celebratory champagne-popping. Here’s how the press covered it: “Jobs Gains Surge, Troubling News for the Federal Reserve,” read a New York Times headline. “Don’t Get Too Comfortable With a Good Job Market,” warned The Wall Street Journal. “September Jobs Report May Be Last Good One Before Sharp Slowdown,” according to Bloomberg.
Journalists have long gravitated toward calling out problems rather than highlighting feel-good stories. Exposing wrongdoing and injustice is, the press for doomerism.) But according to new research from the Brookings Institution, when it comes to economic news, this proclivity for negativity has lately gotten even more pronounced. For the study, the economists Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner an index of the “sentiment” of economic coverage in a set of mainstream newspapers with what is actually happening in the economy. They found that, from 1988 to 2016, changes in the two tracked closely together: The sentiment of economic stories tended to become more positive when measures such as inflation, employment, and the stock market were looking good, and more negative when they were looking bad. At the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency, however, the relationship began to break down; coverage became more negative than the economic fundamentals would predict. After Joe Biden took office, the gulf widened even more. In an email, Harris and Sojourner told me that they found that from 2017 to 2023, the media’s “negativity gap” was nearly five times larger than it was during the previous three decades.
