Economic Meltdown?

In the late 80s, the nightly news featured story after story about the homeless crisis in America. The growing homeless problem was a nightly story…. until it stopped driving viewers to the news and then they moved on to the next crisis. The same was true of the obesity crisis, the war on drugs, the war on terror, stranger danger and anything else the idiot box decided was the next big thing for America to worry about.

In 2008/2009 the story has been the financial crisis facing America. While it’s true that the stock market has performed poorly, banks have had their bad loans catch up to them and some companies have had layoffs, I have to wonder how much of this is something the average American really needs to worry about.

Did anyone really expect that loans without income verification were not going to have a high default rate?  It’s not really news, yet it makes headlines. Why? Because it’s a trainwreck and people like to gawk. But the news agencies can’t stop there, they have to keep making the news… and so doom and despair are the headlines of the day.

The leading story on tonight’s news won’t be about the millions of Americans who are now refinancing their home loans at amazingly low interest rates or of the positive things that are happening in the country today.

10,000 jobs cut at a major employer?  Check out this graph from a study by John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland and Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda of the Census Bureau job creation and decide just how newsworthy it really is.

Television is a for profit enterprise funded by advertisers. To make money networks need to get eyes on the screen. So when you watch the news you should be asking yourself ‘just what are they trying to sell me?’