Party Identification and Media Narratives

Is the economy good or bad? How would you know?

This is, I submit, a hard question. Yes, the economy goes up and down, but even in a terrible year most people who want jobs have them. High unemployment helps some people, especially those looking for workers. The state of the economy also varies a lot from one region to another; in Maryland, there is no recession.

In modern America, people get their ideas about the economy from the news. And even in the days of network dominance, what the news said about the economy was hardly neutral. I quit watching TV news in the early 90s, when I thought that to get readership all the networks were playing up the recession in a disgraceful way. They kept leading with a story like "Today in Canton, Ohio, another factory closed, and 70 people lost their jobs." As if the closing of a 70-person factory was something newsworthy, and not just another way to scare people into watching. I had a conversion with a grocery store clerk around that time who was surprised, she said, that people were buying extra food for Christmas, since "everybody's out of work and nobody has any money." Since this was in Maryland, where the 1991 recession was very mild, she could only have gotten this impression from the news.

So it does not surprise me at all to hear that how people feel about the economy depends on their political allegiance. Right now, Democrats are much more optimistic about the economy than Republicans, no doubt under the influence pre-election wishful thinking. This is one area in which Republican have no monopoly on delusion, as anyone who remembers 2004 can tell you; back then Democrats were all trying to convince me that the generally positive economic numbers were a lie, and really things were awful.

I do think, though, that this might be a problem for our country in a lot of ways. Does the media narrative of what is going on in the country, however distorted, play a key part in creating whatever sense of national unity we have? Over time, will there be less and less shared experience of being an American, and more experience that is determined by your political party? I wonder.