Neil deMause

Reason #1 never to believe economic predictions in the media:

The number of newly laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits fell for the third straight week, evidence that layoffs are continuing to ease in the earliest stages of an economic recovery. —AP, 9/24/09

The American economy lost 263,000 jobs in September — far more than expected — and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the government reported on Friday, dimming prospects of any meaningful job growth by the end of the year. —New York Times, today

Reason #2, three headlines that greeted me in a stack on Google News this morning:

Manhattan Apartment Sales Bounced Back Over the Summer, but Not All the Way

Manhattan real estate sales ‘stabilizing’

Manhattan Apartment Prices Drop for Second Quarter

Finally, if you want some predictions with actual research behind them, I offer Rutgers economists Jim Hughes and Joseph Seneca, who predict that we could be heading into the “Lost Employment Decade,” and that it could be 2017 before unemployment drops to pre-recession levels of 2007, and called this an “optimistic” projection: “It’s not going to be an easy slog from here.” Though of course, I read about this in a newspaper report, so it’s probably best to take it with a grain of salt.

The New York Times ran a Page One story yesterday headlined “Where Home Prices Crashed Early, Signs of a Rebound,” all about the housing market in Sacramento, which it declares to be in “the earliest stages of a recovery, a hopeful sign for an economy mired in trouble and anxiety.”

What’s the evidence of this provided in the article? To wit: A single real estate industry analyst says he’s hopeful that prices will “show evidence of stabilizing” soon — i.e., that they’ll stop falling like a rock as they have in recent months. Meanwhile, home sales are up, but only because everyone’s buying foreclosures — which only foretells that they’ll keep selling if there are more foreclosures. And while that well may happen, it’s hard to see it as a good sign for the housing market.

All of which looks less like a “rebound” than “hitting bottom and staying there,” but there’s an implicit agreement among newspapers (especially the Times) to view the world through the lens of the real-estate industry, which needless to say appreciates having front-page stories encouraging people to run out and buy homes. Though you have to wonder how long they’ll keep this up once real estate ads disappear altogether.

The news media is finally getting around to noticing poverty, but do only a certain class of needy qualify?

As the economy crumbles, issues of poverty and economic need have begun to make more frequent appearances in the news media. From October through December 2008, for example, the three nightly TV news shows ran 20 stories—about one every four or five days—addressing poverty or related issues such as homelessness or food stamps. A previous FAIR study of nightly news coverage (Extra!, 9–10/07), by comparison, found an average of one poverty story on the evening news every three weeks.

More coverage, though, does not necessarily mean better coverage. And while swelling food-stamp rolls and unemployment lines may become media staples as the economic downturn worsens, the way poverty issues are portrayed remains constrained by political biases and stereotypes.

If there’s one commonality to the recent surge in coverage of economic need, it’s that the focus is on the newly poor—-with particular attention to those who can claim a middle-class background… [read more]

Fun with Google caching!

Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion is “in hot water” after blurting out to Yale students that he’d already been picked for a top job in the Obama administration, as well as the target of “an anti-Adolfo e-mail campaign” to Obama’s change.gov by Bronx residents upset by his role in the Yankee Stadium controversy, according to a story by Daily News Bronx editor Bob Kappstatter. Wrote one angry Bronxite: “If he runs for a dog catcher, we will campaign against him and support the dogs.”

At least, that’s what you would have read on the Daily News website at 2:16 am, when it was posted. By this afternoon, the story, headlined “Adolfo Carrion under fire,” had disappeared from the Daily News site… [read more]

So the reports by CNN’s Gary Tuchman of serious flooding in the Lower 9th Ward – as well as his later report that the police were telling anyone in the area that the levees there could “explode at any time” – turned out to be inaccurate: Some water did overtop the levees there, but it looks as if the levees held firm. Of course, it took hours before viewers could be assured of this, as CNN’s (and other stations’) reporters otherwise stayed out of New Orleans’ low-lying neighborhoods, relying solely on Army Corps of Engineers assurances that the levees were holding. Which turned out to be true this time, but if it hadn’t been, who would have known?

In all, the Gustav reporting was a notch better than that during Katrina (at least someone bothered to train cameras on some levees), but still exhibited the focus on the tourist district and reliance on official sources that plagued coverage three years ago, at least until one NBC cameraman thought to walk the few blocks to the Convention Center. For example, while disgraced former FEMA chief Mike Brown has been interviewed on nearly every news station about the Gustav response, I’ve yet to see any interviews with New Orleanians who were evacuated on the buses that, this time, the government provided for people with no means of getting out of harm’s way. (Though Anderson Cooper’s blog does have a brief item about one evacuee shelter with no working plumbing.) If nothing else, asking evacuees whether they knew of people who’d been forced to stay behind in New Orleans would have helped answer the question of whether official claims that only 10,000 people remained in the city were true – something no station attempted to verify.

Anyway, looks like there will be two more opportunities coming up for the news media to work on their coverage. We’ll see how they do.

With Anderson Cooper momentarily off the air (he’s moving his satellite truck so it doesn’t blow over), CNN has turned to Gary Tuchman, who’s finally made it to the Lower 9th Ward. There, he reports, a “deluge of water” is pouring in “over and through” the levee, and stop signs are already underwater. Tuchman promised camera footage to come.

So kudos to CNN for getting somebody out into the neighborhoods this time. Though they’d get more kudos if Tuchman hadn’t been standing next to Cooper in the French Quarter an hour ago, talking about how it looked like New Orleans would be spared flooding this time.

Best unintentionally funny moment of the Gustav reporting so far: Anderson Cooper, standing in the official reporting zone of the French Quarter, assuring viewers that “You don’t see anyone on the streets here except police and emergency personnel – anyone still in town is hunkered down.” At that very moment, four twentysomething guys in street clothes wandered through the shot behind him, waving their arms in the hurricane-force winds.

I figure another ten minutes before it ends up on YouTube.

Flipping cable channels for the latest on Hurricane Gustav, I can’t help notice a striking similarity to the run-up to Hurricane Katrina three years ago: Every single news station is reporting from the French Quarter, or the adjacent downtown region. Even Anderson Cooper, the supposed hero journalist of Katrina, remarked a bit ago that while city officials say the city is mostly evacuated, he has no way of knowing if it’s true.

Is it really too much to expect that, now that Katrina alerted the nation that parts of New Orleans exist outside the tourist districts, the media actually go report from there to see how folks are handling this new threat? Probably yes – after all, a mere six months after Katrina, the vast majority of the reporting was on how Mardi Gras had returned to normal, and never mind that the rest of the city was a disaster, and tens of thousands of people were still displaced.

I did just see one CNN correspondent – I didn’t catch his name – mention to Cooper that while the tourist areas of New Orleans are in reasonably good shape today, the outlying neighborhoods are not. Still, I haven’t seen a single piece of video footage, or even blog post, from the poorer sections of town. Let’s hope we don’t have a repeat of 2005, when the nation went to bed on Monday night assured that “the water is going down” in the French Quarter, only to later learn that at moment, the levees had been breached for more than 12 hours, and half the city – the not-ready-for-prime-time half – was already underwater.

Don’t believe anything you read on the front page of the New York Post, no matter how amusing the headline is:

Today’s front-page Post “exclusive” reports that the Yankees and Mets are in “secret talks” to buy the remnants of Yankee and Shea Stadiums so the teams can sell off the scrap to souvenir-hunting fans. In the story inside, memorabilia expert Mike Heffner raves about the value of New York baseball relics, speculating that in the case of Yankee Stadium, “Each brick could sell for $100 to $300. I doubt we’d have any trouble selling every seat in the house for as much as $1,000.”

Even given the low bar for tabloid exclusives, not much of this is news… [read more]

In the course of responding to the New Yorker’s problematic profile of Rudy Giuliani a couple of weeks ago (by Elizabeth Kolbert, who’s usually one of my favorite of their writers, but who usually sticks to environmental issues), I tackle the common belief that the sinking presidential candidate was a mastermind at tackling crime and welfare:

How will history judge Rudy Giuliani? With his presidential campaign (and political career) at a turning point in tomorrow’s Florida primary, it’s a question worth asking.

If there’s anything close to a journalistic consensus about Rudy’s reign as New York mayor, it’s something like what Elizabeth Kolbert expressed in a long New Yorker magazine profile of Giuliani earlier this month… [read more]