It set the narrative and now people can’t see this:
Referring to the front page above James Fallows explained why this is so pernicious:
The parts in red illustrate the amount of above-the-fold coverage—ie, most of it—given to a jump in inflation rates. This mirrored the emphasis in most other papers and in broadcast outlets and discussion shows.
Below, from December 10, one day earlier, are the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the lead business page of the Times. Again, the part in red is about inflation worries. The headline over two related NYT stories is, “Inflation Gut-Punches Millennials.”
And that little below-the-fold box highlighted in blue, on the Journal’s front page? That’s a story on the lowest U.S. unemployment filings in more than 50 years. The headline reads, “Tight Labor Market Sends Jobless Claims to New Low.”
The placement, emphasis, and “play” of stories is how people in the media signal what they consider most important. I’m not offering these pages as precise scientific proof. But I contend that they fit a general recent pattern of emphasis from the “serious” media: placing vastly more stress on the threat of inflation, which indeed is getting worse, than on the evil of unemployment, which is getting much better. (For more about this pattern of coverage, see Eric Boehlert among others.)
As a reminder: current U.S. job prospects are not simply “better” when judged on the historical curve, with these record-low unemployment claims. They are almost unbelievably better, in light of the sudden loss of more than 20 million U.S. jobs in just one month last year, as the pandemic took hold. After the April, 2020 jobs report came out, a university research center issued a report headlined “U.S. job losses due to COVID-19 highest since Great Depression.” That’s what the news was like less than two years ago.
If you were a future historian, assessing what economic trends the leading media in late 2021 felt should command attention, it would be an easy call. The media of our time are telling us to worry more about inflation. I think they are wrong.
Why does it matter that worsening inflation gets so much more play than dramatically improving job prospects?
—There’s an obvious national-politics answer, which is that this emphasis makes people “feel worse” than they should about overall economic trends. This in turn makes them feel more cynical and fatalistic about the chance of progress on any policy front. It’s related to the long-term pattern of U.S. crime rates going down, but fear of crime going up.
—For those in economist-land, there’s the intensifying discussion about the “transitory” versus the “persistent” nature of this moment’s inflation. And about how the relationship between unemployment and inflation rates has changed, since the era when I learned about the Phillips curve in grad-school economics courses long ago.
But to me, the “human” importance of the mismatch matters most, and it spills over into the media-related, political, and economic dimensions. The over-emphasis on inflation numbers, relative to employment trends, blurs the fact that while both are problems, for the people living through it unemployment is much worse.
Inflation erodes a family’s purchasing power. Unemployment eliminates it.
That makes a huge difference.
It’s not just about purchasing power, as important as that is. It’s also about worker power, personal power. People have choices right now. After years of worker insecurity in the wake of the financial crisis, they finally have some options. It should be a good news story and it would be if the mainstream media would look at the big picture instead of following the lead of right wing propaganda.