A real quick note today, because I’ve got a lot on my plate, but Kevin Drum has provided a perfect excuse to get back on my bullshit with yesterday’s post complaining about reporting on inflation. He quotes a story about a poll saying that 45% of households feel they’ve been negatively affected by inflation, then uses the chart above to show that average prices have increased only a little faster than average wages, and argues that this is overblown.
Now, I partly agree with this, and partly disagree. The disagreement is around the significance— Drum downplays the effect of the 2%-ish gap between prices and wages, saying that “the number of families facing any noticeable hardship has still got to be tiny.” I think that’s a bad look, playing into the “insensitive liberal elite” stereotype— I’m much more inclined to take people at their word, especially around questions like this that are fundamentally kind of qualitative. We’re ultimately concerned with elections, not a financial audit, so what matters is not so much the details of the family balance sheet, but how people feel about their finances when they head to the polls. If 45% of them think things are bad, that’s a problem, and we shouldn’t wave it off.
The part that I agree with, though, comes a paragraph or two later, when he talks about the media:
This is the kind of thing that should make us question the role of the media in all this. Please note: I'm not saying that no one would notice higher prices if the media didn't report it. The price of both a pound of hamburger and a gallon of gasoline have gone up 50 cents since May, and that's something people are going to notice. Nevertheless, the media's job should be to put highly visible price increases like this into context—and in this case the context is that there are some outliers, but on average prices have gone up only slightly more than wages.
But it's been just the opposite. If anything, reporting has made inflation look worse than even the outliers suggest. This is why you get people vaguely guessing that prices in the supermarket have gone up 100% or so. And it's why people report serious hardship from inflation even though the vast majority of us are feeling only a tiny effect.
I do think that people’s subjective feelings are aggravated by the media coverage Drum complains about, and this is the “back on my bullshit” part of things. While I agree that, as Drum says in the next paragraph after the quoted bit, “This kind of context setting is, in theory, one of the most important things the media does,” the “in theory” is doing a lot of work, here. In practice, as I wrote a while back regarding Covid coverage, the core standard practices of journalism push in the opposite direction, and that’s a huge problem.
And again, as I said in the earlier piece, this isn’t a complaint about the relatively recent phenomenon of “clickbait,” this is a matter of deeply ingrained norms. It’s “inverted pyramid”, “man bites dog”, “what’s the hook?” stuff, just basic practices of how journalists are trained to select and present stories. Wonks like Kevin Drum and I think that context-setting is essential, but that’s actually way down the list of journalistic values from story-telling.
And story-telling demands an attention-grabbing hook, which means latching onto outliers, whether those are breakthrough Covid cases or commodities whose prices are unusually volatile. Context goes way down the slope of the story pyramid, and that means things are always going to look either a lot worse or a lot better than a more nuanced, contextual treatment will say it is.
This is why I find that “Democracy Dies in Darkness” at the top of every Washington Post story faintly irritating, and grind my teeth a little whenever someone launches into a panegyric about journalism’s essential role in producing an informed citizenry. It’s not completely wrong, mind, but when the choice needs to be made between accurately informing people and telling a colorful story, the story wins, every time. Most of the time, that’s pretty inconsequential because most news doesn’t actually matter, but when it matters, it really matters, and it’s making us all crazy.
So, there’s one of the clouds I will yell at, as alluded to in yesterday’s post. Here are some buttons to click, if you should be so moved:
and if you just want to yell back, the comments will be open.
My family is not in the top 20%, and the grocery and has prices are noticeable to us.