Kara & Michael’s Blog

This Associated Press story about the subprime mortgage crisis, entitled “Into the Economic Abyss” (apparently with a straight face), is one of the poorest and most irresponsible pieces of reporting I’ve seen in a while, and I think it pretty well reflects what’s wrong with the American media at the moment.

You can go read the article and come back if you like (I’ll wait), but here’s a small portion for those of you with short attention spans:

As economists and Wall Street types grope for historical perspective — which is another way of saying a road map out of this mess — Americans are nervously wondering about retirement savings, interest rates, jobs that had seemed safe.

They are surveying the economic landscape and asking: Just how bad is it?

They are peering over the edge and asking: How far down?

And the scariest part of all? No one can say for sure.

…or, to paraphrase:

Pretty much the whole piece is like this — there’s some recycled crap about what’s happened to Bear Sterns, and some flimsy comparisons to the 1970s that have been endlessly parroted over the last few weeks, but mostly it’s about 2,000 words of grade-A American media fear-mongering.

I think this is disgusting, but mostly because so much of the news is like this now. There are so many articles on various newswires that offer new and interesting perspectives on the current economic situation, but this fatalistic grade-school summary of the situation is currently the most e-mailed article about the economy on Yahoo! News. In other words, this is what people think their friends need to read. I’ll bet you the phrase “hard-hitting” was used in reference to this article at least once during the editorial process.

OMG, people. We are all going to be poor. Gasoline will be forty-six dollars a gallon. Your retirement fund will become worthless overnight, and if you aren’t growing your own food you are going to starve. Buy gold, and a gun.

You know, this sounds an awful lot like the Bad Dream House from “Treehouse of Horror” — “And some horrible stuff, possibly your brain, will start coming out through your nose.”

Oh well. If it wasn’t the economy, it would be terrorists or political scandals.