The United States has experienced a 12% increase in homelessness, to its highest reported level. Federal officials Friday said soaring rents and a winding down of coronavirus pandemic assistance combined to put housing out of reach for more Americans.
    • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.idEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I don’t think that’s what is happening at all. We don’t need to imagine some vast and ridiculously improbable media conspiracy to explain this seeming disconnect. What I imagine is really happening is that the tools that economists and by extension the media use to gauge the health of the economy are no longer (if they ever were) calibrated to accurately reflect the lived experience of many/most Americans.

      This is by far the simplest explanation.

      The idea that this is somehow a conspiracy is simply an example of poor media literacy. It doesn’t work like that at all.

        • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.idEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          It’s cute that you appear to imagine that anyone gets rich through journalism. No one goes into journalism because they want to get rich.

          Journalism is probably the lowest paid “profession” there is because it’s highly competitive and in recent decades the bottom has entirely fallen out of local news organizations due to the Internet having destroyed their revenue streams.

          Overwhelmingly people go into journalism because they want to make a difference, not because they want to get rich. If you want to get rich you go into finance or a STEM field or go to law school.

          This idea of yours, that journalists use their own economic conditions when reporting on the economy is also objectively absurd.

          To the contrary, they report what the economists and financial market experts are saying. Again, this “gaslighting” notion of yours makes no sense inasmuch as it implies something very like a conspiracy or a collective understanding that the truth is to be misrepresented.

          This makes no sense in the reality that is competitive reporting in which one is rewarded for reporting “scoops” in terms of breaking news. Again, it just shows how illiterate you and many others are when it comes to understanding what actually happens in newsrooms.

          While it makes sense to imagine that traditional economic indicators aren’t necessarily indicative of the lived experience of average citizens, it makes zero sense to imagine that the highly competitive news media is somehow in collusion to present an inaccurate picture of the economy.

          That’s just plain stupid.

          Source; I have a degree in journalism together with decades in the news business. It’s actually pretty difficult for me to emphasize how wrong-headed you are on this.