Certain Doom In Uncertain Times

Heard any good news lately?

Probably not, if you’ve had the television or the radio tuned to any of the local or mainstream news outlets or had the newspaper open to anything other than the recipe pages. Without question this has been a long and fertile season for near-hysterical news coverage. With my 20-year background in television, I might be more attuned to — and critical of — the ins-and-outs of broadcast news than other, more “normal” folks. And in my view, we’ve been under an absolute avalanche of negative news, dating back almost two years or more to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. I, for one, have heard enough.

Several months ago, in an editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer entitled “Whoa On The Woe”, small business owner Matt Cook also suggested that we were hearing too much about “how bad things are” and questioned if things were really that bad to begin with. Mr. Cook writes “those who say we are in the worst shape since the 1930s must prefer interest rates in the teens (late ‘70s) and inflation in double digits (‘79-’80) to what we have today.”

Since Mr. Cook wrote his article, elements that define this recession have unquestionably gotten more severe. But in my opinion so have the ways that media outlets continually and incessantly report each and every negative bit of news related to the economy. Seriously, do we need to hear a report on each and every quarterly loss in American business… in each and every newscast? Is it necessary to begin each and every story with a paraphrase of “here’s another sign of our faltering economy”? Do we need to hear incessant arguments from legions of competing economists… none of whom really know whether any particular plan or strategy is going to work against the ever-shifting forces of businesses, brokers, and bureaucrats?

In the midst of the Great Depression, with the nation in far worse economic shape than it’s in today, newly-elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered the oft-quoted line from his inaugural address: ”...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...” That sentence ended with “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

I’m not an expert, but one doesn’t have to look too far or too hard to see that folks are reacting to what they hear by “hunkering down” and holding on to what they’ve got. And if consumer confidence is an element of any pending economic recovery, doesn’t it seem reasonable that confidence might go up — even just a little — if there were fewer reports of gloom and doom from every side?

In 1933, FDR used the relatively new thing called “radio” to break new ground and speak directly to the American people… his “fireside chats” were successful in blunting the “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” Today, the media is everywhere... constantly tabulating every hiccup and sneeze of both our nation's economy and its leadership. Maybe our approach to reaching the same end as FDR should involve just turning the darn things off.

Robert Flinn, REALTOR®
919-698-2040 (Direct)
919-402-1242 (Office)
rflinn@fmrealty.com (email)