Is mainstream media fearmongering the recession?

I not only hear that thrown around as a general rhetorical question; as a newspaper editor, it sometimes comes to me personally.

Being over the age of 40, and remembering well, the Carter-Reagan recession, I’d have to give a qualified Yes to that question. For example, this Time graphic compares recent job losses to the 1992 and 2001 recessions.

BUT… if you’re over the age of 35, you know both of those recessions were mild.

Even worse, since the Internet world, especially the Internet commentary world of blogs, blog readers, etc., skews quite young demographically, the “kids” there seem historically clueless about the U.S. economy before Bill Clinton became president.

But, the reality is the Carter-Reagan recession was worse than this one’s been so far.

How much worse? In BOTH 1982 and 1983, job losses, as a percentage of workforce, were , worse than 2008.

But, thanks to historically cluelessness of much of the wired generation, historical amnesia of the “old media,” and, I suspect, a bit of narcissism among Gen X, or at least the younger portion of it (I don’t consider myself to be fully a Boomer OR fully a Gen X person), we get doomsaying that, for right now at least, is indeed over the top.

In fact, the more and more the “ohhhhhh, so bad” line grows as a talking point in the wired world, the more I wonder about whether narcissism, rather than historical cluelessness, isn’t the primary driver