JOURNALISM AND ECONOMICS: The Tangled Webs of … AND ECONOMICS: THE TANGLED WEBS OF PROFESSION,...

JOURNALISM ANDECONOMICS: The Tangled Webs of Profession,Narrative, and Responsibility in aModern Democracy

by

Richard Parker

Discussion Paper D-25May 1997

PRESS POLITICS

PUBLIC POLICY

The Joan Shorenstein Center

Harvard UniversityJohn F. Kennedy School of Government

Richard Parker 1

The relationship between economists andeconomic journalists should be symbiotic. Theyhave much to learn from each other. The mediaare obviously an important source of economicinformation, and economists have a considerableamount of information about how the economyworks that should be useful to journalists. Inaddition, it is particularly important for econo-mists who are interested in influencing policy tohave their findings effectively presented both tothe public at large and to policy makers in par-ticular. In principle, therefore, these professionsare allies. Yet as Richard Parker convincinglydemonstrates in this paper, their interactionworks poorly.

Economists often find fault with the way inwhich economic information is reported.Sometimes they accuse the press of ignorance,distortion and a misplaced emphasis on recentnumbers rather than trends. At other times,however, journalists are faulted for claimingtrends without sufficient evidence. Journalists,for their part, find much of what economists doboth incomprehensible and irrelevant. Many ofthe issues with which academic economists arepreoccupied, appear remote from the concerns ofaverage citizens.

Economists are, in fact, deeply concernedabout policy. It is common, even in the mostesoteric papers in professional journals, to findstatements which draw implications for policy.Yet one can be sure that the likelihood that actu-al policy makers will be aware of these insightsis extremely low. One reason is that the lan-guage of economists is utterly unintelligible tothe layman and both the economists themselvesand journalists are poorly equipped to undertakethe necessary translation. As an economist I res-onated particularly strongly with the paper’semphasis on the inherent difficulties of commu-nicating information that is technically complexto an untrained public. I would add that theincentive systems which are set up to rewardeconomists and journalists inhibit effective com-munication. In particular, in academe, a highvalue is often placed on rigor rather than rele-vance. Moreover, economists’ reputationsdepend not on the public but their peers. Theyoften feel uncomfortable providing answerswithout footnotes, and compelled to hedge whenthe discipline itself has not resolved an issue or

where the answers that it does have are highlydependent on a particular set of assumptionsthat might not hold true in reality. On the otherhand, journalists quite naturally prize soundbites, answers which are definitive and provoca-tive, that are clear and easily conveyed. In addi-tion, the search for what is newsworthy oftenleads to stories which emphasize the novel orthe unconventional, which accentuates differ-ences of opinion rather than areas of agreement.On many issues important for the news, such asbusiness developments and market movements,economists have little to say. On other issues,where economists do have views, the professionis often presented as divided, even when differ-ences are relatively small, thereby conveying animpression of chaos.

For whatever reason, economists from acad-eme are rarely quoted. The press prefers the pun-dits from Wall Street or Washington. In the rareinstances when they are quoted, the quotesoften fail to capture fully the subtleties of whatthe economists have to say. The result is thatthe public in general and policy makers in partic-ular, for the most part, carry on without the ben-efit of the insights which economists have tooffer.

What can be done to improve this situa-tion? The answer is clearly important if econom-ics is to contribute to better public policy. It issurely a necessary condition for effective report-ing that journalists become more economicallyliterate and better rewarded for doing so. It isalso surely necessary that economists undertakeresearch that is relevant. However, what is inter-esting and most provocative in this paper, is thesuggestion that this might not be sufficient.Parker correctly points to the key actor oftenmissing in this discussion — the public.

He suggests that even the clearest state-ment of what economists know about policy,written by journalists who are as well trained in economics as the economists themselves,might still not penetrate the public’s conscious-ness unless the reporting can be captured by the filters by which the public organizes andprocesses information. In particular, the publicimposes a moral and human interest frame onnews which economics, as a discipline, severelyunderplays. The public, according to Parker, hasdeeply rooted views which are at odds with the

INTRODUCTION

2 Journalism and Economics

individualistic, rational- decision maker para-digm which underemphasizes the role of institu-tions and collective action.

If Parker is correct, the implications are atonce important and somewhat depressing.Unless the discipline changes in a most funda-mental and not very likely way, no matter howbrightly the light is shined by journalists, econo-mists and the public may be doomed, likestrangers passing in the night, never quite tomeet. Nonetheless, Richard Parker is surely rightthat we are far better off understanding the rea-sons for these difficulties in communication,than in trying to ignore them. He is also right inpointing to the need for improved understandingof how the public learns from journalism and inparticular how it interprets and evaluates eco-nomic news. All in all, this is a most stimulatingpaper. It is well worth reading, both for the cen-tral argument it makes and for the many percep-tive observations it contains.

Robert Z. LawrenceAlbert L. Williams Professor of International

Trade and InvestmentJohn F. Kennedy School of GovernmentHarvard University

Richard Parker 3

“Cecily, you will read your PoliticalEconomy in my absence. The chapter on theFall of the Rupee you may omit. It is some-what sensational.”

—Miss Prism, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

“Financial stories really bore me. It’s afunction of my own ignorance.”

—Ted Koppel, ABC News

For most Americans, the press is the singlemost important source they have for informa-tion about the economy—and explanations forits performance. We’re all embedded in econom-ic relations, but our personal experience is onlyan uncertain drop in the sea of economic actionsand assumptions around us.

But what does the press teach us? Or putperhaps more importantly, what do we learnfrom the press about the economy and econom-ics? It’s a question without easy answers—inpart because journalism’s relationship to mod-ern economics has served as an endless sourceof frustration, criticism, and calls for reform.One recent academic study put the matter—orat least the accusation—bluntly: “Economicsjournalism is charged with being factually slop-py; oversimplifying, sensationalizing; focusingon personalities over issues, discrete events overtrends, the short-run over the long-run, and badnews over the good.”1

That would seem to bode ill. After all, ifwe can’t rely on press reports about economicinformation, actors, and concepts, if variousgroups and individuals are right to find suchreporting confusing, errant, or at times mali-ciously misleading, how are we to act rationallyin pursuing our private or collective interests?But, as many of us know, these complaints havetheir own problems. In a world of competinginterests, groups, and beliefs, your bias is mytruth. Your “efficient market” is my “union-busting”; his “clean air” is her “excessive regu-lation.” Charges of press failure, because theycome from diverse sources and have such differ-

ent ideas of what “better” economic coverageshould be, don’t themselves proffer clear-cutpolicy solutions.

Quite frequently, as we all recognize, themost vocal critics of economics journalism aregroups with stoutly defined economic inter-ests—businesses (or specific industries or com-panies), labor unions, farm organizations, con-sumer or community groups, etc. or politicians,parties, or ideological factions associated withthem.2 Their complaints about how particularstories interpret facts or intentions, or whatthey see as systemic press bias, reflect their owndefinition of public interests. Quite often, thepublic realizes such charges are themselves opento debate—or at the very least can be viewed aspart of the pull-and-haul of democratic competi-tion in the marketplace of ideas.

Since World War II, however, these groupshave been joined by an increasing number ofacademic economists who charge journalismwith being insensitive to, or simply ignorant of,broad fundamental agreements that economiststhemselves consider decided professionally, butill-understood by journalists and the public.3Because of economists’ expertise and ostensiblyscientific neutrality (compared to interestgroups), their critique carries a different weight.But is there in fact economic knowledge, widelyshared professionally, which through misreport-ing (more important than annoying economists)causes public harm? Economist Roger Brinner,head of the forecasting firm DRI/McGraw-Hill,for example, believes there is. For one, inoveremphasizing “bad news,” he charges thatthe press was singularly responsible for slowingrecovery from the 1991 recession.4

Yet how the public views all this isn’tnearly as clear as one might hope, since system-atic research is either lacking or open to inter-pretation. Beginning in the late Sixties, largesegments of the public—to judge by opinionpolling—concluded that something was deeplywrong in the play between economics and jour-nalism, though what it is, and where preciselythey place blame is less apparent. Yet there is nodoubt that much of the public is deeply attunedto economic performance: polls have listed “theeconomy” as the public’s number one concernin virtually every year since 1972, when it dis-placed Vietnam.5

JOURNALISM AND ECONOMICS: THE TANGLED WEBS OF PROFESSION, NARRATIVE, AND RESPONSIBILITY IN A MODERN DEMOCRACY

by Richard Parker

Richard Parker is a Senior Fellow at the Shorenstein Center,and heads its Project on Journalism and Economics. Aneconomist by training, he has extensive experience in jour-nalism as well.


None of this debate by itself, of course, isnew. Journalists’ coverage of economic issueswas the subject of contempt and angry criticisma century ago, when professional economics wasstill in its infancy—and when heated debateover tariffs, protection, unionization, trusts, andregulation filled the air. Carlyle’s caustic dis-missal of “the dismal science” is, one mustremember, not recent.

What is new is the explosive growth in thevolume and variety of economic and businessnews available to the public. Studies of networkTV news, for example, found a doubling of thetime allotted to such stories in the 1970s. Thegrowth of cable channels since has at least dou-bled that in turn. TV viewers can now opt for ahost of shows—Wall Street Week, Moneyline,The Nightly Business Report, etc.—that inmany ways perform for business and economicswhat programs such as Meet the Press andWashington Week in Review offer for politics.Newspapers have significantly expanded andupgraded coverage as well—creating separatebusiness sections with significant economicreporting, and now devote more front-sectioncoverage to trade, savings, productivity, andwage issues than ever before. Separately, thebusiness press has seen an upsurge of new titlessuch as Worth, Inc., Euromoney, etc., as well assubstantial increases in circulation ofBusinessweek, Forbes, Fortune, and the WallStreet Journal.

This growth in coverage of course has par-alleled increased public concern about theAmerican economy’s performance that datesfrom the 1970s. The emergence of stagflation,repeated energy crises, eroding productivity andwages, the explosion of public debt and deficits,the “tax revolt,” the “downsizing” of corpora-tions, the deregulation and privatization move-ments, the globalization of competition—andwith all this, an increasingly conservative, pro-business, anti-government political climate—have thrust economic news to center stage.

Not surprisingly, this shift in public atten-tion—and the changes in economic journal-ism—have prompted a good deal of reflection.Quite apart from columnists, op/ed pieces, andthe complaints found in letters to the editors,there has been a tidy stream of activity—gener-ally sponsored by foundations, and carried outthrough academic studies—that has tried to pin-point the causes of the public’s seemingly crip-pled confidence in both professions.6 This paperis meant to continue that effort. It attempts toexamine several features of modern economics

journalism, including prior researchers’ findingsabout its performance, that could open a largerdiscussion about the interacting roles of econo-mists, business, journalists and the public.

Specifically, the paper tries to do fivethings to advance discussion and research inthis area. First, it offers a preliminary catego-rization of concerns about economics journal-ism by economists and select economic groups,especially business; second, it looks at journalis-tic responses, including concerns journalistsexpress about their own training in economicsand business; third, it offers an assessment ofvarious “remedies” for improving economic andbusiness journalism; fourth, it looks at underly-ing models of learning associated with the pub-lic and news; fifth it suggests a research agendafor further work.

In no sense is this paper meant to bedefinitive; rather it is an introduction to issuesin the field, and an invitation to conversationand comment.

Narratives, Knowledge, Audience, Power,and Purpose

How we tell stories plays no small part inthe stories we tell. Harold Lasswell oncefamously observed that politics is about “whogets what, when, where, and why,” a definitionthat could stand equally well, in popular under-standing at least, for economics.7 Indeed, popu-lar understanding often intermingles the twosubjects intuitively, seeing in much of modernpolitical life, an ancient yet continuing econom-ic contest between groups and classes over theproductive output and assets of society.

Professional economists start broadly froma different view. Economics for them is, first ofall, an attempt to provide a scientific, and ulti-mately politically neutral, explanation based onrationally-consistent laws and rules that exposethe inherently mechanical, but nonethelessdynamic, character of economic transactions.Whether one dates the origins of this weltan-schauung to Smith, Marshall, or whomever, thethrust over much of the last century has been toestablish a “positive” core of theory distinctfrom “normative” economic judgments, suscep-tible to mathematical expression and algorith-mic manipulation.8

Particularly since the late 1950s—wheneconomists’ use of mathematics took a quan-tum leap with the deployment of econometrics,game theory, linear programming, and the like—professional economics has been viewed asincreasingly esoteric and daunting by the general

Richard Parker 5

public. Yet in the past fifteen years or so, morethan a passing understanding of professionaleconomics has grown ever-more important: asone study puts it,

“A ‘course’ in macroeconomics has been the pre-requisite for engaging in the politics of the 1980s.But it is clear that members of Congress, theadministration, and anyone who has wanted toenter into the national political debate is talkingabout subjects which assume knowledge of rela-tionships that have not been common parlance inthe recent past.”9

Yet even when the public—largely throughjournalism—has been taught to focus attentionon concepts such as productivity, GNP growth,savings and investment rates, the size ofdeficits, and global competition, for example—audience uncertainty about what to believe hasbeen as much a characteristic as acquiescence.

There is a host of obvious reasons for this.Very few Americans are trained as economists—there are only about 20,000 economics PhDs(and several hundred thousand economics BAs)in a country of 250 million. Even for economists,the discipline’s steadily-advancing mathematicalrequirements constantly raise the threshold forunderstanding the latest theories—as do increas-ing professional questions about its relevance.10

Subspecialization adds an additional complicat-ing factor, as it has in many professions.

Since the 1970s, moreover, economistshave been divided about what tenets of macro-economics—the Keynesian paradigm since the1930s—to embrace, and how they relate tomicroeconomic theory, the substratum thatdates back at least to Marshall in “modern”form. Because macroeconomics has served sincethe New Deal as the principal construct overar-ching public policy, this has fed deep dividesabout the area of most obvious importance tothe public.11

Journalism, as a result of both this academ-ic isolation and complexity, and its own narra-tive focus on politics as the prime arena forinterpreting conflict in complex societies, hasconsequently continued to rely heavily on a“political” dimension in its reporting of eco-nomic information. By itself, this is hardly sur-prising. As a modern profession, journalism is achild of the turn-of-the-century Progressive Era,when the highly partisan and advocacy-orientedjournalism of the 19th century gave way to anew model that sought to combine a scientifi-cally-inspired drive for “objectivity” in reporting

with the middle-class impulse for evolutionarycivic improvement, the superiority of “rationalmanagement,” and democratic limits on bothpublic and private power.

The New Deal added a second, enduringreason for journalism’s focus on the politicalcharacter of its “economics” reporting. In 1900,government amounted to barely 4–5% of GNP;today it encompasses over 35%. Size isn’t theonly change; governments today are purposive(if not always rational) spenders, collectors,employers, regulators, subsidizers, and price-makers. Trillion-dollar budgets make real differ-ences in economic performance—and by virtueof Keynesian beliefs, are meant to. And as “pub-lic” activity, subject to democratic oversight andchoices, these government actions also differfrom the ordinary activities of private business-es, even though collectively dwarfed in size bythe latter.12

As a result, virtually all studies of econom-ic journalism note the high volume of coveragedevoted to government—in particular, toWashington. Of course, this coverage takes awide variety of forms. First, journalists turn togovernment as a source for seemingly straight-forward economic “information.” Governmentstatistics on inflation, unemployment, housing,and the money supply are a staple of economicreporting—quite frequently unadorned by jour-nalistic interpretation. Second, governmentactions—its spending, regulation, tax, and tradepolicies—are prominent features as well. Notjust budget debates, but the various program-matic debates which are a staple of governanceare central to reporting as well. Third, govern-ment “sources” form a critical part of reportingon business, labor and consumer news that maynot by itself have a government “origin.”

This use of government—its data, opera-tions, policies, and legislation—as narrative sub-ject is in turn wrapped in a much more complexnarrative form. Journalism routinely interpretseconomic information in light of its impact onpolitical actors and trends. The most obvious—and ostensibly potent—form lies in assessingPresidential performance and popularity as inter-twined with aggregate economic performance.The journalistic belief that, in the modern era,Presidents are deeply “responsible” for U.S. eco-nomic performance has in turn led more thanone President to seek in various ways to influ-ence the “electoral” growth cycle as part of theeconomy’s business cycles in a myriad of ways.13

As a consequence, readers and viewers findthe “frames” through which “economic” news


is presented almost ineluctably bound to “poli-tics” and government. On one level, of course,none of this is either surprising (or terribly dis-turbing) to professional economists.Government data are a principal source ofinformation for academic research as well asreporting; economists acknowledge andattempt to assess the impact of governmentspending, taxation, and regulation on economicperformance; the “government” sources usedin reporting frequently are themselves profes-sionally-trained economists, etc. Even thepress’s emphasis on the political dimensions of“economic” news is recognized as important tothe polity, even if not the principal locus ofacademic interest or understanding.

Described thus, however, economists’residual concerns about economic reporting arein fact overly minimized.14 One must be hesi-tant to talk too easily, of course, about “econo-mists” as a unitary group—the simultaneousexistence of the Chicago and Harvard economicsdepartments gives the lie to that. Generallythough, what follows represents concerns com-monly held by a broad swath of the profession.(The issue of complaints from economic “inter-est groups” will be taken up later.)

1) Botched Concepts 101: The perhapsstereotypical worries heard casually when econo-mists gather turn around what might be called“botched concepts 101”—journalists’ explana-tion of economic rules and processes throughstatements that economists feel misrepresentsbasic microeconomic propositions. Any econo-mist can easily recall his or her favorite howler,and in fact a small academic literature has devel-oped documenting such mistakes.15

One typical study offers examples drawnfrom articles in the Wall Street Journal, LosAngeles Times, and Milwaukee Journal in whichthe reporter a) misconstrues the effect of a com-modity’s price decline on demand, and its result-ing role in a subsequent price rise; b) describes ahousing market’s price rise as affected by sup-ply-and-demand, “as well as” by interest rates, astrong economy, and foreign investors, implyingtheir separateness from supply/demand; c)speaks of “oversupply” in the market for doc-tors, without reference to the ways in whichwage/price systems bid away such surpluses. Asthe study makes clear, in each instance, thereporter violates elemental principles taught inany introductory economics course.16

While illustrative of what seems to be jour-nalistic ignorance, the inherent difficulty withsuch anecdotal reports is that they don’t gauge

the frequency of the error’s occurrence. Moreimportantly, in some instances, while thereporter may be violating elementary economicprinciples in a story, the story may in fact betelling the reader something real and importantabout actual—not textbook—markets. An Econ101 instructor may think the notion of “over-supply” of doctors violates fundamentals inmarket-clearing, but good health economists—aware that the medical labor market contains ahost of real-world rigidities—may find thenotion realistic, if insufficiently explanatory.

2) “Numbers Reporting”: A second cause ofconsternation for economists lies in presenta-tion of standardized economic data with eitherno explanation—or (worse in some cases) brief,overgeneralized explanation. Television appearsparticularly guilty of this; as one study of net-work TV’s economics reporting concludes:

Only about half of all economic stories contain sta-tistical information, and...only a handful of statis-tics are reported on a regular basis. These are therates of unemployment, growth and inflation, theindex of leading economic indicators, and a fewother simple indicators such as housing starts, retailsales, factory orders and consumer confidence...

Though they underreport the “numbers,” newsshows do not shy away from interpreting whatthey mean. Analysis is part of journalism, but tele-vision’s interpretations of economic developmentstends to be episodic, shallow and formulaic, focus-ing on the most short-term effects....Linkagesrarely go beyond the simplistic level of DanRather’s explanation that “the dropping dollar gota lift today, and that pushed stock prices up onWall Street.” Seldom are statistics or trends placedin long term historical context, and there is littlediscussion of the complex interdependenciesamong economic factors.17

Here, the literature is more advanced quan-titatively than the “botched concepts” litera-ture, with a great deal of counting and classify-ing over a relatively lengthy period. The authorsof the study just cited, for example, said theirreport relied on review of more than 17,000 net-work economic stories broadcast between 1982and 1993.

This seeming advance in quantitative mea-surement, however, frequently belies other prob-lems. One is the methodology used byresearchers: data coding is subject to subtle inter-pretation, and none of the major studies of eco-nomic reporting have actually sought to assess

Richard Parker 7

viewers or readers to judge what audiences takeaway, versus what a trained coder sees.

A second is the significance of the govern-ment’s data itself, a subject of intense debatethese days. One issue has to do with the fre-quency of reporting: until the late 1960s, muchof the government economic data reported todayon a quarterly, monthly, or even weekly basiswas reported on an annual or semi-annual basis.Many economists—especially given the govern-ment’s habit of releasing lagged “revised” esti-mates—question the value of frequency, espe-cially in light of journalism’s (and politicians’)perceived misuse of the numbers.

Yet a third dimension to the “numberreporting” problem has to do with the data’sintrinsic accuracy in two different senses. TheConsumer Price Index, for example, appears onthe verge of being revised downward because ofdoubts about how it measures what it claims tomeasure. Another, longer-running, argumentover the Gross National Product asks a deeperquestion: does it measure what we want or needto know about national economic performance?

A final aspect to the analysis of the “num-bers reporting” problem is more frankly ideolog-ical: since the late 70s, when such research grewpopular, partisan—particularly conservative—non-profit groups have often done the studies to“prove” liberal media bias, an interpretationless-passionate academic studies believeobscures more complex findings.18 (We shallreturn to this issue.)

3) The Implicit Macro-model: A third con-cern for economists treats a rather more compli-cated subject: whether or not there is an implic-it macroeconomic “model” of the economy usedin reporting, and whether it’s accurate and/oruseful. That is, some researchers have asked anintriguing question, particularly for those econo-mists concerned about journalists’ understand-ing of concepts underpinning much of publicpolicy: can one discern a coherent pattern toreporting (versus individual statement errors,noted above) that might provide readers/viewerswith a recognizable structure that also meetsminimal acceptance by economists?

Surprisingly little work has been done inthis field (given its rich potential), but one studyproduced interesting results. By analyzing eco-nomic coverage from The Washington Post overa ten-month period, two researchers were ableto produce a macro-model of the U.S. economywhich they judged not only internally coherent,but quite acceptably recognizable toeconomists.19

This tells us little about the other 1,700dailies, or electronic news, but serves as smallencouragement that all is not wrong with eco-nomics journalism. But here again, though,there is a peculiar epistemological assumptionthat runs throughout existing research on eco-nomics journalism: the valid macromodel is dis-covered by trained economists doing textualanalysis, without reference to what the paper’sreaders take away. Audience—presumably thetouchstone measure of journalism’s transmis-sion role—is absent. (This issue will beaddressed again later.)

4) News Effects on Financial andCommodity Markets: A fourth concern liesspecifically in the impact of reporting on marketbehavior—particularly financial and commoditymarkets, with their special (and seemingly mea-surable) sensitivity to “news.” Here the workhas been rather specialized among financialeconomists (or, to a lesser degree, microecono-mists’s work in information theory). As a result,its implications touch less on what we’re hereconcerned with—a broadly-defined public’sunderstanding of economics, and more with theform and timing of information’s impact (deliv-ered through journalism) on these specializedmarkets.20

One must quickly note that the behaviorof such markets is far from irrelevant. In thepast two decades, financial and commodity mar-kets have been characterized by three features:globalization, integration, and explosive growthin velocity and volumes, all of which exerciseobvious—and powerful—impact on nationaleconomies and policy sovereignty. With theappearance of non-fixed exchange rates,petrodollar recycling, emerging markets, andunprecedented trading activity based on innova-tions in computers and telecommunications,these markets have taken on complicated pow-ers vis-a-vis traditional notions of the “real”economy. These issues, though, are broadly aseparate issue from the vantage point of the lit-erature discussed here, and better taken upunder the rubric of news and economic policy.

5) News and Economic Policy: Here,arguably, lies the core of economists’ concernabout reporting, because it is here simultaneous-ly that markets meet law and regulation, andeconomic theory meets both politics and publicbelief—and the point at which we need to dwellfor a moment. Few academic economists lack forevidence of seeming irrationality in policy choic-es, and many are all too prone to see public poli-cy as the arena in which sound economic theory


is turned into hash (or sausage, for those with aBismarckian cast), a consequence in which theybelieve journalism is deeply implicated.

Vivid debate over economics and “publicpolicy,” of course, is far from new—one need onlyturn to controversy over the 18th-century PoorLaws or the 19th-century Corn Laws in England,or over the National Road system, or NationalBank, or tariffs-versus-free trade before theAmerican Civil War to see how well establishedthe subject matter (if not the modern forms) of“public policy” was long ago. But up until CalvinCoolidge, American leaders lacked formal eco-nomic advisers; after Franklin Roosevelt, nonehas. Creation of the Council of EconomicAdvisers shortly after World War II sanctified theunique place of this branch of social science overthe others in policy judgements.21

Robert Nelson, in a landmark article, hastraced out this development—and argued thateconomists have, since the 1970s, been caught inthe midst of an “ideological era” unlike both theProgressive Era, which marked economists’ firstsystematic involvement in public policy, and theperiod from World War II to the Seventies, whenthey played a role in a “muddling-through” eraof policy meant to address the perceived interest-group pluralism of the times.22

The trickiness of labeling the post-Sixtiesperiod “ideological” (versus, say—among manyother easy choices—the era of Keynesian ascen-dence beforehand) is obvious. But it speaks to acore peculiarity of the ways in which public pol-icy, and supporting public opinion, are formulat-ed that touches at the core of economists’ dis-quiet, the question of alternatives, and journal-ism’s role therein.

Journalism since the late 18th century,when it began disseminating the ideas ofSmith’s Wealth of Nations to readers whowould never read the text, has been (apart frompolitics itself) the primary social arena inwhich knowledgeable publics have confrontedone another over the organization of societyand its rewards.23 In recent years, apart fromissues of distinctly macro-managerial concernsuch as measurement (and remedy) of the gapbetween actual- and full-employment budgetpolicies, or division over fully-fixed versussnake-like exchange rates, the public has beenasked to understand and affirm such funda-mentals as “insufficient” savings or productivi-ty rates, the merits of financial, transportation,and telecommunications deregulation, the ben-efits of GATT and NAFTA, and whether theFed ought to follow interest rate or monetary

aggregate goals—not to mention the issue of“supply side” nostrums as a meaningful alter-native to Keynesianism.

This not unsurprisingly has bred uncertain-ty, and uncertainty has done no little harm tothe prestige and influence of economists,because if there is a Progressive Era value whichstill obtains in journalism and the public’s mind,it is the authority of the expert. Uncertainexperts—or visible disagreements amongexperts—undermine the very confidence of the20th century in the idea of public rationality.

That lack of confidence conjoins with theways in which publics reach public judgmentthat is affirmed in policies. The direct experi-ence of participants in an economy or society isindividual—and overlain by individual frames ofreference—that become collective in complex(and always problematic) ways. When a majorityof young Americans tell pollsters they doubtwhether Social Security will meet their needsdecades hence, they express individual fearsabout whether collective obligations will meetother collective obligations such as budgetdeficits. Absent journalism—and the politicaland economic debates reported therein—theyhave no frame of reference for judgement.

This nervous relationship—between whatan aggregation of individuals thinks it knows,and the outcome of collective choice andaction—is where economists seek relevance, butmust face the constraints which late-20th cen-tury life places upon them. Public policy in thecurrent moment exhibits all the problems ofcollective “irrationality”, by economists’ stan-dards. Reforming welfare, downsizing govern-ment, an insistence on balanced budgets, healthcare reform—all are policy issues with deep,indeed primitive, foundations that touch poli-tics, morality, idealized notions of the self andof the correct public domain. In all these issues,economics exercises a certain parametric, but byno means central or decisive, role.

Economists may be concerned about ongo-ing large budget deficits, but as a policy matter,are divided about whether the current trend lineis positive in detail, or whether even balance perse—as it is conceived by many political figuresand large parts of the public—is the relevantmeasure. Health care policy is even more intri-cately complicated because the valuation ofone’s health is by no means susceptible to sosimple an expression as price, or even a range ofprices, especially when trade-offs are far fromapparent, and consumers are also voters.

Richard Parker 9

Journalists consequently face a narrativecrisis of their own, because they—and elite com-munities—don’t feel economists can providedeterminative answers to any of these questions.This encourages journalistic citation of compet-ing economic views (“economists disagreedtoday about the policy’s effect, following itsannouncement...”), oftentimes mixing judgmentsof supremely different qualities, as it turns out.Also, because the “political conflict” narrativealmost always trumps the “economic,” journal-ism is captured by the range of politicians’ andpartisan analysts’ views (“In reply toReischauer’s comments, policy analyst JudeWanniski insisted...”), again without clear pre-sentation of professional ability or partisan bias.

“Solving” this particularly thorny connec-tion between economists and journalists—andtheir competing narrative demands—is by farthe most complicated, and most important ofthe issues in the field. Yet it is perhaps the leastsusceptible to easy recommendations.

6) News and General EconomicPerformance: A sixth concern, similar to thefourth, but much broader for policy, treats newseffects on economic performance generally—inparticular on consumer behavior. Cited earlier,economic forecasters such as DRI’s RogerBrinner have complained that journalism’s pref-erence for “bad news” has prolonged recessionsor slowed recoveries. It is a charge businessleaders, business publications, and recently-defeated politicians have made a staple criti-cism, although academically-satisfying evidenceis thin.

The critical missing link to the argumentis proof that the public, after years of exposure,has somehow failed to notice the press’s prefer-ence for news of the bank that was robbed overthe bank that wasn’t. After all, there’s wide-spread polling evidence that the public recog-nizes and deplores press “negativism” generally;why—even if one grants the “bad news” thesis,critics argue, aren’t Brinner and others guilty ofpost hoc, ergo propter hoc without more com-pelling, and closely-reasoned evidence? If dis-counting is a feature of rational economic exis-tence24, why isn’t it at play in the public’s han-dling of news?

7) Which Economist Shall We Listen To?:Finally, there is the issue of which economiststhe press talks to, a matter some economistsconsider more than an issue of amour-propre.Beginning in the 1960s (now wistfully called the“Golden Age”by Keynesians), Time put JohnMaynard Keynes on its cover, and Newsweek

made Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman reg-ular columnists; claims for “fine-tuning”abounded, and economists were hailed for hold-ing the keys to eternal prosperity.25 Nowadays,magazines prefer “personal finance” columns,and reporters call the denizens of Wall Streetbrokerage firms or Washington think-tanks forcomment on the latest policy or stock markettwist. Several recent studies of economics cover-age generally shows markedly little use of uni-versity-based economists, despite a boom in thevolume of such coverage.

Some university economists take a balefulview of all this. Paul Krugman, a rising young aca-demic “star”, has particularly taken to task thosehe calls “policy entrepreneurs”—pseudo-econo-mists in his eyes who’ve hoodwinked the publicand political elites into a host of misguidednotions, from industrial policy to managed trade.

Krugman’s critique—often smart, but fullof blistering ad hominem assaults—fails howev-er to fully credit several other reasons why acad-emic economists’ stock as news sources has fall-en, having little to do with perfidious “policyhustlers.” One factor is the sheer number ofpeople now working in public policy, and thespecialization that has come with that growth.Washington, for example, is full of current andformer government economists and policy ana-lysts whose familiarity with specific programsor legislation equals or exceeds all but a handfulof university-based economists. Reporters ondeadline find these specialists easy to locate,highly current on the latest turn in policy, andalso often deeply insightful into the politics sur-rounding the policy.

There is a second reason, which Krugmannotes, but nowhere solves in terms useful tojournalists or the public. Since the 1970s, thehegemony of Keynesian macro-beliefs has beeneroded by what appears to journalists and thepublic as a cacophony of voices—New Classical,Post-Keynesian, Monetarist, Neo-Keynesian, andSupply Side—that fail the role of confident“authority” that journalists use as a narrativeconvention when they query “specialists” forinterpretive comments on programs or issues.

This cacophony—what one economistfriend wryly calls the shift from the one trueCatholic faith to a thousand Protestant ones—has its costs. As Albert Rees, president of theSloan Foundation (and a leading funder of eco-nomic research) has warned economists,

Serious newspapers carry long accounts of the dis-putes among economists of these various views,


and rival economists berate one another in the let-ters to the editor. The newspaper reader no moreunderstands the difference between these schoolsthan he understands those between the rival fac-tions of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hisimpression is that economists are divided on allissues into irreconcilable warring sects. Sinceeconomists themselves cannot agree on anything,he reasons, no attention should be paid to them.26

Note here that Reese is addressing the splitamong full-fledged academics—not Krugman’sdivide between the “academics” and “policyhustlers.”

Robert Solow somewhat more dispassion-ately than Krugman offers yet a third reason whyacademic economists play less than the role theymight hope for in public debates over policy, andreceive thereby less journalistic attention:

. . . . good economics is bound to be complicated.Good economics is also bound to be uncertain.Even where the underlying principle is clear itsapplication to particular circumstances is neverdirect. Too many other things are always happen-ing at once. If there is anything that the politician[or journalist, for narrative reasons—ed.] does notneed it is complexity and uncertainty. Just theopposite is called for. This demand for simplicityand confidence is strengthened by the fact that thepolitical process is rarely interested in narrow eco-nomic policy for its own sake. What we think of asthe heart of the matter is often seen by the playersthemselves as subsidiary to issues of distribution,party-politics, and image. You can hardly expectthe President, the Senator, or the HouseCommittee Chairman to tolerate distraction fromthe frying of his own fish by the complexities anduncertainties of economic analysis . . .27

Solow goes on to observe, “Probably thereis nothing to be done about this. It goes withthe territory of democratic politics.Nevertheless there may be occasions for themarginal improvements and they should be wel-comed and followed up whenever they arise.”

The Journalistic Complaints of Non-Economists

Economists aren’t the only ones with com-plaints about “economics” journalism. Here theissues, however, are both richer in their com-plexity and less susceptible to classification assimply “economic” in the sense that profession-al economists often use the term.

Economics, in this broader meaning,encompasses economic activity—by individuals,

groups, corporations, and the state. Or it mayrefer to economic dimensions of issues that wetend to speak of otherwise as social policy, aslegal disputes, as class conflict, or political competition. The term “economic” in theseinstances tends frequently to the voluminouslyinclusive, and hence awkwardly—and controver-sially—ambiguous. When is environmental policy an economic matter? What are the eco-nomic components of defense spending? How is racial or gender inequality, or reverse discrim-ination, an economic issue? To what degreeshould legal decisions rest on economic princi-ples? Is the single-parent family a social, moral,or economic issue?

These aren’t just matters for social scien-tists or policy makers to sort out, but cut to theheart of democratic speech and reasoning, indeedlie at the core of the democratic polity. Decisionstaken for all sorts of reasons other than econom-ic have economic consequences, but are they tobe judged—or even described—as economic?

For journalists, this is no small matter. Asnoted, the journalist seldom uses academic“economics” to tell stories to an audience—butto what degree does “understanding economics”help better tell the story?

To judge by the volume and durability oftheir complaints, business is the most vocalgroup believing that “economic ignorance” injournalists causes specific, measurable harm. Atone foundation-sponsored convocation wherecorporate executives talked directly with jour-nalists, the report’s summary (befitting the orga-nizers’ purposes) was quite frank about thisantagonism:

. . . the business community is becoming morevocal in its attacks on the press. Of late it feelsparticularly embattled and embittered. What was once a relatively quiet adversary relationshipis fast becoming an openly antagonistic relation-ship between two powerful and self-righteousinstitutions.

To the businessman, too often the antagonism boilsdown to this—business builds up; the media teardown. To the media, too often the antagonism boilsdown to this—business always hides its wrongdo-ing; only the media penetrates this stone wall . . .

The businessmen’s complaints are not unlike thoseof government officials and politicians: the mediais too powerful; they always get it wrong; you can-not get a fair shake; they don’t write about all thegood things we do but only the bad; sensationalism

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sells newspapers; they don’t understand what theyare reporting; they oversimplify.28

At the most elemental level, the issue is ofaccuracy about specifics involving individualstories—hardly an exclusive province requiringeconomists’ judgment. A quotation isn’t correct,a longer explanation is wrongly condensed, thejuxtaposition of statements or examples places abusinessman or company in an unfairly criticallight. Here the economist can add little, becausethe issues go directly to core journalistic canonsabout objectivity, balance, and fairness.

But behind these complaints lies a deepersuspicion, that points toward what manybelieve is a systemic bias among reporters andeditors against business. Here a good deal ofresearch has confirmed that, in terms of self-description, the press sees itself as “liberal,” anddoes in fact harbor suspicion about the trans-parency of motives, and self-interestedness, ofthe business community.

But some of the research goes further toargue that such personal views inherently doesbias coverage of business. Burton Pines, in Outof Focus—a detailed study of network TV’s por-trayal of economics and business in 1992—bit-terly concluded that

. . . a random tuning-in of TV was more likely togive a viewer information that distorted or under-mined free enterprise than supported it...In [1992],network newscasts aired 68 hours, 34 minutes oneconomic policy and business matters. Most ofthis, some 56 hours, 32 minutes, was backgroundmaterial, often factoids of little importance. Butmuch of the reporting was explicitly or implicitlydidactic. Of this, 6 hours, 59 minutes misinformedviewers about the facts or principles of theAmerican economy and business compared to 5hours, 3 minutes which portrayed the free enter-prise economy accurately and fairly.29

The precision here, suggesting a carefulanalysis quantitatively of news bias, initiallyoffers a strong case for bias; however, it losessome of its persuasiveness as one follows Pines’argument. By the end of his book, he offers anappendix of “what to read” for journalists wish-ing to improve their “understanding of freeenterprise.” The list consists of just sixauthors—Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt,Charles Murray, Martin Anderson, RobertBartley, and George Gilder. It is not a diversityof views meant to inspire confidence in Pines’overall judgment.

What Journalists Think, and Do, Aboutthe Problem

None of these complaints—whether fromeconomists or non-economists—is unfamiliar tojournalists; indeed many journalists seem attimes no less bothered by their profession’s cov-erage of economic issues. Elie Abel, formerdean of Columbia’s Journalism School, hascalled business and economics reporting “themost disgracefully neglected sector of Americanjournalism.” Writer Dom Bonafede, slightlymore literary in his imagery, is no less harsh.Business reporters historically, he writes, haveall too often rightly been considered by peers as“city room castoffs and journalistic drifters, bitplayers in a raw profession, fulfilling a melan-choly task requiring little talent and less imagi-nation in a cramped corner of the newsroom.”30

ABC News reporter Jeff Greenfield prefers aslightly more ingenuous metaphor.“Economics,” he avers, “was once the blinddate of journalism. It was better than stayinghome, but not by much.”31

Journalists, however, are thinking of agreat deal more when they talk about “econom-ics” coverage than what economists usuallymean. A quick look at either a newspaper’sbusiness section or its front pages tells why.Topically, and in terms of interpretive frames,“economics” to journalists is heavily shaped (asdiscussed earlier) by a deep-rooted sense of“politics”; but it is also shaped by journalism’suse of “business” as its other important narra-tive frame.

“Business” pages—or increasingly, businesssections—are the routine repository for thesestories. These sections have surprisingly stan-dard organizational form, despite ever-changingstories. They typically consume a third to halftheir space (or more) simply publishing financialtables—reporting the activity of stock exchanges,mutual funds, and bond, currency and commodi-ty markets for the previous day. Descriptivereporting concentrates on large publicly-tradedcorporations, both local and national—theirmergers and acquisitions, quarterly sales data,personnel changes, new product announcements(and occasionally, legal troubles). Added to thatare government reports—routine announcementsof economic data series (unemployment, housingstarts, inflation, trade, etc.), Fed activities, andthe like. And then, usually depending on activitylevels, shorter or longer stories on the financialmarket movements and their meanings.

In recent years, as more talent andresources have flowed into such coverage, char-


acteristics of these stories have changed. One istheir origin. Historically, business news reliedheavily on press releases and wire service copy,with only cursory independent reporting byjournalists; nowadays, while press release-basednews still dominates the total number of stories,turning up as shorter articles and news items,the section lead and longer articles tend to betrend or impact stories, about internationalcompetition, industry or market profiles, andhigh-technology reviews. Smaller and newercompanies—part of the renewed national inter-est in “entrepreneurs”—get more coverage, par-ticularly if they’re in “hot” technology fields, as(in an age of affirmative action) do women andminorities working in corporations. Laborunions figure only marginally—usually when astrike occurs, while consumer-reform-orientedand public interest group-generated stories aredown markedly from the 1970s.32

This “story environment” seems to bepart of a larger trend, especially in print jour-nalism, that views “interpretive reporting”(compared to the old “who, what, when, where,why” style) as a premium print can offer incompetition to radio and TV news. Theprovince for years of magazines—whether thenewsweeklies, business magazines, or selectpublications—this style of reporting appearsnow much more regularly both on the frontpages and as section leads.

The front pages are reserved generally forfour types of stories. First are the aforementioned“trend” stories, in which journalists seek toevaluate large economic/business themes—wagestagnation, global competitiveness, savingsissues, growth rates, etc—and which editors con-clude merit the wider exposure of the front page.

Second—and most obviously painful tomanagement—are what we might call the cor-porate “Three Cs”—crime, crisis, or conflict sto-ries. “Boesky (or Milken, or . . .) Arrested,”“Government to Indict . . . ,” etc. represent thefirst; the Exxon/Valdez, Dow Corning, A.H.Robbins stories typify the second; “Caterpillarenters second year of strike” is a not unusualthird. It is, incidentally, these types of storiesthat almost inevitably produce the greatest hos-tility and anguish among executives over presscoverage, given especially the latitude for jour-nalistic interpretation of the “crisis” stories.

A third category is the corporate “secularfortunes” story: “ATT to cut 50,000 jobs,” “LastUS TV Manufacturing Plant Closes,” “IBM totake losses on PC business.” These portraychanges in individual corporations, usually large

ones, that because of their size are presumed tohave a significant impact (versus the constantswirl of changing fortunes exhibited by millionsof smaller, privately-held firms). Given the enor-mous restructuring of American industry inrecent years, these have been staple features onfront pages.

A final type is a “political-corporate”hybrid, particularly relevant to industries suchas telecommunications, entertainment, finance,transportation, energy, and the like which havebeen the focus of deregulation in the past fewyears. These stories inevitably invoke fresh cor-porate activity—say, the acquisition of three TVnetworks this summer—into multi-story exami-nations of the “significance” of the move for theindustry, the economy, government policiessuch as antitrust, and the inevitable Americanconcern about corporate concentration. (As jour-nalistic forms, these are perhaps closest to abusiness magazine style pioneered by HenryLuce and Fortune in the 1930s, but seldom uti-lized in newspapers until the 1980s.)

Television, meanwhile, with the growth ofcable and independent channels, has done sever-al things: its main network evening newscastscarry more stories about the economy generally,as well as corporate and industry news. Cablechannels such as CNN and CNBC now offer“business news” programs, as well as interviewand panel discussion programs about economicand business affairs. The explosion of “news-magazine” shows—following the “60 Minutes”model—have also increased coverage of the“Three C’s” on television, though hardly a likenumber of serious “trend” stories.33

Since the 1970s, these changes have fed agrowing consensus among journalists at leastthat, taken together, things are improving—thequantity and quality of coverage, the trainingand specialized skills of reporters and editors,etc. Still, the question of how much remains.One study in the late 1980s conducted for theFord Foundation interviewed 4,552 workingreporters and editors, and concluded:

Journalists themselves are aware of the poorstate of public economic knowledge, and theyrecognize the need to improve the quality andcoverage of business and economic news. Over80% of the organizations surveyed had increasedsuch coverage in the last five years; 67% believedthat coverage of stories with economic contentshould be increased even more. Reporters andeditors alike, however, are dissatisfied with thequality of coverage. More than 50% feel their

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firms do a “fair” or poorer job of business/eco-nomics coverage, while 80% believe that generalreporters are not well equipped to handle busi-ness/economics content. The poor quality of cov-erage also affects the quantity of news provided,for 62% of the editors surveyed said they wouldincrease coverage if the quality of business/eco-nomic reporting improved.34

The report itself goes on to document whatit views as deeply problematic:

A) Formal economics training seems lack-ing: 55% of business/economics reporters arejournalism majors, vs. 4% who majored in eco-nomics and 6% in business. Only 23% havetaken more than three economics courses, while17% have had a similar number of businesscourses (96% say they wish they had takenmore such courses earlier in their careers).

B) Experience levels are lower:Business/economics reporters averaged 10.2years in journalism, vs. 15 for other reporters(They were twice as likely to be female aswell—39%, vs. 18% on other beats).

C) They’re likely to do less “digging” to getstories: Business/economics reporters are twiceas likely to rely on press releases, and spend lesstime (24%) than others (31%) doing research fortheir story. They also relied less on wire storiesand government hearings. They rely much moreon individuals in private companies for techni-cal questions, much less on academics or gov-ernment sources.

D) They’re likely to feel undervalued:when controlled for education and experience,these reporters in fact make less than those onother beats. Perhaps related, 43% feelbusiness/economic reporting isn’t well support-ed by management.35

All this suggests a major gap of sorts, but italso invites reflection. For example, by lumpingtogether several thousand journalists from wide-ly different-sized and kinds of papers, do thissurvey’s aggregation techniques obscure whetherrecent heavy hiring pulled down average experi-ence, whether lack of management support wasgreater at smaller papers, whether “less digging”reflected business section norms or those of thefront page? One can also wonder what sorts ofbusiness or economics courses reporters wishthey had taken, which in turn has invited reme-dy through “improvement” that takes severalrecognizable paths.

For the Ford Foundation, however, theresults were persuasive—and exemplary of anissue to which we next turn.

Curing What Ails Them: The Pedagogical Model

“I formally reject the proposition that increasingthe economic understanding of the public is animpossible task. I just wish I had stronger empiri-cal evidence on which to base that rejection.Nevertheless, I find the job of educating the publicon economic issues and controversies as importantand urgent as any the economist has, if we are tomake democracy work, or work better.Discovering the economic truth comes first, buttruth is of scant value unless the public and thegovernment respect it and use it. And I believethat economists can do much more to improveeconomic understanding if they really give it theenergy, resources, and thought the job requires.”

—Leonard Silk, New York TimesEconomics Editor, to the

AEA annual convention, 1985

The model for almost all the remedies pro-posed to date rests on increasing economicknowledge and communications skills for econo-mists and journalists, which—it is thought—willincrease the knowledge of the audience, andhence “improve” civic understanding (and there-by, the functioning of democracy). In this basi-cally classroom idea of learning transposed tothe press, the problem is viewed as a failure todevise appropriate means for transmitting under-standing between three economic “ideal types”(in the Weberian sense)—the economists asknowledge producers, the reporter as distributor(and translator), and the audience as consumer.

This diagnosis, as far as it goes, sees alimited set of key problems. For the econo-mists, the failure is one of “relevance,” ofmaking issues or modes of thoughts whicheconomists value apparent and plausible to thejournalist, and hence to the general public.The late Leonard Silk, himself a PhD econo-mist and former economics columnist andbusiness editor at the New York Times, set outthe case in a speech before the AmericanEconomic Association.36

In it, he outlined what about economists’professionalism impedes their ability to com-municate through the general press. The first,he said, was “hermetics”—the preference fortechnical jargon and talking too much withinthe caste. The second was “ambivalence”—refering to economists’ support for self-interestas a motive in the market, but alarm at its role(individual or collective) in politics. A third was“flawed science”—economics’ failure at predic-tion, basically, but also a certain inadequacy of


explanation when simple models met complexeconomic realities, as well as a willingness tohide political bias or preference behind scien-tism. Combined with a public that was both“lazy” and “disillusioned” by repeatedly unmetclaims by economists, he admitted to soundingdiscouraged.

He then attempted to overcome some ofthat discouragement both by the perorationquoted above, and a series of recommendationsthat essentially counseled greater academicmodesty, commitment to public teaching, and arejection of the idea that a dispassionate andvalue-neutral science could solve the problem ofideology and interests.

Journalists, in turn, have been encouragedto strengthen their own knowledge of academiceconomics as a means for better reporting notonly views of economists, but better interpret-ing economic performance and issues in debateover public policy. Most of the recommenda-tions have followed four suggested lines ofimprovement: 1) hiring changes—place greateremphasis on hiring economics and/or businessmajors as reporters and editors; 2) pre-employ-ment training—emphasize more skills prepara-tion in economics and business reporting atjournalism schools; 3) mid-career training—provide short-term programs designed toimprove formal understanding of economicsthrough intensive seminars, etc.; 4) status/reward—ensure more recognition, pay, andprestige are given to reporting theeconomics/business field.

Over the past two decades, a number ofprograms—frequently foundation-sponsored—have emerged to fill in the perceived lacunae injournalists’ economic knowledge. With burgeon-ing demand for business and economicsreporters, there has been a pattern of—thoughperhaps not a systematic attempt at—increasinghires with at least BAs in both fields. At thegraduate level, surveys of journalism schoolsindicate both an increasing number offeringcourses in business and economic reporting, aswell as growing numbers of course cross-regis-trations at business schools and economicsdepartments. Organizations such as theNational Association of Manufacturers or theKaiser Family Foundation have also offeredtraining programs—mostly short seminars—orsometimes mid-career fellowships available tojournalists interested in specific fields such ashealth policy, trade, and the like.

But how accurately does this “classroom”learning model address overcoming what both

economists and journalists take as the public’signorance and/or disinterest in economic matters?

For one, because journalism (like the pub-lic) gives the broadest possible meaning to theterm “economics,” incorporating business news,socio-economic trends and problems, and thesimple reporting of governmental and financialmarket indices, it focuses on much more thanclassroom theories and theorists. The demandfor academic economists and their theories isovershadowed by the constant demand for newsand analysis of market changes, the latest gov-ernment policy debate, the newest legislativeturn and the like—issues at which others offersuperior information, or at least informationorganized in forms readily utilized by journalists.

When a group of Bagehot Fellows con-structed a textbook/reader for journalists onbusiness and economics in 1991, for example,economics took the decidedly back seat. Two-thirds of the text focused on reading balancesheets, using SEC documents, where to locateindustry information, and simple elements ofstory construction; the chapter on economicsdisplayed no knowledge of recent innovations(Samuelson and Friedman were the newest theo-rists mentioned), spent much of its timeexplaining simple economic indicators and Fedoperations, and even oddly insisted that JohnKenneth Galbraith “virtually managed theFrench economy after World War II.”37

For another, surprisingly little work hasbeen done to measure audience effects fromostensible changes in journalists’ knowledge offormal economics. Reporters interviewed afterboth short- and long-term “training” programsin economics journalism judge themselves “bet-ter informed,” but no one has actually analyzedcoverage quality, or audience learning, on a pre-and-post basis.

Economics: From a “People’s Science” toProfessional Discipline

“Reasonable men” reach “reasonable” conclusionsin circumstances where they have no prospect ofapplying classical models of substantive rationali-ty. We know only imperfectly how they do it. Weknow even less whether the procedures they use inplace of the inapplicable models have any merit—although most of us would choose them in prefer-ence to drawing lots. The study of proceduralrationality in circumstances where attention isscarce, where problems are immensely complex,and where crucial information is absent present a

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host of challenging and fundamental research prob-lems to anyone who is interested in the rationalallocation of scarce resources.

—Economist Herbert Simon38

Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in partfor pioneering work on “satisficing” behavior asan alternative to economics’ beloved notion ofrational “maximizing,” wasn’t specificallyaddressing problems in economic journalismwhen he spoke; but he could have been. Hisremarks point to a singularly neglected aspect ofthe debate over the quality of economic report-ing: we have very little clear understanding ofhow and what the public learns from the news.

In the burgeoning academic field of com-munications theory, that lack of understandinghas not been for want of trying. The twentiethcentury’s two great boom industries in commu-nication have been propaganda and advertising,the former associated with coercive states, thelatter with manipulative markets—and for manyyears formed the central concern of communica-tion theorists. Starting in the 1960s, theoristsshifted their efforts to focus broadly on whatcame to be called journalism’s “agenda-setting”function. It was widely argued that while jour-nalists cannot consciously dictate what wethink, by virtue of selecting the issues and actorswhich received prominent and recurrent atten-tion, they “set the agenda” of public debate.

More recently, there has been increasingrecognition that publics themselves approachthe news with their own agendas and organizingfilters, through which journalism’s “agendas”must pass. The emphasis has been on determin-ing what the “frames” of media presentationare, what “frames” audiences bring to theirabsorption of media messages, and the gaps andcontrasts between the two. Coupled with newattention to the factors involved in life-longlearning, “framing” analysis has in turn becomepart of what the discipline refers to as “sociallearning” or “social cognition” theory.39

There are several relevant lessons (or chal-lenges) here for those concerned about economicsjournalism. The first is evidence that “econom-ics” (in the loose sense used by the public, notacademics) is in fact one of the primary “filters”audiences use to screen information. Politicalscientists Russell Neuman, Marion Just and AnnCrigler, for example, have identified five domi-nant filter categories in their empirical studies ofaudience learning through news, which theyidentify, along with “economics,” as “conflict,”

“moral values,” “powerlessness,” and “humanimpact.”40 Media, they argue, share these framesand use them to communicate—but to impor-tantly different degrees, and in importantly dif-ferent ways.

The media tend to employ technical language forthe economic frame, while people are far morelikely to overlay the frame with a moral or evalua-tive dimension . . . Approximately half of our inter-viewees framed at least one issue in economicterms but they tended to put a human face on it.The media’s numbers are reflected back as humanimpact, values, or moral judgments . . . Greed wasseen as motivating various actions by governmentsand individuals . . . Often, individuals saw the prof-its going to powerful others who could not alwaysbe trusted...our interviewees also included themedia among the powerful others motivated bygreed. Several of them employed an economicframe to suggest that the media’s main concern inissue coverage was rating or profits.41

This constant conjunction of “economics”with other frames, particularly the “moral” and“human interest” frames, suggests at least twokey insights into how audiences learn from jour-nalism. First, audiences carry with them fully-elaborated frames that run at odds in several keyways to the “frames” professional economistsuse to teach economics—and sometimes seemto want journalism to convey. Economists valuedispassion, observable rules, and the absence ofindividuals in their narratives; they avoid wher-ever possible telling stories that use words like“greed” or “power,” and hardly ever mentionindividuals by name as key economic actors, sohighly do they prize their own narrative aboutabstract economic rules and forces.42 Whatframing analysis seems to suggest is that suchefforts run tangentially, and perhaps at odds, tothe modes through which people assimilate andretain information, thereby complicating thelearning process itself.

Second, it suggests why critics find journal-ism—particularly TV journalism—weightedtoward coverage of what the critics define as“bad news.” Audiences tend to validate suchbad news because it meets their own doubts orskepticism about the world generally, but in particular about their experience of and confi-dence in the economy’s performance—and thereliability of leaders and professionals (includingeconomists) when called upon to predict futureperformance of the economy or the benefits ofspecific economic policies.43


There’s an intriguing additional dimensionto public skepticism over economic perfor-mance to be found in research on public percep-tions of risk. Repeated studies have found thatthe public routinely assigns a higher risk of dan-ger to man-made projects than to natural phe-nomena. Nuclear power plants, toxic spills, etc.are considered much more likely to occur andcause harm than scientific evidence suggeststhey will; earthquakes, hurricanes, etc., by con-trast, are routinely given lower probability esti-mates for occurrence and harm than scientificdata say they hold. But why should this be so?Public policy analysts and statisticians, con-fronted with such evidence on a broad scale,have concluded that public trust of such man-made projects inherently contains deep doubts(or at the very least, skeptical uncertainty) about“authority” and “honesty,” that directly relatesto confidence and relative powerlessness.

How Then Do We Learn?

There’s a good deal of evidence today thatwe do in fact learn from the press—but in waysquite unlike the straightforward pedagogic mod-els that many who debate economics journalismunderstand. The mode is called “unintended” or“accidental” learning, and its proponentsbelieve that we acquire bits of information andunderstanding from the press in haphazard, butnot unsystematic, ways. Those fragments arethen tentatively assimilated into what theresearchers call learning schemas, stored,“retested” against new information for consis-tency and usefulness, sometimes forgotten andthen relearned—and finally only graduallyretained as part of a larger cognitive architecturefor life-long learning.

As “frame” theorists now understand, thepress consequently is never simply providinginformation to audiences in a void, but pressingits reports through complex, interactive narra-tive structures—or “frames”—that serve as keyorganizing modules. Moreover, from the audi-ence’s vantage point, the usefulness of frames isin no small part to filter out the vast amount ofinformation for which the audience has nouse—in one researcher’s words, “taming thetide” of information constantly flowing over us.

Over a lifetime we encounter endlessstreams of new information, that flow past uswithout disturbing much about those basicframes. What’s lacking for a theory of economiclearning through journalism is an understandingof how different groups in a society come tovalue key elements in a frame—how for example,

some people come to favor widespread govern-ment involvement in the economy while othersoppose it, and how journalism affects commit-ment to those views.

Separately, different researchers have addedan additional, intriguing dimension to thislearning question. Without fully accounting forwhy, they have shown that—contrary to earlierresearchers’ concerns—such beliefs display, inaggregate societal terms, remarkable stabilityover time. Individuals change their views, butwithin the society as a whole, the mean com-mitment to particular views changes only veryslowly when it changes at all.

This understanding of public opinion—asan expression of public beliefs and “frames”used to interpret news—is relatively new tosocial science. For many years after World WarII, researchers focused on instability and short-term change in public opinion; only recentlyhave they gone back to look at patterns docu-mented over as much as half a century. Whenthey have, it is constancy, not change, whichhas stood out.

This has enormous implications for theeconomics journalism debate, particularly inpolicy reporting. Political scientists BenjaminPage and Robert Shapiro, in The RationalPublic, for example, argue that stable prefer-ences and beliefs are a characteristic of theentire post-World War II period:

Opinions about employment, inflation, taxes, andenergy, for example, reacted in systematic andconsistent ways to objective trends in prices andunemployment rates. Because of the predomi-nant stability of opinions, we concentrated agood deal on patterns of preferences within andacross issues, showing that the American publicmakes coherent distinctions among policies andholds opinions that fit together into backing forindividualism and a limited, but substantial, wel-fare state.

The high and generally stable public support forgovernment action on Social Security, education,jobs, medical care, the cities, the environment,consumer safety, and the like—and willingess topay taxes for these purposes—is especially striking.We noted a number of dips during the late 1970s insupport for taxes, regulation, and social spending(especially on welfare, redistribution, minorities,and medical care), but in nearly every case this“right turn” of opinion was small and temporary;opinion never altered much and soon rebounded ina liberal direction. In other cases (eg., spending on

Richard Parker 17

Social Security and education), there was hardlyany change at all or even a continued movementin a liberal direction . . . Throughout the Reaganyears and on into the Bush years, Americansfavored more, not less, spending and action on vir-tually all these economic welfare programs.44

Presumably what we see in such researchare expressions of the “frames” used by the pub-lic to come to public judgment. Unlike the oftenviolent swings in leadership and elite arenas(including the press), as policies become com-plex instruments of competing group power,large segments of the public opt for a conserva-tive consistency that one might infer feelsdeeply wounded and offended by Washington’shyper-partisanship of recent years. This viola-tion of a public desire for consistent, and demo-cratically-reflective, policies—as much as thespecific policies and politics themselves—maybe playing no small part in public disillusion-ment with politics and the press (as well aseconomists and other professionals).

What Then Ought to be Conveyed?

Even if we could fully understand howpeople learn about economics and the economyfrom the news, what should we conclude?What, in other words, ought we to desire as analternative, if we are discontent with the pre-sent state of affairs.

Economists aren’t a particularly goodsource of answers—or at least we need to recog-nize that many of their answers collide withdeeply-rooted customs, values and beliefs thathave proved remarkably powerful in shaping ourcollective pictures of democracy, mutual obliga-tion, power, and institutions. The economicassumption of the individual as a rational, self-maximizing figure, the suspicion about motiva-tion for collective action, a complex and veryimperfect understanding about information feed-back, its costs and benefits, and a highly-styl-ized minimalist description of the impact ofinstitutions on decision-making issues all makefor a worldview appreciated by a far smalleraudience than otherwise might be the case.

To be sure, in recent years, with bothdebates over “rational expectations” theory, anda growing interest in the role information playsin economic decisions—as well as “rationalchoice” theory’s invasion of political science,there have been advances. But for the timebeing, they remain largely at the abstract model-ing level, unavailable to policy-makers, or forthose interested in interpreting their appliedmeaning to the general public.

Set against (or alongside) this worldview, ofcourse, is the pageant of the journalist, and hisor her role in it. Fundamentally, it is a democra-tic worldview, composed of citizens who areonly secondarily economic agents. This citizen-ry participates in democratic activity as a meansof fulfilling deeply-held desires for freedom,equality, and opportunity. Bound up in and byinstitutions ranging from family to custom tocivic obligation, the citizenry looks to journal-ists to play a crucial role as information-provider as a means to democratic action.

In a cynical age such as ours, one can dero-gate such models—but journalists, no mean cyn-ics themselves at times, find this picture ofcivic life a—if not the—central raison d’etre fortheir work. Born out of a Progressive Era under-standing that objectivity must blend with con-stant civic improvement and democratic renew-al, to surrender such beliefs is in some sense togive up on journalism as a profession.

But since neither journalists nor econo-mists plan to give up their professions—and thenarratives, logics, and audiences that go withthem—the issue remains of what then ought tobe conveyed. Both “frame” theory and researchin the stability of public opinion suggest that astarting point different from most thinking todate on economics journalism—including theclassroom model of improvement—would betwo-fold.

One is an empirical effort to understandhow, and why, audiences learn from journalism.Expansion of the “frames” analysis to carefullysubdivided social and economic groups andclasses would expand our understanding notonly of how citizens use information to formu-late judgments on economic issues, but also giveus greater insight into how the competingframes interact. The work already done in thisarea of news learning has, for the most part,been focused on politics, with little large-scalework conducted on economic learning.45

Alongside this, better research on how dif-ferent media affect learning would add to ourunderstanding. Neuman, Just, and Crigler havefound that, contrary to easy assumptions, TVenhances understanding and retention of certainlearning experiences, compared to print.Whether or not this applies to economic con-cepts, however, is less clear—and needs investi-gation. Sahr has also found that TV learningabout inflation and unemployment also is relat-ed to income and occupation, but not to sex andlevel of education—which suggests patterns forresearch as well.


There also needs to be an effort to betterunderstand how individual knowledge, groupaffinity, and the notion of delegated power worktogether. That is, a good deal of existing litera-ture on economic journalism presumes thesuperiority of better public information andunderstanding, but nowhere specifies what anideal distribution might look like. Assumingthat we needn’t all acquire economics PhDs, arethere varying normative levels of understand-ing—perhaps distributed by education levels—that we can at least hypothesize as more coher-ent measures of improvement, compared to anunspecific notion of a unitary public’s learning?

This in turn raises both empirical and the-oretical issues of what we expect from an“informed public.” From the emotive effect ofRonald Reagan’s “Are you better off now thanyou were four years ago?” to political scientistEdward Tufte’s “When you think economics,think elections; when you think elections, thinkeconomics,” observers of American political dis-course have long assumed the deep interactionbetween voters’ perceptions of economic perfor-mance and political outcomes and alignments.

But how do voters assess economic perfor-mance, and by what criteria? Are voters assess-ing past performance—ie, voting “retrospective-ly”—or looking forward, ie, voting “prospective-ly”? To what degree do voters vote on their per-sonal pocketbook, or on a judgement aboutnational performance? When evidence suggeststhe latter, are they engaged in “irrational”behavior, or calculating long-term self interest?To what degree is economic voting assymetric—punishing “bad” results more than rewarding“good” ones?

We also need to understand better not onlythe individual “frames” through which citizensprocess journalistic information, but the groupcues that help them interpret it. What are themodern equivalents of the “barber shop” or“water cooler” discussions—where we test notonly what we have read or seen in the media,but seek feedback and interpretive understand-ing of their meanings? In an age of allegedlyincreasing isolation, are the declines not just inparty affilation, but in mediating civic institu-tions—described in Robert Putnam’s “BowlingAlone” and elsewhere—so fundamentally weak-ened as to be ephemeral to individual judgment?

Finally, are there shifts in the emphasis ofspecific “frames,” or selection of cueing termsor concepts, by journalists that would aid in anyof this? Neuman and Just argue that journalistsand the public share common sets of frames, but

differ emphatically in the frequency and empha-sis with which they use them. “Conflict” rateshigh with journalists; “morality” and “humaneffects” rate much higher with audiences. Isthere some way in which journalism can sustainits canonical commitment to “objectivity”while serving this public hunger for differently-organized forms of information?

Because the American economy seems tobe entering a new era—or at least leaving behindmany of the coordinates of an older one—theseissues are of lively and critical interest to all ofus, not just economists and journalists. Perhapsit is frustrating to end with more questions thananswers, but in part it may be a result of havingasked questions in the past which don’t addressthe issues of greatest importance.

Economic journalism will increase in vol-ume, variety, and importance in the comingyears, as change in the economy imposes bothtrying challenges and painful dislocations on theeconomic lives of millions of Americans. Muchof the past complaints about it seem to haveborn little fruit—in part, this paper has argued,because we perhaps haven’t framed our concernsin fruitful ways. Economists will continue to betempted to predict the future, and will oftenmispredict it; journalists will err through haste,simplification, and misunderstanding particularissues, data, and concepts. Economically impor-tant groups and actors will continue to feelaggrieved.

What we need better to understand is howthe divergent and multifaceted lives of our fel-low citizens—that we compress at risk into anominal and homogeneous “public”—not onlylearn from, but evaluate, and come to act upon,the information economics journalism provides.To date, we’ve not done an especially good jobof it. There is room—and reason—to do more.

Richard Parker 19

1. Stephen Reese et al., “Economic News onNetwork Television,” Journalism Quarterly (Spring1987), p. 137.

2. Cf. Tom Goldstein, Killing the Messenger: 100Years of Media Criticism (New York, 1989) for a rep-resentative overview. Progressive Era writers especial-ly were vocal about “capture” of the press by busi-ness interests (Will Irwin’s eleven-part series forMcClure’s in 1912 is perhaps the most famous, andlater shaped the thinking of the HutchinsCommission’s 1946 report). Conservative writers,though, were by no means less active, especiallywhen they concluded criticism of capitalism waslinked to Communist leanings. Cf. Percy Crosby’sbitter Three Cheers for the Red, Red, and Red(McClean, Va., Freedom Press; 1936) for an especiallyrancorous example. Richard Hofstader’s Anti-Intellectualism in America offers examples across alonger span of time.

3. Cf. David Colander and A.W. Coats, The Spreadof Economic Ideas (New York, 1993), Part II, esp.Robert Solow’s article, “How economic ideas turn tomush”.

4. Roger Brinner, in John Labate, “Bad News HurtsToo,” Fortune, March 23, 1992, p. 26. The motif ofthe press as economic Cassandra recurs throughoutthe business press. Cf., for representative examples,Kenneth Fisher, “Misery in the Media,” Forbes,January 20, 1992, p. 127; John Lawrence, “BusinessNews: The Terrible Truth,” Fortune, April 25, 1998,pp. 145-149; and James Sites, “The Press, theEconomy, and the Nation’s Future,” Vital Speeches ofthe Day, March 1, 1978, pp. 290-294.

5. Reese et al.

6. For a view of foundations’ evolving role in eco-nomic policy and theory, see James Smith, The IdeaBrokers (New York, 1991). For a synopsis of major foun-dations’ current activity in the field, see Caren Grown,“Federal and Foundation Support for Economics andPolicy,” unpublished memorandum (Chicago:MacArthur Foundation, 1994). For a survey of conserva-tive foundations’ recent activity, though focused on the“law and economics” movement, see Alliance forJustice, Justice for Sale (Washington, DC, 1993).

7. Harold Lasswell, “The structure and function ofcommunication in society,” in Bryson, ed., TheCommunication of Ideas (New York, 1948), p.XX.

8. The positive-normative distinction, taught in vir-tually every introductory text, has been nonetheless acontentious one for years. Veblen’s attack on Marshallis one of the earliest statements, followed by TalcottParsons’ rejoinder to Lionel Robbins’ claims for it inthe Thirties. Friedman’s famous restatement of thecase remains the post-war classic, but see Rosenberg,Machlup and McCloskey for dissent.

9. G.R. Boynton and Christophe Deissenberg,“Models of the economy implicit in public dis-course,” Policy Sciences,v. 20:1987, p. 129.

10. Cf. the AEA’s officially-chartered “Report on theCommission on Graduate Education,” and its statisti-cal annex, “The Education and Training of EconomicsDoctorates,” Journal of Economic Literature, Fall,1991, for a frank measure of the troubling intramuralproblems in the profession. According to it, 61% ofgraduate economics professors agree that economicstraining “over-emphasizes mathematical and statisti-cal skills at the expense of economics.” An evenhigher number think training needs major revision.The commission itself concluded that “graduate pro-grams may be turning out a generation with toomany idiot savants skilled in technique but innocentof real economic issues.”

11. Bell and Kristol’s The Crisis in Economic Theory(New York, 1980) offers a slightly dated, but still use-ful introduction to the non-specialist. For a morerecent—and troubling—look at division and disarrayin economics, see the American EconomicAssociation’s detailed examination of graduate eco-nomic education, the “Report of the Committee onGraduate Education in Economics,” cited above.

12. Obviously, corporate activity isn’t unexamined,whether by SEC oversight of public corporations, ormore generally by journalism. Still, individual enter-prises escape routine public surveillance in a wayunknown to government.

13. The classic arguments for the “electoral” eco-nomic cycle are William Nordhaus, “The PoliticalBusiness Cycle,” Review of Economic Studies v. 42(1975), pp. 252-273, and Edward Tufte, PoliticalControl of the Economy (Princeton, 1978); for criti-cisms of the thesis, James Alt and Alec Chrystal,Political Economics (Berkeley, CA; 1982).

14. For a lively discussion, see Colander and Coats,eds., The Spread of Economic Ideas (New York, 1993).

ENDNOTES


15. The Journal of Economic Education, primarilyconcerned with economics pedagogy at the collegeand high school level, also looks at journalistic cover-age, and offers a rich sample of such literature fromeconomists’ vantage point.

16. John Cochran and R. Michael Brown, “What’sWrong Here?,” Economic Inquiry (July 1989), pp.541-545.

17. Robert Lichter and Ted Smith, “Bad NewsBears,” Forbes Mediacritic (Fall, 1993), p. 82. Thearticle references two longitudinal studies, one by theMedia Institute covering three one-year periodsbetween 1982 and 1987, and a second by the Centerfor Media and Public Affairs that periodically ana-lyzed coverage in 1987-88 and continuously since1990.

18. Cf. David Harrington, “Economic News onTelevision: The Determinants of Coverage,” PublicOpinion Quarterly v. 53 (1989), pp. 17-40. Harringtonreviews the literature, and in passing illustrates thecoding and bias problem of the conservativeresearchers. By coding, for example, movements inunemployment only by their direction, one study exco-riated network coverage as “bad news”, because itreported on unemployment when it was declining. Thiswas in 1983, however, when unemployment was 10%.

19. G.R. Boynton and Christophe Deissenberg,“Models of the economy implicit in public dis-course,” Policy Sciences v. 20 (1989), pp. 129-151.

20. For examples, cf. Jacob Frankel, “FlexibleExchange Rates, Prices, and the Role of ‘News’,”Journal of Political Economy, v. 89, no.4 (1981), pp.665-705; Craig Hakkia and Douglas Pearce, “TheReaction of Exchange Rates to Economic News,”Economic Inquiry, V. XXIII, October 1985, pp. 621-636; Torben Andersen, “Credibility of PolicyAnnouncement,” European Economic Review v. 33(1989), pp. 13-30.

21. Harvard economist Robert Barro—a determinedcritic of the New Deal legacy—likes to puckishlyremind fellow economists that U.S. economic per-formance fared best during those several (though rel-atively brief) periods when the CEA chairmanshipwas empty.

22. Robert Nelson, “The Economics Profession andthe Making of Public Policy,” Journal of EconomicLiterature, v. XXV (March, 1987), pp. 49-91.

23. Wayne Parsons, The Power of the Financial Press(Rutgers, NJ; 1989), esp. chs. 1 and 2, offers detailed

insight into the role of the press since the 18th centu-ry in disseminating economic theories.

24. Not to mention a tenet of faith among followersof this year’s Nobel Laureate, Robert Lucas and the“rational choice” school.

25. James Tobin’s The New Economics One DecadeOlder (Princeton, 1974) offers an excellent, brief rendition.

26. Albert Rees, “The Marketplace of EconomicIdeas,” AEA Papers and Proceedings (May 1986), p. 138.

27. Robert Solow, “How Economic Ideas Turn toMush,” in Colander and Coats, The Spread ofEconomic Ideas, p. 82.

28. Howard Simons and Joseph Califano, Jr., eds.,The Media & Business (New York, 1979), pp. ix-x.

29. Burton Pines, Out of Focus: Network Televisionand the American Economy (Washington, DC; 1994),p. 6.

30. Abel and Bomafede, cited in Chris Welles,“Economics and Business Reporting,” in HollieKluge, Columbia Knight-Bagehot Guide to Businessand Economics Journalism (New York, 1991), p. xiii.

31. Greenfield, in Matthew Miller, “The CaseAgainst Ted Koppel,” The Washington Monthly (May,1989), p. 35.

32. The great majority of small dailies, of course,lack the resources described here. One study foundthat a majority of business sections had fewer than 3staffers. Cf. Kent MacDougal, Ninety Seconds to TellIt All: Big Business and the News Media (Homewood,IL: 1981), p. 24.

33. The newsmagazine shows’ emphasis on “ThreeC’s” has been painful to many in the corporate com-munity, it should be noted—though hardly withoutsome chagrin among journalists as well, after dust-ups over “Dateline” and GM trucks, or “20/20”’sencounter with the tobacco industry.

34. James Hamilton and Joseph Kalt, “A Summary ofthe Report to the Foundation for AmericanCommunications and the Ford Foundation,”(Cambridge, MA; 1987), p. 5.

35. ibid, pp. 5-7.

Richard Parker 21

36. Leonard Silk, “Communicating Economic Ideasand Controversies,” AEA Papers and Proceedings, v.76, n.2 (May 1986), pp. 141-144.

37. Pamela Hollie Kluge, Columbia Knight-BagehotGuide to Business and Economics Journalism (NewYork, 1991). For the Galbraith role, see p. 161.

38. Herbert Simon, “Richard T. Ely Lecture,”American Economic Review (May, 1978), p. 3.

39. Cf. Albert Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory ofMass Communication,” in Jennings Bryant and DolfZillman, Media Effects: Advances in Theory andResearch (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale,NJ; 1994).

40. Cf. Neuman, Just and Crigler, CommonKnowledge: News and the Construction of PoliticalMeaning (Chicago, 1992), esp. Ch.4.

41. Ibid, pp. 63-64.

42. Donald McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics(New York, 1985) elaborates at length, though some-what controversially, on this point.

43. One stark expression of the public’s deep appre-hension of power and elites generally appears in arecent New York Times/CBS poll. Asked to agree ordisagree with the statement, “The government is runby a few big interests looking out for themselves,”79% agreed. Asked further whether “the average citi-zen had a chance of being heard,” 75% disagreed. Cf.New York Times, August 25, 1995, p. 2.

44. Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, The RationalPublic: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ PolicyPreferences (Chicago; 1992), pp. 169-170.

45. Cf. Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder, NewsThat Matters: Television and Public Opinion(Chicago, 1987); Russell Neuman, The Paradox ofMass Voting: Knowledge and Opinion in theAmerican Electorate (Cambridge, MA; 1986); andLance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion (WhitePlains, NY; 1988) for examples. Robert Sahr,Television News and Public Policy (New York, 1992)takes up a limited analysis of economic news andlearning, but from very small samples.


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