Fair and Balanced, the road to doom

When things're fine, the constant criticism and hoping-to-predict-the-worst the media does isn't bad. If things get overly speculative it's annoying and can give some stupid, impressionable, and biased people improbable scenarios to base decisions off of. But in the middle of a crisis, the media is essentially fanning the flames of our own destruction by constantly scrutinizing every little thing.

The economy has an undeniable psychological component to it. As long as people are continually fed grim information, sometimes as a counterbalance to a positive story, things will continue to be bad. For example, in January 2009 Consumer Spending went up. Obviously that's good news, but the news outlets had to "balance" it by saying, "But it's unlikely to continue." And then they spent the majority of the rest of the story explaining why things're bad.

If the media isn't going to be optimistic, who will? We receive our information from them, sometimes it's more important to do what's right for the country than it is to produce "balanced" information. Especially in a non-political crisis like an economic meltdown.