Display:
Well, bad news and doom & gloom sell papers and air time. Every once in a while, someone will start a "good news" paper or magazine, with much positive fanfare, only to see it fail dismally within a short time. Good news lacks the conflict interest of bad news. Conflict is the moving force in drama. Even the best comedy plays and movies have plenty of dark moments.

Admittedly, the talking heads of recent times seem to have taken the gloom part to ridiculous lengths. A more reasoned approach would be preferable, but then many of the talking hairdos of US (and probably European) TV would be unemployed.

by Mnemosyne on Sat May 3rd, 2008 at 05:20:30 PM EST
It's asymetric bad news - whatever the euro/dollar rate, it means that something's wrong, or about to go wrong, with the eurozone countries.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sun May 4th, 2008 at 05:46:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]
if it's raining things are bad, and if there's blue skies it's going to rain.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Sun May 4th, 2008 at 05:56:32 AM EST
[ Parent ]
It's interesting this point should be made twice in this thread.

The newspapers concerned here are not from eurozone countries. Preaching the demise of the euro is not bad news, doom and gloom from their point of view and that of their reading public. If they were trying to sell their publications on the doom and gloom ticket, they'd be talking about the decline of the US dollar and dollar-based GBP.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sun May 4th, 2008 at 06:08:22 AM EST
[ Parent ]
To supplement the others; what I notice in the same papers when writing about the British or US economy is the discovery of silver lining in bad news (say a big loss of a bank is not the news, but that it is less than predicted) and the boosterist now-the-crisis-is-over commentary of every uptick.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.
by DoDo on Tue May 6th, 2008 at 03:37:00 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:
Login
. Make a new account
. Reset password
Occasional Series