Yesterday’s jobs report for the last week in September was really bad. But you’d be hard pressed to find it on the major financial websites, since it was getting buried under more neutral news about mergers and GM becoming more efficient (by ditching Saturn) and such. And while today’s news of unexpected (!) rises in unemployment and job losses did top a lot of headlines, it didn’t stay there all day. In fact, as of this writing, CNBC’s homepage isn’t even carrying an article directly about the jobs numbers!

So what’s the deal? Certainly every glimmer of green shoot, however fabled or trumped-up (like the clunkers numbers that are unsurprisingly now crashing, just as predicted) gets top billing in the hopes it will send the market surging. So why is there no equal play for the downside of reality when it comes in?

The answer is simple and probably obvious. The people doing the reporting are biased. They are rooting for an economic recovery just as hard as the embedded reporters in the early days of the Iraq War were rooting for American victory. This bias, the real bias innate to our modern system of journalism, is far more insidious than alleged left-right political spectrum claims or even less visible Democratic-Republican differences. For this bias actually manages to separate us from the reality of what’s happening and is all the more costly for it.

While I have posted before about the ills of exaggeration in partisan bickering and its proclivity to make people think larger-than-life differences exist, I find this type of bias to be far worse. For one thing, there’s no presentation of an alternate viewpoint. Because everyone in the mainstream media is personally invested in a 401k and/or personally says the pledge of allegiance, there’s no one to present the other side of the debate, to take a contrarian viewpoint. This is exceedingly dangerous, because it allows us to delude ourselves into thinking that everything is fine because all our “objective” arbiters are actually propagandists in fedoras.

This is precisely how messes like the Iraq War were crammed down the throats of what would have otherwise been a questioning populous. The role of the New York Times and other trusted media outlets in making bogus claims of the Bush administration seem credible is well documented. Their role in failing to follow-up on the dangers of the initial subprime housing bubble is also at issue. But their current role in making things seem way better than they are on the economic front is clear yet undocumented. For who would document it? Who reports on the reporters? Only similarly invested other reporters.

This is not a call to arms for bloggers against the mainstream media per se, even though I’m clearly writing this on a blog and railing against the “MSM”. For I doubt there are a lot of mainstream bloggers out there (yes, this heralded “independent” media of personal internet reporting has now developed a mainstream of its own) calling for a deeper examination of the current economic numbers and asking why no one is reporting them accurately. After all, most of these bloggers also have 401k’s and such. Which begs an important question: who got us all invested in these 401k’s in the first place?

This ends up relating back to my most recent Mep Report post as well, indicating that everyone’s investment in the money system and its entailing rat race ends up blinding us to the real ills of the world and how we could spend time solving them. And while I doubt money was invented by the Mesopotamians specifically as part of a vast distraction conspiracy, the modern impact of money has mostly been to get us to obsess about our own personal financial standing at the expense of worrying about larger communal goals.

Of course, since every major country in the world, encompassing every developed press, is on the same page about the direction they’d like to see the economy go, there’s no one minding the store anywhere. Sure, the BBC is better at reporting generally than CNBC, but the BBC’s reporters are surely pro-economy as well, damn the reality. (Though I guess it’s worth nothing that the BBC’s economic headline right now is the stark “More US jobs lost than expected”, in high contrast to American news outlets’ relative denial.)

Everyone’s mostly convinced that the economy is largely psychological, that if we can just say and think enough good things, then everything will turn out okay. But as my Dad would say, the problem is that there’s a real reality out there somewhere. And in that reality, the numbers don’t add up. A few people getting tired of selling stocks does not a recovery make. A 70% consumer-based economy with no jobs and no consumer spending does not function. A society obsessed with buying houses and having mobility does not work when home values continue to plummet and everyone feels stuck. And throwing fiat currency at the problem in big heaps is not going to instill any lasting value in anything.

The problem is that the only difference between right now and the nadir of the market in March is that people irrationally think something is better now. We employ journalists to wake us up from perceptual snafus like this. But they are just as deluded as the rest of us.

If you’re wondering how whole societies in history could have seemed to go crazy, could have put their faith in insanity, could have made self-defeating decisions, this is how it starts. It starts when no one in the society has an incentive to point out the Emperor’s nudity. And right here in River City, it’s long underway.