The Press: Silver-Lining the Slump

DECLINE HERE? DON’T BELIEVE IT! headlined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Page One last week. Other newspapers from Seattle to Savannah were doing their unlevel best to bull their way through one of the nation’s biggest—and most botched—running stories: the recession. Though more than 50.000 workers are out of jobs in Georgia’s four largest cities, the Atlanta Journal has zealously kept the state’s slump off the front page, and, until last week, even banned the word recession from the paper.

Since the severity of the recession varied widely from region to region, it was not a big local story for all newspapers. But in many of the cities where unemployment was heaviest, editors ranged uneasily from boosterism to ostrichism. In Los Angeles, where layoffs have idled nearly 6% of the work force, Hearst’s Herald & Express whooped: ROSY L.A. ECONOMY SEEN. In Detroit, some of the big auto plant shutdowns have landed in the back pages. In New England, most publishers admit privately that they are worried about business conditions, but, says one news executive, “you’ll never read a line of what they’re saying in their own papers.”

Buried Statistics. Determined not to see the clouds for the silver lining, many editors are solicitously pumping up buoyant bulletins on building permits, bank deposits, airline travel, and other statistics that are normally buried on the business page. Scripps-Howard’s Memphis Press-Scimitar last week ran a glowing story on expansion plans for a local Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. plant—without mentioning that 2,600 of its 3,600 employees have been laid off. In Atlanta, the Journal suppressed the news of a layoff of 2,000 Lockheed Aircraft workers last fall until it could report that the factory had found other jobs for some of them. The paper drew criticism from Federal Reserve officials for another story cramming a pack of upbeat department-store sales statistics into the lead while burying other sales figures that outweighed the rosy first paragraph.

By contrast, some newspapers handled the story with candor and imagination. Just as Democrats in Washington pedaled hard for political mileage, it was Democratic dailies generally (but not exclusively) that gave the recession the biggest play. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Louisville Courier-Journal and Chattanooga Times were quick to tell readers how the slump was affecting community and family life, personal budgets, taxes, jobs. Marshall Field’s Chicago Sim-Times ran a human-interest series on the steel-mill layoffs at Gary, Ind. (and in a story on employment agencies last week unearthed the fact that first-rate secretaries are still hard to find).

Since the recession, many dailies have been playing up Sylvia Porter’s sharpwitted, clearly written daily column on economics. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has added two topical syndicated columns: “You and Your Job” and “Family Finance.” A five-part recession roundup filed by the Associated Press last week was used by most papers—including many that maintain there is no recession. Though it had yet to focus on human angles of the slump in its own backyard, the encyclopedic New York Times reached across the world to report repercussions of U.S. economic pangs.

Pocketbook Optimism. Some newsmen —who as a group are not famed for sunny dispositions—admit frankly that their sudden preoccupation with cheer radiates from the pocketbook. “We don’t want to scare our advertisers to death,” says Editor Joseph E. Lambright of the Savannah morning News, which last month reported that downtown sales were off 10%, next day ran an advertiser-pressured “clarification” explaining that the slump was caused by the suburban growth. Last week the Nashville Tennessean was pointedly warned by advertisers that its alert coverage of the recession was “bad for business.” Newspaper front offices have reason to be sensitive to these arguments: while circulation has held steady, U.S. advertising linage slipped 6.4% in January from the 1957 level for that month.

The advertiser’s theory is that news of the recession stirs up even more caution and uncertainty in consumers. But newspapers that tailor the news to this formula help neither the economy nor themselves. Says Tennessean Editor Coleman A. Harwell: “How can we pretend there’s no unemployment when people are talking about it? If we pretend, we look stupid.”