How satisfied are we with the
way things are generally going? Our answer to this question underlies a broad spectrum
of our behavior and action. Our public mood can vary a lot over time, depending
on many personal, familial, local and broader events. I vividly remember my
parents quickly creating an ad hoc air-raid shelter in the basement of our home
in the fall of 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis became all too scary for me
and my family. We were most definitely “not satisfied” at that point.
Is crime now on a giant
bender with robberies and physical mayhem everyone’s every-day occurrence that’s
freaking us out? You’d think so if you only received your news from local TV
stations, given their news programming. This sense of predisposition isn’t new.
The favoritism that lies behind media channels has been long recognized and discussed.
It’s the principal reason I don’t watch local TV news, and only sparingly gaze
at national news.
Fortunately, there are more
expansive views of our general mood. Several polls attempt to measure the
general pulse of the national public’s mood. The Gallup Organization has
conducted a national monthly poll for over 35 years to assess the general
satisfaction of Americans. The figure below illustrates this poll’s varying results
from February 1979 to early September 2015, when just 29% of respondents said
they were satisfied.
Gallup National Satisfaction Survey, 1979 – 2015
Our current public mood is very different than it was in February 1999, when Gallup found that 71% of Americans were satisfied. 1999 contained many “good ol’ days.” In 1999, our real GDP grew at 4.7%, the unemployment rate was 4.2% (at that point the lowest in decades), the Consumer Price Index rose by a slight 2.7% and Bill Clinton was acquitted in the Republicans’ misguided impeachment efforts. Praise be.
Low points in the Gallup
satisfaction poll include a gloomy 14% in Jun 1992 and a dismal 7% in Oct 2008.
In 1992, the US economy was
in fine shape: GDP grew 3.6%,
inflation was 3%. However,
foreign events in 1992 included several that were clearly dark. The civil war
in Afghanistan unofficially began (was it really that long ago?). On May 5 Russian leaders in Crimea declared their
separation from Ukraine as a new republic, proving that lightning can eventually
strike in the same place twice. However, unlike 2014, the Russians withdrew the
secession 5 days later. Finally, the Bosnian war began in 1992 and took until
1995 to end it in Dayton, Ohio of all places. Closer to home 2 unsettling,
fairly large earthquakes (7.3 and 6.3) rocked Southern California in June.
In 2008, the US was in the
very unsatisfying Great Recession; GDP declined by 0.3% and inflation was 3.8%.
By October 2008, the “global financial crisis” – that germinated in the US via
toxic sub-prime mortgage lending – was in full swing. Lehman Brothers collapsed
in mid-September. As the survey was fielded, the International Monetary Fund
warned of a global meltdown and offered to lend to countries if needed. We
endured these unsettling times for quite a while. Only somnambulant
cave-dwellers had any reason to be “satisfied.”
Rather than capturing our
present mood of the times from a national poll, I explored an alternative and used
the august New York Times as my
source. For the past 5 weeks I’ve characterized each of the 86 articles published
in the Times’ Sunday Review section[1].
In broad terms, this section provides the Times’
analytical and opinion overview of the previous week. I used these stories to depict
what the “mood” of the Times has been
on a weekly basis. The ultimate selection of articles in this section probably has
to do with decisions of editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal. Nevertheless, I
was particularly interested in whether my subjective categorization (just as
subjective as any survey measurement of “satisfaction”) has any
relation to what’s going on (or not) in the larger scheme of things.
I divided the stories into
three segments: (1) stories that presented events or opinion that I
characterized as “downbeat, or alarming.” I labelled them with an L unsmiling face. (2) Stories
that focused on a topic that was fairly “neutral or indeterminate”) I labelled
with a K straight face.
And (3) stories that examined and discussed a topic that was “positive or
uplifting” I labelled with a J smiling face, as shown in the table below.
Mood of the Times
An example of a positive article
is this one, “The (fake)
meat revolution;” here’s a neutral one, “Can a
novelist be too productive?”; and a clearly downbeat one, “The
next genocide.” As you can see, the first 2 issues (30-Aug and 6-Sep) contained
predominantly downbeat articles. The percentage of positive articles rose – and
the downbeat ones declined – after the initial issues during the 30-day period
I examined and reached a high point in the 20-Sep Sunday Review when they
accounted for 56% of the section’s articles. Except for the first Sunday, the “indeterminate”
articles accounted for the smallest portion of the Sunday Review.
I also attempted to categorize
news analysis and opinion articles from the Times
during Jun 1995 and Oct 2008 (when the Gallup poll shows nadir-like
dissatisfaction, as well as during Feb 1999, when 71% of the public said they
were satisfied with the way things were going, an all-time high since 1979.
Unfortunately, the nytimes.com search function doesn’t allow historical searches
for articles found in The Week in Review section (the previous section title for commentary and opinion articles and editorials) of the Sunday Times.
Although it’s a bit
fanciful, my weekly Mood of the Times
“index” shows that over this 5-week period of Aug and Sep 40% of the articles
were either positive or uplifting – registering a decent degree of smiley
article “satisfaction;” and a much stronger level of satisfaction than
presented in the Gallup national poll.
What does this comparison
mean? I’m not suggesting that the Gallup Organization revise
their methodology or that the Times alter its article selection. But
characterizing the pulse of correspondents and commentators of the New York Times offers a complementary portrayal
of the nation’s mood. Perhaps more folks should be reading the Sunday Times if they want a more positive and
balanced characterization of our times. Who’d of guessed?
[1]
I did not include editorials, only the news analysis and opinion articles. Unsurprisingly,
the editorials are invariably and predominantly downbeat. I didn’t find any positive
or uplifting editorials during the 5-week period. My examination of the Sunday
Review section did include the often-insightful cartoon, “The Strip.”
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