Striving to tell it like it is, whether 'insane' or not

A year and a half ago, and for some months before, a certain refrain was repeated when some people took stock of the nation's economy. Things weren't that bad, the theme went. It was just the media's fault. We were, it was said, just repeating the same depressing headlines, either for some subversive political purpose or just because that's what we do.

Many of us editors were sensitive to the criticism, and as the stock market sank and major report after major report showed new signs of the plunging economy, we gave a lot of thought to when and where and how we ran each story. Our aim was not to influence developments, but to report them. We had no desire for bad-economy headlines to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The bad economy came, of course, needing no help from us, and I suppose - indeed dearly hope - a new, good economy is somewhere on the horizon. It, too, will come in its own good time with no help from us, but I have found it interesting in recent months that I haven't heard anyone saying that our now-more-positive economic headlines deserve the credit. The current economic recovery, if that is indeed what we're in, is producing its own wave of positive headlines - increased sales here, stabilizing home values there, unemployment improving, if much too slowly. Yet, no one seems to be saying that the improving tone in headlines is producing the improving economic results.

If anything, the same critics who once said we were overstating the economic crisis now complain that we are overstating the recovery.

Sigh.

We hope we're just telling it like it is in the most accurate way we can.

In the context of the economy, I couldn't help but be struck by the content of the front page of many of our Wednesday editions. On one side of the page, a story tinged with mild outrage about how the governor is raising his staff salaries an average of 11.5 percent even amid calls for everyone to share in the state's budget hardships. On the other, the story of a departing school superintendent who will be paid $185,000 for the final year of his contract, even though no one knows why he is, in the cold parlance of business, being "separated." At the top of the page, another in the endless speculations about where LeBron James will have the opportunity to ply his considerable basketball skills and astonishing wealth.

What kind of world are we living in, I wondered, where, in the midst of widespread economic malaise, these types of events can occur? It's certainly no wonder they make the front page.

It reminded me of Mike Imrem's column in Monday's Sports section, wherein Mike reflected on the incongruous "insanity" of the frenzy to rain unimaginable wealth on basketball heroes like James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and others and the struggle for almost everyone else (except perhaps state employees and separating school superintendents) to pay the most-basic bills.

"It isn't right. It isn't wrong. It just is," Mike wrote, and as much as I wish otherwise, I couldn't agree with him more.

I suppose that's true of the economy, too, and of school boards and governor's offices and real estate prices and city councils and police and fire departments and practically everything else we cover. In our reporting, at least, we try not to suggest it's right or wrong but just to show you that it is.

You, of course, take it from there.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor for the Daily Herald.