Is Our ADD Media Accelerating the Recovery?

Far more often than not, our experience of the frantic, heedless, amphetamine-addled speed of the modern news cycle is an unhappy one. For consumers of news, it means enduring a lot of errors and bogus speculation and a gnawing sense that you're missing way more than you should. For journalists, it means the devaluation of the scoop and the crazy-making sensation of running on a treadmill that's constantly accelerating.

But every so often, our hyper-warp-speed news cycle is a gift. Reading today's economic headlines, I'm wondering if now might be one of those times.

The stock market is on a tear. Consumer confidence is up. The credit crisis is behind us.

Of course, any of these developments could turn out to be illusory; that may even be the more likely scenario. Lord knows I'm no economist. But if they hold up, could it be that we'll have the impatient, prediction-happy, self-amplifying news media to thank, at least in part? Stock prices, consumer spending and interest rates have everything to do with expectations. The faster you convince people that things are terrible, the sooner they'll believe that things can only get better.

A few months ago, it was popular to ask whether the media's doomsaying was making matters worse than they would have been otherwise. Perhaps it did. And perhaps, if what we're seeing is evidence of a true bottom and not just a false spring, we'll be glad it worked out that way.