Standard-Examiner: Ogden Area Bouncing Back?

What ought to be clear from a reading of the Brookings Report... any talk of local economic recovery is premature at best

On the theme of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, we'll briefly direct our readers' attention an uplifting Standard-Examiner morning story, where some unnamed SE writer has cherry-picked a rather dismal Intermountain West economic survey, and reinterpreted it as a downright "chirpy local good news story."

This morning the highly respected Brookings Institution released this report, which paints a generally disappointing picture of "economic recovery" in the Mountain West:

• June 2010 —Mountain Monitor: Tracking Economic Recession and Recovery in the Intermountain West’s Metropolitan Areas

And here's the SE's morning writeup, which craftily (and mendaciously, we think) generates a positive local spin:

• Ogden area bouncing back / Top of Utah's economic recovery leads Western region

The SE puts all the emphasis on the good part:

The study... contends the Ogden metropolitan area has completely recovered in production output and surpassed prerecession levels of growth in goods and services.

But the fly in the ointment is unemployment, folks; and even the upbeat SE couldn't suppress that fact:

"... jobs failed to materialize, and Ogden's unemployment rate continues to mount..."

What ought to be clear from a reading of the Brookings Report is that Ogden, and the Mountain West in general, is still plagued by a dynamic of increasing unemployment which makes any talk of economic recovery premature at best. For a good discussion of the nature of the so-called jobless recovery on the national level, by the way, check out this link:

• The Jobless Recovery

We're going to file this story under the label "Puff Pieces," folks, and for that we'll engage in another neck-snapping Weber County Forum segue. In that connection we invite our readers to check out this 5/10/10 blog article, which skillfully expounds upon the tendency of the print media to process "every visibly negative bit of data ... through a media and Central State assembly line" and to refashion it as "good news" and "evidence" that [a] "nascent recovery is taking hold":

• Suppressing the Cognitive Dissonance of a Bogus Recovery

While we appreciate the SE's probably well-intentioned effort to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, we prefer to dwell in the world of reality here at Weber County Forum.

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