Recession. Have We All Overcooked it?

They say there's no news like bad news and unless you've just returned from a sabbatical in deep space you can't have failed to have noticed that this adage has pretty much set the news agenda for the past eight months if not longer.



Credit crunch, failing banks, government bailouts and job losses lead the headlines on a daily basis.



While I recognise there is always a danger of being a sample size of one, are the media and politicians waking up to the fact that their continual outpourings of doom and gloom are talking us into an even bigger black hole than we're already in? What am I basing this hypothesis on?



Well three things actually. Firstly, over the past few weeks I've met quite a few industry peers and have listened to their comments on the overall outlook and how business is faring.



While it is generally accepted that people working in marketing communications have a tendency to sell the positive, especially when it comes to the performance of their own company, it appears the world has not ended for any of them, with the vast majority saying they're still incredibly busy. And they seem to be busy on profitable business as opposed to busy fools even after you've factored in the exaggeration factor that tends to prevail in such a gathering.



They do however admit to more than a passing frisson of nervousness based on what they're hearing and reading on a daily basis. You can make what you will of that, but if it is generally accepted that cut backs in marketing spend are an inevitable consequence of a recession you have to wonder what all these agencies are up to (unless of course they're lying through their teeth) if they are as busy as they claim.



The second indicator was an interview on FiveLive yesterday morning - caught it halfway through and didn't catch the guest's name but they were obviously a media grand fromage and were being pretty stiffly questioned by a BBC presenter about, wait for it, "have the media overcooked this?" The interviewee did say things were pretty grim (speaking personally having wandered down the street of our nearest town recently there's an awful lot of empty retailers) but did admit that bad news sells.



While not an outright admission of overcooking, it was couched in such a way to suggest that life is still going on out there, albeit it's very tough.



The third trigger for asking this question was the story this morning (http://tinyurl.com/cm8o5h) that Gordon Brown is warning us against pessimism - a bit rich I know given that he's not exactly the jolliest of folk even when things are looking good. But nonetheless it does make you wonder if people are starting to realise that if we talk about doom and gloom for long enough we might just run the risk of making it even worse.

I appreciate that the media can only report the news as it is and if a company has made thousands of people redundant then it has to report it as such. That said, it does seem there might just be the start of a trend where people are starting to question whether the endless diet of misery is talking the whole thing down even further

I am not pretending for one minute that business life is a bowl of cherries at the moment but would be interested to hear your views on whether in your view the media's reporting of the crisis has ben reflective of your own experiences.