A report published Monday by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, says that US media coverage of the Great Recession has been top down with the impact on people being secondary.

The Pew study also found that when the stock market recovered from its lows and the focus in in Washington moved beyond bailouts, the news media generally turned attention away from economic coverage.

Finfacts doesn't aspire to be a modern day Skibbereen Eagle, on this issue but praise where it's due should go to The New York Times, for its regular focus on the human dimension, including a memorable story among many others, on the residual hope of people who have lost their homes, only to find that their personal effects are auctioned off when they are unable to pay storage rents.

In Ireland, we have often highlighted the impact of monumental economic mismangement on tens of thousands of lives while the people responsible - - not only politicians but senior officials who took the spoils - - to a man or woman, none saw reason to show principle and publicly oppose it.

There is also a reality that unless a person experiences the fear of unemployment or the reality of being jobless and out of money in an economy where money means everything, the good fortune of having a secure job for life is taken for granted and media coverage is unlikely to have an impact on ingrained misperceptions.

So the public sector staff who were reported to be noisy and bad-mannered in their claims of victimhood on the Irish television programme Frontline last Monday, would never accept facts on their pay premia over the private sector, even though in recent weeks, public sector staff at the Economic and Social Research Institute and the Central Statistics Office, provided the inconvenient truths.

The Pew study says media coverage of the economy has also largely centered on two cities, and focused on a relatively small number of major story lines.

An analysis of a larger array of media using new "meme tracker" technology developed at Cornell University also finds that phrases and ideas that reverberated most in the coverage came early on, mostly from government, particularly from the president and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and that few Republicans in Congress articulated any memes that got much traction.

The basic narrative of the coverage was studied from Feb. 1st through Aug. 31st, an analysis of about 9,950 stories from television, radio, cable, newspapers and online. A more detailed analysis of the sourcing in stories, the datelines, the events that triggered each story and the differences between media sectors was conducted for a shorter period, from Feb. 1st through July 3rd. The third element, an examination of the precise phrases and ideas that resonated most fully in the media was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Cornell University and Stanford University. This third element included an even larger universe of media -- millions of different web-based outlets, including mainstream news sites, new media sites and blog RSS feeds.

Pew says almost 40% of economic news reports dealt with the troubles of the banking and car industries, and the federal stimulus bill which passed in February.

Unemployment and the housing crisis accounted for 12%. And, the study said, “stories that tried to explicitly examine the broader impact of the economic downturn on the lives of ordinary Americans filled 5% of the economic coverage.”

The reports says as an example of coverage of topics that may have been harder to cover but arguably affected many more people, for example, all the reporting of retail sales, food prices, the impact of the crisis on Social Security and Medicare, its effect on education and the implications for health care combined accounted for just over 2% of all the economic coverage.

Fully 76% of the datelines on economic stories studied during the first five months of the Obama presidency were New York (44%) or metro Washington DC. (32%), the two most powerful and media-saturated cities in the country. Only about one-fifth (21%) of the stories originated in any other city in the US, and about a quarter of those emanated from two other major media centres: Atlanta and Los Angeles.

After accounting for 46% of the overall news coverage in February and March, coverage of the economic crisis dropped by more than half (to 21% of the news studied) from April through June.