Different media same day: “Some Laid-Off Women Now Stay-at-Home Moms” (MSNBC) and “As Economy Slips, New Mothers Cut Short Their Maternity Leave" (Wall Street Journal). I thought I’d wandered into an Onion parody. Which is it—are women being opted out or opted in?
Both stories are no doubt true—as descriptions of the experiences of some moms, somewhere. But that’s not how the pieces are framed. Instead they purport to describe a new “trend.” Trend stories are the slipperiest game in journalism. Journalists especially love to get breathless about supposed trends in women’s social roles, mixing up description and prescription, from the supposed marriage dearth peddled in the 1980s and debunked soon after by Susan Faludi to the “opt-out revolution” hyped by the New York Times’ Lisa Belkin in this century and debunked by Joan Williams in the American Prospect, among others. The New York Times’ trend stories are weirdest, warped as they are by the confluence of gender and class. Their m.o. is to pick some tiny slice of the East Coast’s ultra-privileged and take them as representative of the whole country.
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Bread (and roses), not circuses
Amazing fact: Forbes calculates profits of the big four sports (I guess that’s baseball, football, basketball, and tiddlywinks?) at $1.6 billion, but these industries receive taxpayer subsidies totaling more than $2 billion a year. That is, taxpayers provide the entire profits of sports. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
I’ve always had a deep resentment of sports analogies, the continued job security of sports writers even as investigative reporters become an endangered species, and sports films with “universal appeal,” not to mention taxpayer-funded stadiums. Why am I supposed to take overgrown boys’ games any more seriously than I would expect anyone to take pedicures, eye-brow-plucking technique, or the collection of Beanie Babies?
Now I know what I've always suspected: the whole sports business really is parasitism, pure and simple.
The above revelation comes from a terrific article in the current issue of Mother Jones laying out how we can get the economy back on track. Check it out.
Another fact to ponder in a different article in the same issue of MoJo: Tax cuts and credits for corporations and wealthy individuals have a negative return on investment—less than 37 cents on the dollar—while every dollar spent on food stamp benefits returns $1.73 to the economy. I’d like to see what the return on investment in childcare or paid family leave might be. Something tells me it’d be better than sports stadiums.
I’ve always had a deep resentment of sports analogies, the continued job security of sports writers even as investigative reporters become an endangered species, and sports films with “universal appeal,” not to mention taxpayer-funded stadiums. Why am I supposed to take overgrown boys’ games any more seriously than I would expect anyone to take pedicures, eye-brow-plucking technique, or the collection of Beanie Babies?
Now I know what I've always suspected: the whole sports business really is parasitism, pure and simple.
The above revelation comes from a terrific article in the current issue of Mother Jones laying out how we can get the economy back on track. Check it out.
Another fact to ponder in a different article in the same issue of MoJo: Tax cuts and credits for corporations and wealthy individuals have a negative return on investment—less than 37 cents on the dollar—while every dollar spent on food stamp benefits returns $1.73 to the economy. I’d like to see what the return on investment in childcare or paid family leave might be. Something tells me it’d be better than sports stadiums.
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