Are we afraid of the bright side?

There's a view in journalism that goes: 'bad news is news, good news isn't.' Even so, I think reporting of the economy has been too pessimistic. Not all experts have been gloomy, but those that weren't haven't been much heard.

But is there another factor in the preference for pessimism, namely fear? Fear, I mean, of criticism. If you are pessimistic but things turn out OK, ah, well, things turned out OK, so no one is too worried. If things turn out badly and you had kept an open mind, there's a fear of having appeared to treat bad prospects lightly, which looks like not just a poor reading of the economy but insensitivity - and no-one wants to be accused of that.

I once did a piece about the likelihood that the first Iraqi election would be carnage. We found someone who had analysed the insurgents' strength and concluded that they didn't have the muscle to wreck the election. Everyone else was talking up a bloodbath. We ran this minority view but, crikey, we sweated! Our report was hedged all over the place with disclaimers to indicate that it might be wrong; that it was just one voice etc. No report or analysis on the other side of the argument felt the need to say such things.

Even in arguing that I think the economy was reported too pessimistically, I can imagine accusations of being callous to the unemployed or anyone else who's struggling. In two recessions now, we've seen politicians - Norman Lamont in the 1990s, Baroness Vadera in the 2000s - say they could discern green shoots and then be shot to pieces for "insensitivity". Lamont turned out to be spot on. It looks as if Baroness Vadera might have been pretty close, too - though of course the economy is not in the clear yet.

Pessimism can produce bias, since bad news might suit some political interests and not others. In the case of the economy, my feeling that the pessimism was overdone was not because I felt hugely optimistic - or partisan - but mainly because I just didn't know, and didn't see how anyone else could know either, how things would turn out. The possibilities on the positive side, particularly for recovery, seemed at least as good as the negatives that so much journalism basked in, like a warm, soapy bath of undifferentiated misery.

That comment too risks the accusation that I am claiming all was rosy. Not at all. Simply that economies are melting pots of varied experience and expectations at all times - and journalists have much preferred the bad to the less bad.

Of course, optimism can produce bias, too. Again, my own view, for what it's worth, is that, while the gloom on the recession has been overdone, the government is getting off relatively lightly on the specific question of the origins and prospects for the deficit, which go back before the recession and will be the most stubborn cause of spending cuts or tax rises once the recession is over. So, even handed, I'd like to think. But this illustrates another point: that general pessimism can produce a lack of discrimination between what is, in my view, a genuinely nasty problem, and what we might have taken a more balanced view of.

One irritation was a BBC Radio 4 continuity announcement that began: "With everyone feeling the pinch nowadays ..." Everyone? With mortgages at rock bottom?

The temptation is to treat gloom as a variety of average, a kind of norm that applies equally wherever we look. But all averages conceal variation, both of opinion and fact. That goes for the rate of growth of GDP (not everyone experiences the same average rate of recession and some recessions can affect more people than others even on the same GDP fall), and for that other great, generalised source of journalistic gloom, debt.

This being so, it would be equally wrong to say that all journalism has been uniformly miserable. I've found some BBC commentary admirably level headed, and, on occasion, brilliant. But I think the balance has been wrong - on balance.

If there's any truth in all this, what can we, and should we, do about it?