A story in The Washington Post yesterday contained some survey data that bolster an argument the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute (BMI) has made for years now: the media's negativism on the economy has a strong influence on the public:

Here's what I posted over at BusinessandMedia.org:

The paper sponsored “a survey-based experiment” of “more than 2,500 online respondents” who were “shown a brief news clip before being asked to reply to a series of questions.” The views of respondents on their personal economic well-being were wildly different between survey-takers shown a story on gas prices and respondents shown a story on job growth.

Asked “would you say that you and your family are better off, worse off, or just about the same financially as you were a year ago,” 42 percent of the group that saw the gas price story said “worse off,” while only 29 percent of the group that saw a story on job creation answered that way.