Missing the Second Industrial Revolution

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It is an apparently conventional dispatch leading page one of The New York Times, yet to a critical eye it is an archetype of a core flaw in American media economic coverage.

"In a stunningly grim portrayal of the midsummer economy," the article by Robert D. Hershey Jr. begins, "government figures showed today that American business and industry lost 167,000 jobs in August as factory employment skidded to its lowest level since April 1983." The report, last Sept. 5, goes on to note that "manufacturing was particularly weak ... with losses appearing for 16 of the 20 industries specified." What's wrong? Hint: See a Washington Post story by Barbara Vobejda Aug. 18):

"To some, the numbers carry ominous signals--a dangerous slide in the, American industrial base--To others, they merely reflect what we should already know: that the economy is now undergoing a fundamental restructuring." She added that a government expert "attributed the decline in manufacturing jobs in part to significant gains in productivity, which have enabled employers to produce more goods with fewer workers."

The difference? The thrust in Hershey's long Times story appears to be a recession-causing lag in American manufacturing performance, the most severe since 1983. Vobejda, on the other hand, provides a crucial perspective on what the numbers really signify: another step in a painful, sometimes debilitating national transition from the smokestack era.

Lance Morrow, in Time on March 29, put it this way:

"In the terrible highland clearances of the 18th Century, thousands of Scots were driven from their farms so that landlords might turn the fields over to the mass grazing of sheep, a more efficient and profitable enterprise. The wool business prospered .... It was the end of a way of life .... A transformation that merciless and profound is occurring in the American workplace."

American media have periodically noted that transformation, in individual features, editorials, book reviews and TV …