Amity Shlaes, She Ain't

Late last year, Virginia Postrel spotted several journalists with the hots for “Depression Porn”, as she dubbed it. Add Katie Couric to the list:

On Monday, [Couric] launched a new “Children of the Recession” series, in collaboration with USA Today, with an op-ed in “the nation’s newspaper” in which she speculated today’s kids may become the “Recession Generation” since “in some ways, I think they already are,” or the “innocent victims could become the Lost Generation.”

Then, on Monday’s CBS Evening News, she portrayed America as in such a bad way that it reminded her of the Great Depression, asserting the impact of the recession “may be” to children “what the depression was to an earlier generation.” In a story on the “Safe Families for Children” program that helps overwhelmed families hand their kids temporarily to other families, Couric raised the most ominous comparison: “Volunteer families stepping in during tough times is reminiscent of the Great Depression when parents in dire straits sent their children to live with relatives or other people in the community.”

Of course, a “journalist” who didn’t bat an eye when Joe Biden mentioned President Roosevelt going on television in 1929 to comfort Americans when the stock market crashed isn’t exactly the most qualified source to reminisce about the Great Depression…

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