Economic doom and gloom - is the media partly to blame?

Credit crunch. Corporate failures. Thousands dumped onto the dole queue.

Everywhere you look at the moment it's economic Armageddon.

But to what extent has my own profession been complicit in the cloudy outlook? There's certainly been talk of the economy being made worse by a media voracious for bad news.

Listening to the radio the other day, I heard Radio 5 Live's Nicky Campbell cover this very point in his usual insightful manner. Then he proceeded to talk about how bad everything was, both here and in the US.

Loath as I am to admit it — after all, it doesn't do my grumpy cynical hack image any good to own up to this sort of thing — even I've tired a tad recently of seeing newspapers and TV news bulletins stacked high with bad news.

But I am part of the media machine. And we report the licensed sector as we see it.

If there's good stuff going on out there, you can betcha-by-golly-wow it'll get coverage. But at the moment there's little that lends itself to such positive exposure.

Yes, people are still making money in pubs and in some parts of the brewing game. But few if any are immune to what's going on in the economy, and what's going on in the economy is forcing people to batten down the hatches like Dorothy's family in The Wizard of Oz. Sort of.

Understandably few will own up to specific problems in their respective businesses. But things are clearly getting a lot, lot tougher. One chief executive I spoke to recently said even his "good people" were starting to suffer. The presence of keen business acumen becomes indispensable in such times as these.

But it's not enough, in many cases. With pub income levels under greater pressure than ever the relationship 'twixt licensee and pub owners has to become more… fulsome.