Is that not the whole point of the argument, The media underplays / overplays the situation, we all follow the merry go round.
When the media underplayed the situation a year ago we still felt pretty good and had x amount of pounds in our pockets, now the media are possibly overreacting, we feel bad but still have the same x amount of pounds in our pockets.
Lincoln was right, you can't fool all of the people all of the time but you only need to fool some of the people some of the time to succeed!