No pity for media 'victims' of stock crash. (Commentary).

LAST month the Wall Street Journal sent out a team of reporters to find victims of the stock market crash. Here are the five people they flushed out into the open for their readers to contemplate:

* Leonard Bentley, who had dreamt of retiring since he was 25, and who, in his mid-fifties, in the middle of the boom, actually had retired. The crash has persuaded him to put a trip to Alaska on hold, and to reconsider his interest in renovating old cars. His bankroll has shrunk to $570,000 from $725,000.

* Steve Archer, age 45, who, during the boom, quit his job as some sort of airline consultant to become a day trader. Sure enough, he became rich flipping tech stocks. In the past two years, he has seen his portfolio shrink alarmingly. He still drives his $85,000 Porsche and owns his house near the beach. But he no longer has a million dollars in the bank.

* Robert Yang, a 23-year-old who was hired and fired by Credit Suisse First Boston in the space of eight months. He has been embarrassed, he says. He has taken a new job in real estate lending at a major insurance company that pays less than the $55,000-plus-bonus CSFB had promised him.

* Larry Graening, a 60-year-old owner of an Iowa manufacturing company called GMT Corp. that is on pace for $50 million in revenue this year. In the past two years, he's laid off 60 people. Though clearly still well-to-do, and possibly even rich, he's been worried that he might have to sell off a piece of his business to an outside investor. This troubles him.

* Richard Breining, a Morgan Stanley broker who has been forced to stop getting a new car every time his lease expires. He's also making fewer trips to his summer home, and decided not to send his kids to an expensive summer camp.

There have been so many stories of this type in the news lately that it is unfair to pick on the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes you need to be unfair. It's too much trouble to go digging up all the other stories in the business press that turn an essentially comic situation into tragedy.

Far from tragic

For whatever else the Journal's victims are, they are not tragic figures. Each might honestly summarize his peculiar plight with an absurd sentence: many of the truly incredible number of dollars that landed on me during the stock market boom have vanished, and it's just not fair. The Journal did not play it that way, of course. It offered these people up as examples of the real pain caused by the crash.

No doubt there is real pain out there in America. In any free market, there is suffering. Most of it is done by people you don't typically read about in the Wall Street Journal. (The people Graening laid off, for instance, might well be suffering.) But hardly anyone who didn't deserve what they got is suffering directly from the current stock market crash.

The loudest noise in American life right now is not the shrieks of people actually in pain. It's the sound of a guilty prisoner dragged in for interrogation who, fearing he might be slapped around a bit and hoping to avoid it, squeals before anyone has laid a finger on him.

This tendency to view inherently comic situations as tragic is partly a result of the way high-concept journalism gets made by serious-minded editors sitting around a table rather than by the reporters on the ground who do the actual work. It proceeds from the general to the specific, rather than the other way around.

The editors see the stock market plummet and they think, or hope, they are covering the Great Depression. And so they pick up the phone and order some poor reporter to beat the bushes for victims of a depression. The reporters take the premise and do with it the best they can. If that means casting as a tragic figure a man struggling with the possibility he will have to sell his $85,000 Porsche, so be it.

But nothing is ever entirely the fault of the media. The media just feeds people what it thinks they want to hear, and it is usually right. The stock market has crashed, just as it crashed before. But this crash hasn't sent masses of destitute people out of dust bowls and onto the streets, or caused great migrations of unemployed workers.

Back to work

We haven't gone from being prosperous to being poor. We've all lost a lot of money we didn't actually have to work for. In doing so, we've gone from being obscenely rich, by our own high standards, to being merely prosperous. That's hardly a pleasant feeling, but it isn't the end of the world either.

Forced to summarize the real cost of their personal stock market tragedies, the Journal's victims might say something like this: I won't be able to retire early, and I can no longer spend as much money as I want.

Myself, I've never understood this fetish people make of early retirement. Retirement has always struck me as something to be avoided. People are meant to work; work helps to give purpose to life. Golf does too, I suppose, but not nearly so honestly.

It's not mentally healthy, when you are 25 years old, to be dreaming of retiring. If the stock market crash means that people who were planning on ceasing all productive labor at 40 will have to work until they are 65, well, then this crash has probably added years and meaning to American lives.

Michael Lewis, a columnist with Bloomberg News, is author of "Next: The Future Just Happened" and "Liar's Poker."