So says the italicized, boldfaced, bright red headline on the Drudge Report. All that’s missing is the little siren graphic.
What the sensationalized headline doesn’t mention is that the price of oil was below $138 from the beginning of time until a few weeks ago. Doesn’t seem like much of a plunge in that context.
Posted in Media
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a hyperbolic article entitled “Milwaukee lags behind on parks spending.”
Call me crazy, but shouldn’t the quality of the parks be judged by their actual quality, and not by how much money is spent on them?
Reuters reports that jobless claims are at a four-year high. Everybody panic!
Wait a minute, hold on. Context, please. Just how were things back in 2004, the last time jobless claims were this high? It turns out GDP grew by 3.1%. The economy also added 1.989 million net jobs that year. I’ll take numbers like that any day.
Reuters suffers from pessimistic bias, like most media outlets. They assume that the current jump in jobless claims is de facto evidence that the economy is in free-fall. Fortunately for all of us, that claim doesn’t hold up against the data.
There’s a woman in New York who is claiming that bedbug bites have given her post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m not kidding.
She is suing her former employer for a pretty penny; the infestation was in their offices. How appropriate that the employer in question is a media outlet, Fox News.
Fox, and other outlets, have reported uncritically on all kinds of hypochondria and frivolous lawsuits for years. Now Fox gets to taste some of its own medicine.
Posted in General Foolishness, Media
One of CNN’s top stories is “Indiana Jones movie upsets communists.”
Posted in General Foolishness, Media
You know it’s a slow news day when pointless articles appear in prominent places in major newspapers, filling what is probably better left as empty space.
Today, the NY Times asks, “Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?“
Short answer: No. They are both, in fact, people. They only seem like computers.
Posted in Elections, Media, Political Animals
CNN.com has a scary homepage story today entitled Stock Selloff Deepens.
The headline is misleading. One cannot sell something without a buyer. The headline could just as easily read read “Stock Buyup Deepens,” but that would also be misleading. It should simply note that trading volume is above average today. And despite a 415 point drop, the Dow is still over 12,000, not too far from its record high.
My hunch is that the story’s ominous tone is intentional, even though it is false. A scare-prone investor would be more likely to click on the story if it forecasts impending doom than if it said, “everything’s fine, nothing to see here.”
One could take an anti-corporate stance here. CNN, after all, is trumping up a non-story and scaring people for no reason other than to boost their traffic – and their ad revenues.
Such a stance is too shallow to be correct, though. Going a level deeper, the blame here lies on the human condition itself. As a survival mechanism, people pay attention to things they perceive to be threatening, and they tend to ignore non-threats.
Add to this Say’s Law, which in simplified form, says that where there is a demand, someone will supply it. CNN sees demand for doom-and-gloom, and caters to it. A company that did not do this would go out of business. Natural selection processes would ensure that mostly doom-and-gloom news is supplied, since there is less demand for sunshine and happiness.
The real world, which is neither all doom nor all sunshine, is given short shrift.
In other words, I’m afraid we’re doomed to lousy news coverage forever. And this is just one reason why I don’t watch cable news.
I’m sure this Human Nature + Say’s Law + Darwin framework could be applied to other areas, but I’ll save that for another time.
Posted in Economics, Media, Philosophy
