Inertia Wins!

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.