Getting the business treatment

Howard Bernstein, a former TV producer, blogs about the problems with business journalism and what he would do to improve its performance.

Bernstein writes, “My first proposal is that it should be against the law to name any stock or other financial product as something that the public should buy or sell. The practice is far to open to manipulation. Just as an example: CNBC says Amalgamated Baloney is a good buy. The suckers go out and buy up the shares driving the prices up. The guy at CNBC sells his shares at the inflated price. The suckers are left holding the worthless bag when the prices fall back to what they are really worth. Has something like this happened? I bet it has. Can anyone prove it hasn’t? In any case why allow a practice that is so open to manipulation and fraud. Ban the touts and the touting.

“It is an old joke that if you ask 100 economists where the economy is going you get 100 different answers. If the so-called pros can’t agree, it should therefore be illegal for TV hosts and pundits to predict where the economies and markets of the world are going. There is far too much money being bet on the apparent expertise of these hosts and pundits. I say the business media should get out of the prediction game and report the facts, the facts that can be proven to be true, just like the rest of the journalists are forced to do. If you cannot prove it, you cannot report it. Finished. The end.

“Finally, I think it’s time to remove business news, as a sub-heading, in mainstream news. Most people don’t care about the markets or the economic minutia. They want to know where their next pay cheque is coming from and what bread and milk are going to cost tomorrow. If something happens in the economy or the markets that is newsworthy it should have to compete with the political news, the murders and the car accidents for air time. When Chrysler adds jobs in Oshawa, that’s a story. The unemployment figures and the budget are stories. The markets jumping or diving 150 points, that’s a story. But when Honda announces a dividend or the stock market climbs 0.2 percent what the heck is that doing on our TV newscasts and in our major newspapers?”

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