Biz media overplaying Facebook IPO

Jerry Lanson, a journalism professor at Emerson College, writes for The Huffington Post that the business news media is devoting too much coverage to Facebook’s initial public offering.

Lanson writes, “Facebook’s public offering is everywhere — on the web, on the radio, on TV. Does the public really care as much as the press seems to want it to?

“‘Facebook’s initial public offering will be the largest and perhaps the most highly anticipated Internet deal in history,’ wrote CNBC in a piece reprinted in the Christian Science Monitor.

“As I write, a corner of that deal is the lead story on Huffington Post Business and No. 2 on the site’s homepage (‘General Motors Says Facebook Ads Ineffective, Pulls Campaign from the Site…’). It was the subject of a long segment on NPR’s Takeway Tuesday morning. An Associated Press-CNBC poll even asked members of the general public for their views (more than half reportedly believe the company is overvalued) — a poll, by the way, quickly picked up by The Washington Post and Time, among others.

“Don’t AP and CNBC have any better way of spending their money than asking the public what it thinks of an IPO? Isn’t there a lot more important news out there? Does anyone recall that there’s still a war going on in Afghanistan (not to mention Syria)? That student loans have climbed above $1 trillion? That JP Morgan Chase & Co. just squandered $2 billion in bad trades? That the economic foundations of Europe are crumbling? That the United States market is dropping at a steady pace?”

Read more here.