David Cay Johnston, the former New York Times busienss reporter, writes on The New Republic Web site that some recent media coverage of the markets borders on instilling fear in consumers.
“My first thought when scanning the nightly news programs was that this was just another example of how journalists, broadly speaking, are innumerate and so errors pop up when it comes to numbers. But the subsequent words in the ABC and NBC reports made it clear that someone on the writing and producing staff knew just what they were doing. This was not an error; this was fear mongering.
“Williams, for example, reported in the first story segment that ‘stocks fell off a cliff, the largest single point drop in history.’ If someone knew enough to write ‘point drop,’ and later the correspondent Tom Costello used the right measure–the percentage drop–it suggests the writer of Williams’ intro was more interested in hype than sober facts.”
Read more here.
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