How much is media influencing the market?

Ben Steverman of BusinessWeek writes Wednesday about the influence the media plays in what happens in the stock market.

Steverman writes, “Downbeat headlines and bearish market analysis in major financial publications—including BusinessWeek—have offered readers plenty of pessimism in the past couple of months as well. The media frenzy has reached a point where CNNMoney.com advises its readers, for the sake of their sanity, to ‘Turn off CNBC.’

“Yet despite plenty of gloomy headlines and panicked talking heads, Richard Sparks of Schaeffer’s Investment Research doesn’t think the media are adding unnecessary fear to the market. ‘The facts themselves are scary enough,’ he says. It’s a historic crisis, ‘and it hasn’t needed any embellishment from the media,’ he says.

“Still, the media can contribute to ‘huge swings in optimism and pessimism by investors,’ says Christopher Smith of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. When conditions look good, analysts on TV are often ‘excessively optimistic,’ he says. ‘When things go sour, they outdo each other telling people how bad things could get.'”

Read more here.Â