News swings with the stock market

Joanne Ostrow of the Denver Post writes Sunday about stock market coverage on television.

Ostrow writes, “CNBC’s Jim Cramer, hyper host of ‘Mad Money​,’ put it succinctly (accompanied by dire sound effects): ‘Whenever we hear 600-point decline . . . you can’t help but be scared to death.’ For parallels, he examined the 1987 crash which was ‘hard to understand, like now.’ Not that we get it more than before, but he’s entertaining. His message: Stay the course.

“On Bloomberg, the analysts can’t see any bottom yet. The debate is whether we’re in a recession already, or merely sliding that way. And guess who comes out smelling like a rose in a quarterly revenue report? News Corp.! The Murdochs shrugged off the hacking scandal — in terms of money, if not reputation. Meanwhile, Apple surpasses Exxon as the biggest stock in the world. That we can understand.

“The network is full of talk about the QE2, the Fed’s second round of ‘quantitative easing.’ Don’t ask. Does all this teach us anything meaningful about how the global economy works? Bloomberg assumes a certain level of sophistication. That is, you have to know the economic history of Japan to make sense of the analysis. What we got out of it: It’s bad, but maybe not as bad as it sounded at the beginning of the crisis.

“Fox Business explained how it took nine years for a government to crawl back from a AAA rating downgrade the last time it happened, saying emotional trading is a losing game that can cost big money over time. This isn’t your grandfather’s stock market, we learned; it’s run by unemotional computers. The takeaway: Don’t panic.”

Read more here.