In recent years, many newspapers, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Orlando Sentinel (to name just a few) have been scaling back on their daily stock listings. While everybody is in the trimming mood, there’s one more age-old staple we’d like to see exorcised from the business pages — that is, the daily market round-up story, the one purporting to explain the latest fluctuation in the marketplace vis-à-vis the collective mood of the world’s investors.
The daily market round-up story has never been a particularly deep genre — (market up on optimism about the economy! Market down on pessimism about the economy!). Yet for decades, every morning, newspaper readers have been served up the latest helping of this dish, which inevitably offers all the nuance, depth, and nutritional value of a pan-fried flapjack.
The advent of the Internet has only made the situation worse. What had been a shallow once-a-day affair has now turned into an all-day distraction, with business editors racing to explain every dip and flip and blip in the market.
Over the course of a single day, as we’ve noted before, that approach can add up to contradictory stories.
Over the course of a week or a month, it can add up to a huge waste of time for reporters and readers.
To wit: Last week, with the market falling, news outlets were busy tossing up story after story, headline after headline, attributing the downturn to anxiety over inflation.
CBS News: “Inflation Spurs Wall Street Fears.”
Reuters: “U.S. Stocks Fall, Bonds Rally as Inflation Eyed.”
International Herald Tribune: “Angst over U.S. Inflation Clips Revival of Stocks Worldwide.”
Wall Street Journal: “Stocks Get the Inflation Shakes.”
New York Times: “Inflation Rising, Markets Tumble.”
It all sounds pretty grim. But today, the market is up.
So what’s happened to the inflation worries? Poof. The worries are gone.
“Stocks rose Thursday after the government’s latest measure of first-quarter growth showed the economy grew at a solid pace at the start of the year — but not so hot as to spark fears about inflation,” the Wall Street Journal reported this morning.
No doubt in the coming minutes, hours and days, business editors will roll out another wave of market round-up stories, attributing the upturn in the market to a downturn in concern about inflation.
That is, until the market dips again. At which point, the concerns will flare up again. And on, and on. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam.
Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.