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Follow the Dancing Dow: Who Is Business News For?
It's everywhere: Bloomberg, Reuters, 24-hour financial channels, fat newspaper sections, exponentially expanding business magazines and Web-investing markets. Dominating it all is an endless stream of numbers: the
Dow, the NASDAQ, the rise and fall of stock exchanges around the world. No longer just for brokers and CEOs, the tickers fill front-page stories and scroll across screens everywhere. But is this media obsession with stock markets answering the call of a world full of hungry investors, or is it dragging ill-informed dupes into a gambling scheme that merely serves the moneyed elite? Are the media just looking to provide an affluent
audience for advertisers while revealing their pro-corporate biases? Are reporters ignoring important issues for American workers, or are we truly witnessing a new participatory economy where everyone has the chance to
be Warren Buffett, global speculator extraordinaire? MediaChannel affiliates dissect the business and financial media; we present the debate.
- Aliza Dichter, "Taking Stock" editor.
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Modern Mythology
A mysterious force, potential world domination and the looming threat of collapse: It's the new Evil Empire. Where the Cold War and the devious Soviets used to dominate media coverage and the American consciousness, now, columnist Jared Kendall writes, the big story is the roller coaster of technology stocks. Only this time, we want them to take over the world — as long as we get our share. From wordarchive.com ltd, November 4 1999
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Hey, Ho, IPO!
"The old media adage of 'Sex sells,' " writes Salon technology correspondent Janelle Brown, "has been shoved aside by an even uglier '90s truth: money sells." The media blatantly ignore the reality that most people aren't actually being swept up in the golden tsunami of Silicon Valley, and the perhaps more poignant fact that not everyone
wants to be. Whereas coverage of the Internet used to be full of tales of dropout geeks inventing revolutionary technology in their garage, the main story now is how much those geeks are worth. From Salon.com, October 4 1999
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All In All, The Business Journalists Win
To Bill Saporito, senior editor at Time magazine, the abundance of business news has a solid market-based root: demand. Tracing the history of U.S. business coverage in the 20th century, Saporito tells of the business press from its first incarnation as cheery pro-industry promoter (right up to the 1929 crash), through a period of investigative
exposés in the 1960s, to starry-eyed coverage of celebrity CEOs and notorious financial wizards in the 1980s. Now, according to Saporito, the business media have found their true purpose as an information service for a citizenry empowered, mandated and eager to manage their own money.
From Columbia Journalism Review, March 1 1999
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Pied Pipers
Despite critics' claims of growing obsolescence, the Dow Jones Industrial Average may still be the most influential barometer of the U.S. and world economy. For all its power, the composition of "the Dow" — an index whose fluctuations command banner headlines — is entirely determined by two editors at The Wall Street Journal, as they confer over lunch. Kimberly Conniff reports for Brill's Content. From Brill's Content, January 2 2000
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How's the Economy? Ask Tony Soprano
While magazines and anchor-folk sing the glory of the NASDAQ and the Dow, TV shows tell the real story of the U.S. economy. The national zeitgeist is not the tale of the ticker but the reality that "work is becoming less secure, less enjoyable and less meaningful for Americans of all
classes and backgrounds," writes media critic Jon Katz. The miseries of the workplace make it into sitcoms. Why can't they make it into newsprint?
From Brill's Content, October 1 1999
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Do We Hate Our Workers?
According to the former communication director of the Teamsters Union, Matt Witt, not only do the news media ignore American workers, the entertainment media constantly satirize as them dumb, lazy, incompetent (Oh, Homer ... d'oh). For all the attention paid to elite arcana like large-cap funds and basis points, labor issues such as job safety and workers rights are conspicuously absent from the news. The media frenzy over a stock market in which only a minority of Americans invest just confirms: U.S. business press is only for a tiny fraction of the people. From The Black World Today, August 26 1999
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Taking Stock Of The Reporters
As the business media serve and inspire an ever-growing group of individual and first-time investors, should they take responsibility for actually explaining the markets and teaching good investment strategies? U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt says yes,
absolutely. Speaking to journalists at the Media Studies Center last year, Levitt warned of a "financial literacy crisis," and insisted that journalists covering the stock markets must "educate and not just titillate."
From Freedom Forum, April 27 1999
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Live, Love, Trade
Advertising has always equated personal happiness with consumption. But along with fulfillment, ads were usually selling products. Now, writes Media Beat columnist Norman Solomon, the route to spiritual satisfaction
is the marketplace itself, without the merchandise to bog you down. According to the multimillion dollar ad blitzes saturating the media, online stock trading is the key to "believing in yourself." But, warns Solomon, believing the hype can have dangerous consequences.
From Z Magazine/ZNet, January 12 1999
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Whose Business Is It?
The ticker numbers go up and down, international economies boom and bust — but the one market consistently swelling is the one for business news. Why? Because, writes Matt Welsh, former managing editor of the Budapest Business Journal, the media court advertisers, and the advertisers court stock-owning, well-compensated consumers. But what's good news for that elite is not always good for the rest of us. Besides alienating people who aren't fluent in marketspeak, this pro-business
bias means, for most people, that the media "are actually rooting for your life to get worse."
From wordarchive.com ltd, August 14 1998
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AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE
MEDIA.
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