Bad News Sells More Newspapers - Even the Wall Street Journal!
Posted by: Gary Alexander on 1/27/2011
When I haul each day's mail up our long gravel driveway after my daily walk, my wife greets me at the door with, "What do they want us to worry about today?" I open our Wall Street Journal and give her the fear word of the day. On Tuesday, it was Terrorism. On Monday it was Inflation.
The page-1 above-the-fold headline in Monday's Wall Street Journal was: "Global Price Fears Mount: As Food, Raw Materials Soar, Europe's Central Bank Head Warns on Inflation." On his way to Davos, ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet warned of rising inflation in the euro-zone and in "fast-growing markets, such as China and Brazil." But let's take a closer look at the facts.
The Journal's page one chart on Monday showed consumer prices rising over the last year by 5.9% in Brazil, 4.5% in China, 2.1% in the euro-zone and 1.6% in the U.S. The chart did not show that U.S. inflation in 2010 was at its lowest level since 1957, or that Brazil used to wrestle with triple-digit inflation. Moreover, the central banks in Brazil and China have intervened early and often. China's inflation moderated last month, due to Beijing's bank reserve requirement increases, and Brazil is energetically fighting inflation by raising its key interest rate to 11.25%!
Wise old Calvin Coolidge once said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." So, just for fun, I looked up the Journal's top headlines of a year ago, when the Dow was in the midst of a 660-point (-7%) drop, based on fears of (1) reduced corporate earnings (laughably false), (2) Chinese economic policy (what else is new?) and (3) the fear that Ben Bernanke might NOT get confirmed to a second term as Fed Chairman. P.S. Bernanke won confirmation and the market resumed its recovery, despite a 3.5% decline in January 2010 - putting a lie to the "January indicator" once again.
It's a daily battle to overcome the army of fear-mongers in the media. I can turn off my TV, but I must read the Journal each day as part of my job, so I can't escape Rupert Murdoch's bias for fear (for four straight days, January 10-13, Jared Loughner's twisted personal life was the lead story in the WSJ). There's no rest on weekends, either: In last weekend's WSJ "Review" section, which I read religiously, there was a two-page debate on the Hobbesian choice: "Does Helping the Planet Hurt the Poor?" Bio-ethicist Peter Singer called for the West to make further sacrifices, while the scientist Bjorn Lomborg said that industrialization has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Pessimism Pays...Cynicism Sells …"If it Bleeds, It Leads"
There's a saying in TV news: "If it bleeds, it leads." The lead story, the first image, is invariably some hurting human I don't know. That's why I don't watch TV News. Local newspapers are no better, and national papers like the Journal (thanks to Rupert Murdoch) have followed this proven formula: Bad News Sells. For decades, I made a good living writing these worst-case scenarios. My first job in journalism was for a nationally-known radio commentator who asked me to take all the negative trends in society in the late 1960s and extrapolate the numbers to find out when "the world would end" (his term). The figure I came up with is 1975. P.S. The world didn't end.
At the time, I wasn't alone. Scientists at MIT were undertaking the same studies, published in 1972 as "Limits to Growth," while other well-known scientists (like Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown and the Paddock brothers) were publishing warnings of the coming famine, with titles like "The Population Bomb" and "Famine 1975," published during the height of the Green Revolution.
I've just finished reading a great new book by Matt Ridley, "The Rational Optimist." He was kind enough to quote me on page 295: "Apocaholics (the word is Gary Alexander's - he calls himself a recovering apocaholic) exploit and profit from the natural pessimism of human nature, the innate reactionary in every person. For 200 years pessimists have had all the headlines, even though optimists have far more often been right. Arch-pessimists are feted, showered with honours and rarely challenged, let alone confronted with their past mistakes." How true: Paul Ehrlich's popular but failed population predictions earned him a MacArthur "genius award."
"I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage."- John Stuart Mill
In his book, Ridley cites several chilling quotes from best-selling doomsday books going back to the 1890s, when Max Nordau's best-seller, "Degeneration," said we were all "in the midst of an epidemic, a sort of Black Death of degeneration." Oswald Spengler's influential "Decline of the West" (1923) said that "Optimism is cowardice." Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1962) is still studied as a classic but she was 100% wrong in saying DDT would cause "practically 100% of the human population to be wiped out from a cancer epidemic in one generation." Instead, DDT stopped malaria and typhus epidemics, saving perhaps 500 million lives from 1950 to 1970, but then allowing an even greater death toll to strike when do-gooders banned DDT in poor countries.
Examine any airport bookstore and you will find the lead "non-fiction" display including gloomy titles by Lester Brown, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Al Gore and Michael Moore. They belong in the fiction section, but their popularity underlines our inner desire to believe the worst about the world while, ironically, most of us feel good about our own life in our own community.
One more quote: "On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" - Thomas Babington Macauley
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