Perspective - Kanniks

I do care about what happens in the world. I do not like to be cocooned in a bag or live in a well like a frog.

I like the newsmedia as it lets me know what is going on in the world.

But does the newsmedia want to keep me informed of what is going on or does it want to keep me at the edge of my seats all the time?

This morning when I opened MSNBC’s website, there was a ‘Breaking News’ alert on the top, on a read band that read ‘Bush says Econonomy has serious issues”.

Oh my God! So what has happened that msnbc has reported it as a hight ticket breaking news! That too in Red!

It turned out that later when they updated their site, all that had happened was that Bush had made a speech in Kansas to push his economic relief package through the congress and this was a rhetoric to emphasize his point.

Now, there are some serious issues here. There are issues with the economy, I agree. There are greater issues with the way in which it is interpreted.

The president uses his bully pulpit to create rhetoric of any kind. In his first term, it was optimistic rhetoric. Now, it is at the other end. It wasnt too long before economic woes had been underplayed by the Whitehouse. Now, when  President who paints a rosy picture of his accomplishments, how are people going to react to it?

The second problem is with the media. Over the last few weeks I have been reading news items that report the slightest fluctuations in job data or in housing data.

Come on. Can the housing market grow for ever? There have been plateaus, even dips in the past. We are just going through one of those; one that has resulted from foolish lending practices, without any broad vision of the future.

Why does the media have to keep predicting a doomsday?

The strong hype that the media puts out is going to be a greater threat to the economy.

It always has to be sensational. It is either the media. Or it is Obama’s sensational victory in Iowa. Or Hillary’s comeback in New Hampshier. The hype is even comparable to the level of excitement that prevailed in a presidential election in 1996. And this is only a primary. But, the media wants to maintain this level of sensation.

In this day and age when there is an overabundance of information, there is ample scope for creating news and news headlines out of mere pieces of statistics. As the old cliched phrase goes, there is always the truth, the lies and the statistics. It behooves the media to behave responsibly in deciding what is a piece of breaking news and what is not.