Two leading news agencies spun different headlines form the same report.
AP:
Bernanke: Recession may end in '09; Stocks climb

Rueters:
Bernanke fears recession could extend to 2010

 

We live in a risk averse society and we find it harder to assess and interpret risk... journalists are no different in sharing their interpretation.

 

I thought it had more to do with being swayed by preconceived notions.

 

Monkey see, monkey do.

 

Thats journalism :excited:

 

May = may not

could = may not

The glass is half ____

 

Headline writers are in a category all by themselves, and headlines generally have very little to do with what the story actually says.

The question is, why do stocks respond, one way or another, to what Ben Bernanke says??

 

True about the headline writers, but is still is a negative spin.

Maybe the investors trust him more than they do Congress.

 

I am not at ALL confused by the nudes....


Sometimes I am a bit flustered and my pants get pretty tight and uncomfortable, but I'm not CONFUSED...


huh? What???


oh. NEWS.............never mind.......

 

Not funny...

 

You are very right.

 

Tenguy I guess I'm confused by your op.

When I click on the first link I get.

Stocks jump after Bernanke says recession may end

http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20090224/Wall.Street/

When I click on the second link I get:

Bernanke says recession to linger


http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20090224/NEWS-US-USA-FED-BERNANKE/

I don't think you should blame Rueters and the AP for two stories comcast cherry picked and wrote headlines for. The only thing obvious to me is that these stories were aimed at different readers and both act as cheerleaders for the stockmarket.

 

My favorite college text was called, "How to Lie with Statistics." News reporting is like statistics. If 20 people were killed in the crash of a plane with 120 passengers, it Can be reported as "Gruesome air crash kills 20!" or it can be reported "There were only 20 fatalities in a crash that involved 125 passengers and crew." The former is a terrible tragedy; the latter a tale of luck and rescue.

 

An instructive example.

 

They trust him the way a herd of cattle trusts a rattlesnake.

 

You mean like this. Let's say my hometown is Winterland and the neighboring town is Riverside and they are 20 miles apart. When a terrible accident or crime occurred it happened 18 miles east of Riverside. But when a record crop came in or someone did something great they lived 18 miles west of Winterland.

 

o hai!
the only thing that confuses me is fearing fear itself, but that's not news.
kthanxbai!

 

Some news need the shock appeal but others dont its that simple fact.

 

Hey wait a minute tenguy. This stuff isn't news. Its a damned propaganda machine.

Now, I got to thinking about the stories you put up and the headlines and figured there were a lot of possible explanations. One could be deliberate spin on the part of AP and/or Rueters. But there were some other possibilities. One is Ben Bernanke could have been telling two different stories depending on who he was talking to. That would be a really important thing to know.

Another possibility is maybe he was saying the same thing but the two different news agencies were deciding what they thought was most important to emphasize.

And the other possibility was that Comcast was just cherry picking things and spinning the headlines depending on their audiences.

So I decided to check out the stories and see where the real differences were. But guess what I can't because even though I clicked on the same to links you provided in one case a got a whole different story. And that is downright shady.

As I'm sure you are aware I've got plenty of grips with the US mainstream media. I'm also fully aware of how spin doctoring is a staple of the MSM. But that being said I don't see many of the glaring examples that you pointed out.

And in this case it turns out not to be the AP or Rueters that's playing games here. Its Comcast who are trying to sell its readers on a preconceived agenda which is all their own. So while certainly we all need to be cautious when we read and hear stories, apply critical thinking and use a bunch or different sources to make sure we're getting the truth, we also need to be aware that some news sources can't be trusted at all and Comcast sure appears to be one of them.

 

I saw a report a while back, talking about the response in monkey troops when scientists played the cries of predators over loud speakers. Some would stand and try to fight the threat, some would run for the nearest shelter in a blind panic, and some would just keel over, hoping not to get noticed in the chaos. It didn't matter the stimulus wasn't real, they thought it actually meant something, and reacted off of instinct.

Bernie is a lot like those predator recordings, I imagine. And the brokers just prove that we're not quite as distantly related from apes as we'd like to imagine.