I’m now in my seventh day of not watching the TV news. And I feel great.
It started last Monday, 3/9/09, after watching the early morning CNBC interviews with Warren Buffett. Warren said a lot of things about the economy, some good and some not so good. But the best thing that he said was that the economy would be “fine” in five years. Okay. Five years is a long time to wait. But if Buffet is clairvoyant (sometimes he is and sometimes not so much), then if the economy would be “fine” in five years, we should be starting to pull out of this mess within the not too distant future.
Now, Buffett isn’t a sage. He doesn’t have a crystal ball, but he is a solid, no-nonsense businessman with a more than demonstrated ability to pick winners. He’s one of the “wise ones” that people look to when clarity is needed. And he doesn’t disappoint. So you think the news would jump onto his words of wisdom like linebackers on a fumble. Nope.
All day on Monday, all the headlines I saw in reference to the Buffett interviews were downers. All the headlines picked out the negatives about which Buffett spoke. If it bleeds, it leads. Not one of those headlines mentioned Buffett’s prediction about the economy being fine in five years. That’s when I said to myself that I’ve had enough of the mainstream media, specifically the TV “news.”
It isn’t really “news.” It’s more like a choreographed drama. More reality “show” than objective reporting, actually. But it figures. Because humans are more able to relate to a continuing story, like a drama, than just an endless stream of facts. News organizations are businesses and need to sell ads. Drama draws eyeballs. Endless streams of facts usually don’t.
The mainstream media have been talking up this recession since early in 2008, and back then I said to many colleagues that the mainstream media want a recession, so that’s what we’ll have. Voila. I saw this coming, but I’ll admit I didn’t think that it would go as deep as it already has.
In a society that’s as continually connected as ours, both online and offline, when a meme is propagated, it’s believed. True or not. The self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s too bad. It doesn’t have to be this way. If at least 10% of the American population would stop watching the TV news for, oh, about three months, we would probably see the economy start to turn around.
I’ll be doing my part.
How about you?
