Monetary machinations and media sorcery.

I was browsing through the tv listings at tv.yahoo.com and came across an advertisement that claimed that The Wall Street Journal reported the end of Walmart. Since the ad was a graphic image and not actual text I figured it was bogus, so I thought I would check it at wallstreetjournal.com. When I got there it was a page that requires a user to subscribe for a fee.

I almost considered paying for a subscription to The Wall Street Journal, but I was reminded of my experience taking economics and accounting in college. The books were old, and I was taking economics and accounting in the spring of 2008, during the worst recession since the great depression. What part of ironic is missing from that? If enough people who studied economics and accounting actually got the correct information, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

So I wondered how many people read The Wall Street Journal. They appear to be the authority on financial news. The publication has been around since 1889 and has a reputed circulation of 2.1 million copies and nearly half a million online subscribers. So, why are we in a huge recession?

Wait a minute. The subscriptions and circulation don’t cover the entire population of the United States, around 307 million people. So now the question is this: Did everyone who subscribed to The Wall Street Journal come through the recession smelling like roses? How many people who took college economics and accounting survived the recession?

Every day I opened my books I wondered if the information I was learning was any good at all because of the recession. Now that I thought about it for a while, those who participated in the marketplace deserve all the credit for the recession. Two million or so people out of three hundred million read The Wall Street Journal, and very few people are studying for their MBA degrees. I imagine that they weathered the recession very well indeed, but businesses failed, so there are those among the financial experts who know something more than just the old economics and accounting textbooks.

I studied communication too, so I recognize that certain information is for public consumption, and other information is deliberately convoluted. Should you get all your investing ideas from watching CNBC or reading the Wall Street Journal, or should you go to the trouble of looking up a company’s annual or quarterly financial report using EDGAR at www.sec.gov?

I figure most people regard the mass media with such validity and credibility that they don’t question the sources and dig themselves a recession, while others analyze the mass media to predict the behavior of the public reaction to it for financial gain.

Such examples of public behavior to media would be the “Oprah Effect.” [http://www.cnbc.com/id/29961298/ ] Oprah Winfrey one day might mention a product and the next day the person who created it could be a millionaire. That example is one of the clearest. Another example is the recent jobs report put out by the White House on Friday that showed most of the recently created jobs were temporary census workers. That information combined with the BP oil spill and Hungary being added to the growing list of European countries in financial trouble, caused a massive sell-off of stocks in Wall Street, which in turn dragged down the stock market.

Monday, some traders on Wall Street will swoop in like vultures to buy up stocks that suddenly became cheap, causing the market to go up, but less. The trend from February through April was a steady increase in stock values, but ever since, the industrial averages are stepping down. Two steps down, then one step up. Some bit of information keeps changing the game week to week.

To find out what happened I went to Google Finance and looked at the index timeline. [http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI,INDEXSP:.INX,INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC ] Google saw fit to place news releases along the timeline and one source that looked appealing was found at Bloomberg.com published April 28, 2010 ” S&P 500 May Drop After ‘Ultimate Squeeze’: Technical Analysis”. [http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-28/s-p-500-may-drop-after-ultimate-squeeze-technical-analysis.html ] The headline itself predicted the current trend, and it doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon.
The uptrend appears to result from slightly improving earnings reports, while the downtrend follows news from Europe, employment numbers, or some other news related to government, like new regulatory legislation in the works.

One might think that the stock market is punishing the country for having elected a Democrat President of the United States. Either that or deregulation throughout the eight years of the Bush administration is meeting its karma in the form of bank failures, financial bailouts, E-coli and Salmonella outbreaks, coalmine and oil rig explosions, lead and cadmium in consumer products, and who knows what else lurks on the horizon. Either way, the layoffs started soon after the election of Barack Obama.

When I look at a news story, I wonder it was published literally for its own value, or intended to move the public or some audience to a certain action. Real stories about events concerning individuals aside, news about trends, numbers, or groups of people have the potential to be falsified or distorted to motivate the public.