When the Dow is up, news is down
You might think that when the Dow Jones Industrial Average is climbing, news coverage would increase too. But that's not what a study found from the Pew Center's Project for Excellence In Journalism.
Chart showing economy coverage vs. performance of the Dow. (Project for Excellence in Journalism)
More on Wall Street
Links
- Covering the Great Recession
Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism
TEXT OF STORY
KAI RYSSDAL: This final note today -- and it's got graphs and charts, so it's a tricky one to do on the radio but here goes:
The Pew Center's Project for Excellence In Journalism came out with a new study the other day called "Covering the Great Recession." The chart that really hit me when I saw it this morning plotted the Dow Jones Industrial Average against the amount of news coverage the economy was getting. I figure you know where this one's going. The worse the Dow does, the more coverage the economy gets.
So back in March, with the Dow down at 6,500, the economy took up 55 percent of the available news space. Today, with the blue chips better than 10,000? Economic coverage is down near single digits.
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10/21/2009
This graph would be more interesting if news coverage were plotted on the horizontal axis, and the Dow closing along the vertical access. The strong the relationship between the two, the tight the cloud of points they will produce.
The problem with plotting two (presumably related) signals against time is that it is too easy to overestimate the strength of relationships.
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