Some Journalistic Jollies

George Rebane

Readers know that today’s professional journalists comprise one of my favorite foils.  Perusing the morning papers, I ran across three doozies that brought on a spate of self-satisfying chuckles.  First, let’s start with Don Rogers’ essay in his 26jul19 Union.  The newspaper’s publisher is an irreconcilable ‘never Trumper’, and promises to cut off your nose to spite your face.  He observes the national scene and laments that “no one truly acts for the common good.”  But in the sequel he doesn’t seem to understand that in today’s America we no longer have a ‘common good’, all the polarizing evidence withstanding.  Let me begin by acknowledging that Mr Rogers is a likeable man of good character and an intellectual leader of our community

In today’s essay he claims to like “some actions” of Trump “almost exclusively in economic matters”, and brushes off the historic sea change from Obama years as something “any decent Republican could have accomplished”.  But they didn’t, Trump did.  Society correctly credits the individuals who actually accomplished a notable thing, good or bad, and doesn’t withhold accolades or accusations with the excuse that someone else could just as easily have done it sooner or later.  Einstein discovered relativity, Lucky Lindy was first to solo the Atlantic, and Stalin killed tens of millions of his own citizens.  It wasn’t just anyone doing those things.

Mr Rogers joins his legion of liberal colleagues in calling Donald Trump “Racist? Sure, of course, but we’ve known that for a while.”  And along with them he offers no definition of the ‘racism’ to which he hews; Trump is “of course” racist for the reason that Rogers simply echoes that accusation – for a liberal, that is more than enough to make it so.  Consensus ignorance becomes common wisdom.

Our publisher’s main complaint in his ‘Impeach me, please’ is that Trump is flying solo in wanting the House to impeach him as part of some self-serving “thuggery” in his re-election strategy.  Apparently, Mr Rogers has not been exposed to the last two years of news about how Democrats, high and low, are in an all-out assault to impeach and discredit the president based on no culpable evidence, and ONLY as a blatant tactic to end his presidency in 2020.  The long litany of investigations, hearings, conspiracies, criminality, along with gratuitous and baseless accusations in the Democrat-compliant media, to Rogers somehow fall short of thuggery - actions and behaviors which for the rest of us overfill its most basic definition.

Don Rogers would rather vote for the Democrats’ “wrong-headed” and “ill-advised” legislation and policies and deny us the demonstrated benefits of Trump’s policies, why? because he doesn’t like the wrapper in which they are delivered.  And there we have a sterling example of a journalist promoting the common good. 

With a mild segue we now encounter Aaron Zitner, WSJ editor for digital innovation, who discovers the independent voter as those who actually swing elections one way or t’other.  He breathlessly reports the news of both parties having the dilemma of spending campaign funds to nail down their core voters or spend it trying to convince those yet to make up their minds.  His report (here) in the 26jul19 WSJ has got to be evidence of a slow news day.  Why?  That decision and its cash allocation dilemma is as old as electioneering.  Anyone familiar with how America has voted for the last couple of centuries knows the 40-20-40 rule.  We have reported on it extensively (here, here, and here) starting with The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) by Bryan Caplan, who covered the large body research which demonstrated that the minority ruled, and did so until politicians discovered mass media in the 1920s.  This caused voters to succumb to the guile of political sound bites in their number and recency.  And that, of course, brought the whole thing back to which party and candidates could buy more eyeballs and earballs on the media.  So we’re back to the ‘middle minority’ as the swing votes who always determine elections.  But then, you knew that, and so should have Aaron Zitner.

OK, we’ll end with a real subtle knee-slapper.  How many times have you been told about investors moving into this or that investment?  The image painted by these financial reporters is of a mass of agitated people moving en masse from, say, stocks to bonds or vice versa, or to some other area like commodities or real estate.  ‘Investors give up on gold!’ is a regular headline in this genre.  Today we read Jessica Menton’s breathless report (here) about investors pouring money into bonds at a “record pace”.  Apparently investors are forsaking stocks as being more risky and going into the perceived less risky debt instruments.  Well, no they aren’t.  No investor threw their gold bars or stocks into the gutter; no one left their corporate stocks lie fallow in some drawer or some broker account when they switched their investment focus.  Every investor sold their old investments to whom?  Rumor has it that these buyers have always been (seatbelts please) other investors – imagine that.  Just as much money was coming out of one pile of investments as was going into another pile or two.  These monies don’t move by abandoning what was previously valued; they can’t.  Never are there discarded piles of share certificates found in dumpsters when monies move.  For some reason, this important little aspect of investor monies moving around is never mentioned.  You gotta sell stuff before you can buy other stuff.  And if investors are buying something else at a record pace, other investors must also be buying what was sold at a record pace.  Reporters should point this out now and then. 

Comments

[Todd Juvinall]

Excelllent GeorgeR!

[Scott O]

I think the terms 'moving into' and 'moving out of' refers to the movement of money, not the actual amount of financial vehicles. In other words, there is possibly a noted rise in the value of one financial vehicle at the same time there is a noted lowering of another in approximately the same time frame. You are correct - it's not an accurate depiction of what's happening but just sloppy word smithing. Like talking about the 'media'. As in the 'mainstream media'.
They mean the news media, but now we have to rely on the context to figure out what kind of media they mean.
It may seem petty, but you would be amazed at the number of young folk that no longer know the actual meaning of the word 'media'. If some one wants to say that I need to get up to date on the 'evolved' meaning of words, let me then ask what kind of art is 'mixed media'?
News from different media?
Most financial news is pathetically ignorant. One of the big reasons I enjoyed listening to Tom Sullivan. He would often destroy even writers from the WSJ on their lame attempts to describe the financial scene. He worked as a tax guy for wealthy individuals and large corps all over the country for years. He saw first hand how and why folks spend, invest and earn money.
As is often said - money talks, BS walks.

[Todd Juvinall]

Looks like Rogers screed is generating a lot of comments.

[Todd Juvinall]

Ken Jones of Oxnard is at it again in the Union. All lib all the time. Of course, he and his ilk never have a solution for anything. I use him as a fine example of a worthless libtard.

[Gregory]

Jones, with a mail order bachelor's in environmental engineering from a for-profit mail order university (he runs scrap/recycling operations for manufacturers like Parker and earlier, the Grass Valley Group), is an ideologue of the left. He's also not very bright.

[Todd Juvinall]

I love your smacking him down with logic and facts.