Whence the Ignorance? Look No Further.
September 26, 2007
– Comments (5)
Want to know why people have no idea what's going on? One guess is it's because they news they watch is so poorly informed. An example. Today, I was sitting for a live TV interview on housing. The news channel (which shall remain nameless, lest someone get offended and I get harshed on for writing this up...) had me talking to a producer. They were going to start things off with this lead-in: Today, the National Association of Realtors reported its worst earnings in over five years.
I said, "Ummm, you realize that the NAR is a trade group, and doesn't have earnings to report, right? I assume you want to talk about the drop in existing home sales, which was 12.8% for the month of August, year-over-year, if I recall the figures."
They huddled and came back with something vague, clearly having simply trolled the Internet for a headline and not examined the numbers behind it.
Eventually, of course, I was bumped for wall-to-wall, 30-40 minutes worth of coverage of a police news conference about an abduction, which took over from a good 5-10 minutes worth of worthless banter on Senator Widestance's trying to take back his guilty plea for bathroom gregariousness.
It is absolutely no wonder that so many people are so ignorant, and so easily talked into taking part in a housing bubble, buying shares of CMGI, etc.
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