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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (7388)	8/19/2001 1:05:43 PM
From: Mark Adams	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Juxtaposition; The Sunday NY Times had no stories on the Strong/Weak US Dollar. The Friday UK Based Financial Times had 5 stories on the topic. The topic has sustained every greater interest of the FT authors over the past 10 or so days. From a paper by Robert J Schiller The News Media The news media play a prominent role in generating our conventional wisdom, more so among nonprofessionals, but among investment professionals as well. And the news media are themselves in a fiercely competitive business for survival as news media. They cannot be indifferent to the public resonance with the stories they write. They therefore help reinforce a conventional wisdom in some dimensions, and help change it in others. News media success thrives on good writing. A well-written story can have powerful impact on public thinking, and, indeed, can become a news event itself. One well-written news story that succeeds in grabbing public attention begets a long sequence of follow-up stories in competing media outlets, and reinforces its impact in public thinking. The news media are therefore generators of attention cascades, as one focus of attention in public thinking leads to a related but different focus of attention, and then in turn to yet another focus of attention. Thus, shifts in public attention to economic issues are rather like the shifts in topic of conversation at a dinner party. During such a party, the focus of attention seems to drift aimlessly as one person after another is reminded of a new interesting story to relate, and there is no telling where the conversation will be in another ten minutes. The succession of attentions in the media are rather like this too, though spread out over days and weeks rather than minutes. cowles.econ.yale.edu Should we conclude that the strength of the dollar will eventually be a topic of greater future interest to US News media? Or that the topic will fade in non-US media? Or is it just much ado about nothing, on a slow news day?