by pup55 » Tue 27 Feb 2007, 09:24:46
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'w')e are being led blindly by blind fools
If you want an educated guess I would say that the newsroom at the internet section of Bloomberg is populated by relatively bright but inexperienced journalists ex: graduates of Columbia that think they know everything. Evidently there is no effort to teach these youngsters how to understand data and statistics at some level, but that does not bother the management too much because most of the population is in the same boat.
They are, indeed, making pronouncements about the market that are tailored to have an emotional impact to get people to read them. I think on bloomberg, as on Yahoo and other news websites, the more emotional the headline, the more hits the site gets, and this allows them to charge more for their advertising. So, it's all about commerce in the age of web news.
So it is a mixture of cluelessness and deliberate design that leads to the type of articles noted above.
So it is up to the readers to either take the time to figure it out for themselves, or start reading a site like PO.com where there are some further discussions about this subject. PO.com, on the other hand, is not objective enough to be considered a really good source of unemotional interperetation of some of this stuff, but at least you can get beyond the headlines a little bit. There are a lot of technical people here, petroleum engineers and the like, and also a few of us with some data analysis experience that can sift through this kind of BS when it presents itself to find the nugget of good information.
What we could do, for the common good, is email the writer of this bloomberg article (it's posted) and rag him about his lack of statistical understanding, or deliberately over-emotionalizing the article, thus educating him a little bit and giving him some constructive suggestions about how his readers could get some useful information out of this weekly survey, but frankly, that is his editor's job and I do not feel like doing it, personally.
However, if anybody else wants to, the writer's email address is linked in that article. Maybe somebody should send him a link to this thread. He might get either an education or a cheap laugh out of it, no telling which.
Also, it would not surprise me at all if the writer already occasionally views this site, as a rich resource for story ideas, so if you are reading this, writer (and we know who you are), I hope you learned something.