People are often surprised that I never consume traditional media (newspapers, TV, etc). I call it “selective ignorance“. “Selective” because I pick and choose what my brain gets exposed to, and “ignorance” as a joke.
Why be selectively ignorant? Because the mainstream media is worthless, sensationalist, ill-informed and devoid of any intrinsic obligation to deliver the truth. They’re in the business of selling ad space, not content. As such, they compete for eyeballs. Under that business model, fiction and misinformation get more attention than thorough knowledge.
Just as fast food will rot your body, fast facts will rot your brain. In the last couple years, it’s cost a lot of people a lot of money in the form of unrealized gains. The media has scared people off of investing in the stock market at the exact time that they should be heavily investing.
“Last year we saw, in one instance, how sound-bite reporting can go wrong. Among the 12,830 words in [our] annual letter was this sentence:
‘We are certain, for example, that the economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 — and probably well beyond — but that conclusion does not tell us whether the market will rise or fall.’
Many news organizations reported — indeed, blared — the first part of the sentence while making no mention whatsoever of its ending. I regard this as terrible journalism: Misinformed readers or viewers may well have thought that Charlie and I were forecasting bad things for the stock market, though we had not only in that sentence, but also elsewhere, made it clear we weren’t predicting the market at all.
Any investors who were misled by the sensationalists paid a big price: The Dow closed the day of the letter at 7,063 and finished the year at 10,428.”
– Warren Buffett, 2009 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman’s Letter
