Mr. Market's Brother, Mr. News

Legendary investor Warren Buffett has an analogy presented several times in his annual reports called Mr. Market. One of the risks for any investor is the immediate ability to understand the market price of a particular stock or bond. Unfortunately, Mr. Market is a person of enormously variable emotions. So sometimes he is happy and other times he is sad. And sometimes he misprices his market simply because of his feelings of the day.

As I have thought about the last couple of days of news, Buffett's analogy seems to extend to the current news business. A few years ago USC President Steve Sample in a book called The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership, suggested that he had tried an experiment where for six months he avoided newspapers and other kinds of media. He found unsurprisingly that he learned about all the important stories of the day, through common talk with associates and at the same time he had a good deal more time that had formerly been devoted to reading newspapers and watching TV news.

One wonders what would have been different on the major stories like the Imus chattering, the Duke Lacrosse students jeopardy for a false accusation, and the tragedy at Virginia Tech. The news cycle for each of the stories takes a predictable pattern - it goes from breaking news (with lots of speculation), to bringing in the "experts" (most of whom are really not expert about anything but accessing the media), to endless meanderings into the minutae of the issue, to moving on to the next crisis. It creates some absurd moments that are often repeated. For example, Geraldo Rivera (Allen Cruz Rivera) last night commented on Fox that the Virginia Tech was a story so profound that it "tested the limits of his journalistic professional training" - that was absurd on its face from this buffoon who tries to wrap himself in the mantle of seriousness and who once tried to hustle us through a basement that was once used by Al Capone.

Ultimately the three stories have differing impact on our lives. The Imus story deserved to be consigned to page 30 - a hasbeen makes an insensitive remark that in no way diminished the achievements of a basketball team. The Duke Lacrosse story was abetted in part by the media. Clearly this "rogue" prosecutor who was seeking re-election wanted to pump this story up. Clearly, the "experts" (Jackson and Sharpton and their co-conspirators) wanted to present their slapstick regardless of the story. But with a more measured approach, Nifong might have been a bit more cautious or he might have been recognized earlier for the miscreant that he is. On the Virginia Tech story, perhaps by stepping back from the reportage we could get a better measure of the scope of the tragedy but more importantly whether anything could or should have been done differently. Mr. News in all three spaces inhibited our ability to understand and deal with issues. That is unfortunate.