Old Media and This Week's Markets: Who Knows They're Up -- Quite a Bit?

The tone of this week's reporting on the US stock markets would lead you to believe that even though Wednesday and Thursday were pretty good days, the markets are down for the week.

That's completely wrong.

The Dow is up 279 points (2.3%):

How about the broader S&P 500? It's up almost 27 points (or 2.0%):

The NASDAQ, weighed down not by actual results, but by gloomy expectations from the likes of Apple and Ebay, is only up by a bit less than 21 points (0.9%):

A quick review of business press coverage shows why most people probably don't know that the markets are, heading into Friday's opening, up for the week. It's because there may not be anyone who's actually reporting that fact.

Examples:

• It's not here at the New York Times (Jan. 25 -- "With a Day of Steady Gains, U.S. Stocks Join in a Global Rebound").
• It's not here at the Washington Post (Jan. 24 -- "Wall St. U-Turn Pulls U.S. Stocks Out of Nosedive"; the Dow and S&P were positive for the week at the close on Wednesday).
• This pre-opening report today from the Associated Press ("U.S. Stocks Head for Strong Open") gets close as it describes the events of the week thus far in the second-last paragraph, but doesn't actually say that this week has been positive.

This seems to be a pretty obvious piece of missing information business readers should know. Why is it missing?

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.