Based on how they handled it today, it's pretty obvious that the Associated Press's Ken Sweet and his wire service's headline writers want the lowest possible number of users of their reporting — consumers and subscribing print and broadcast outlets — to know about the mainland Chinese stock market's historically deep 8.5 percent Monday dive.
It took four paragraphs for Sweet to get to the specifics. What preceded it was clearly intended to create an "It's No Big Deal, so you can move on to something else" impression.
Let's start with how the story was teased at the AP's Top 10 Business Stories at about 2 p.m.:
AP certainly had the opportunity to communicate the size of the drop right off the bat, and passed.
Now let's look at the story's first four paragraphs in Sweet's 12:17 p.m. report:
It took Sweet until Paragraph 4 to tell readers that yesterday's Chinese market plunge was "precipitous." Even then, he failed to disclose in this or any subsequent text that the Shanghai market has dropped by almost 28 percent since June 12, and that it was at the 20 percent bear-market threshold even before its horrible Monday.
If AP and everyone else in the establishment business press is so confident about how "resilient" the U.S. economy and stock market supposedly are, why do they all seem so afraid to widely disseminate information about what's happening in other major world economies and markets besides little old Greece? There are at least two good answers. The first is that the U.S. stock market is in fact very fragile, propped up for years by artificially low interest rates, and subject to serious disruption if investors ever figure out how fundamentally overvalued stocks currently are. The second is that what little there has been of a "recovery" in the U.S. economy has been achieved primarily as a result of consumer spending. The wire service doesn't want to give consumers, who have been saving the economy for years by spending money they have borrowed on cars, education, and other things, any reason to consider pulling back.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
