This morning, several people woke up, scraped the barrel and wrote stories like this: “S&P takes worst slide in 2 months“. Worse, they got paid for it. Even worse yet, they probably have no idea why it’s horrible work.

To put this nonsense into perspective, here’s a chart of the S&P 500′s progress over the past 12 months. Last Thursday, the S&P reached a new 52-week high. The intra-day low that day was 1,281.10. After the “worst slide in two months”, the S&P finished today at 1,281.92.

Wikipedia describes journalism as “the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues, and trends to a broad audience. Although there is much variation within journalism, the ideal is to inform the citizenry.” (Italics mine.)

I suppose this type of garbage fits the bill while falling well short of the ideal.

Wikipedia describes sensationalism as “a manner of over-hyping events, being deliberately controversial, loud, self-centered or acting to obtain attention. It is also a form of theatre.”

Now that sounds more like it.

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