Veteran Australian financial journalist Michael Pascoe admits to having spent a quarter of a century providing daily financial market reports that were “mostly rubbish.” Now he is trying to keep investors focused on the long-term, and is finding that doing so is of less interest to readers. Pascoe is spot-on. It’s not just the financial media that are to blame; it’s also media consumers hankering to get their fix of infotainment.
In this brief podcast (4:26), we consider a parallel example of this problem in news stories with polls during elections. The polls are shoddy work, their data usually meaningless and their track record dismal, yet that's what readers gobble up.
