Enough with the negativity
Published by Simon Hall on 17 February 2009.This morning once again, with coffee in hand, I popped open my web browser to scan the news for anything interesting as I do every morning. And once again I found myself inundated with doom, gloom and negativity. Its no wonder consumer confidence is in the toilet. Every single story in the business section had a negative headline. What's ironic is that when you actually read through these articles there is actually much to be positive about. The media powers that be seem to prefer burying the good news under negative headlines in the hopes of selling more papers. Let's have a look shall we?
Canadian new-vehicle sales hit 11-year low
Not so positive, except when you actually read the entire article you'll find a sentence that clearly states that preliminary data suggests new vehicle sales actually rose 6% in January! Methinks this might be good news, no? This is just one example I've found over the last couple of weeks of apocalyptic journalism. Here's another scary article mentioning how house prices have declined 11.3%. Read a bit further and you'll notice how its mentioned that price declines have actually been easing and that the 11.3% figure is skewed lower by fewer sales in select provinces and is actually more along the lines of 6.2% - still not so good, but not near as bad as 11.3%. How much better off would we all be if these articles were slanted toward the positive instead of the negative?
Now I'm not going to pretend that everything is all well and good with the economy. Far from it. And I'm not telling anyone not to read the news either.
Just make sure you actually read it.