GUEST ANALYST LYRIC HUGHES HALE WRITES — Most Russian consultants and navy strategists I observe doubted Putin would invade Ukraine. I agreed with their rational arguments, however right here we’re.
I’m reminded of the Haruki Murakami novel 1Q84. The heroine alights from her taxi and regularly discovers that she resides in a world the place all the pieces is nearly the identical, besides there are two moons. Since Covid started, I doubt I’m alone in feeling that I’ve by some means gotten off on the fallacious cease, and am dwelling in a hellishly perverse various universe.
The two-moon metaphor illuminates how geopolitics has lately developed. We reside between the tidal pulls of two opposing celestial our bodies, the East together with the Global South, and the West together with Japan, that are quickly creating their very own separate ecosystems. The cross-currents are proving treacherous.
Both more and more disconnected worlds have their very own competing views of actuality that transcend ideology, the previous marker.
The function of the media in driving these opposing narratives has been underestimated, as a result of every is blind to the opposite, besides to the few who navigate each side. I think about that the Venn diagram of people that learn the Washington Post and People’s Daily is principally two circles that hardly contact.
Media has one other superpower. Not solely does it inform us how issues are, it could additionally forecast the long run. A brand new web site The Structure of Economic News makes use of AI instruments to seek for key phrases in information experiences. Researchers discovered that mentions of the phrase “recession” for instance, have been way more predictive of an precise recession than every other numerical knowledge, together with authorities knowledge releases and market experiences. From their paper ‘Business News and Bsiness Cycles: “A central operate of the economics career is measuring the state of the economic system and creating fashions that hyperlink these measurements to distributions of future outcomes. The media sector, as a central info middleman in society, regularly transforms perceptions of financial occasions right into a verbal description that we name ‘information’.”
Remarkably, we discover that information consideration explains 25% of the variation in mixture inventory market fluctuations. Thus, information textual content partly resolves a central puzzle in monetary economics — the infamous incapacity to clarify inventory market fluctuations even ex publish with something besides different asset costs.
Based on this dynamic, since we all know inflation expectations matter, is it a lot of a leap to imagine that media protection of inflation would possibly improve the possibilities that inflation will the truth is happen?
Media is not only a witness, it’s an lively participant in key occasions. This is equally true in democracies and autocracies. What you consider Ukraine, Covid, and the economic system relies upon quite a bit upon the place you reside. This could be very apparent in Russia and China, the place media is state-controlled, however much less obvious within the West.
With few exceptions for the reason that Iraq War, US legacy information organizations have taken remarkably comparable, institutionally aligned positions on essential coverage points. What they resolve to report, and fail to report, issues. However, they’re clearly below risk from new entrants and are struggling to adapt. CNN+ failed to draw even 10,000 subscribers.
Lyric Hughes Hale is editor-in-chief of EconVue, a writer of on-line financial information and evaluation by impartial consultants. She is producer of the Hale Report, a Chicago-based podcast sequence on economics with featured visitors from world wide. A marketing consultant to multinational companies, she has contributed to a variety of publications together with the Yale Books Blog, the Huffington Post, the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Current History and Institutional Investor. A famous speaker, Ms. Hale has addressed audiences on the World Economic Forum, the Brookings Institution, the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Tokyo, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, in addition to Stanford, Northwestern, Harvard and the University of Chicago.
https://asiamedia.lmu.edu/2022/04/15/media-brings-the-message-moons-for-the-misinformed/
