How the Media is Draining Your 401(k)

I was a guest commentator on the NBC television affiliate in Nashville years ago. Once while walking around the studio, I saw two things I never forgot.

One was a picture of their former weatherman, Pat Sajak. The other was a sign that read:

Bad news is good.

Good news is bad.

If it bleeds, it leads!

I think about that sign as I see how biased most of the media is in its coverage of the Coronavirus. Here’s an example of two headlines that are 100% accurate, but convey completely different messages.

A: “Over 6,000 People Have Died from Coronavirus”

B: “Number That Have Died from Coronavirus: 6,065. Number That Have Recovered: 75,620.”

Headline A is intended to scare you.

Headline B is intended to inform you by giving you the same fact, but also gives hope by putting the number in perspective.

It’s the proverbial question of whether the glass of water is half empty or half full. While it’s scary that over 6,000 people have died from a virus we’ve never seen, these figures (from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine) indicate that if you do catch Coronavirus, you’re 12 times more likely to make a full recovery than to die.

As someone who’s made his living as a full-time speaker for over a quarter of a century, I can attest to the fact that what you say isn’t nearly as important as how you say it.

To see how much this affects your finances, look at what happened last Friday, which ironically was Friday the 13th.

When President Trump declared a national emergency in a press conference, many people assumed the stock market would tumble even further. But then members of the “Coronavirus Taskforce” explained what was being done to handle the challenge.

One of them is Dr. Deborah Birx. She’s a rockstar and living legend in the medical community, who lead the fight against HIV and AIDS. Having her on the Coronavirus team is like having Tom Brady as your starting quarterback and Patrick Mahomes as your backup.

While that press conference was going on, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up by 1,985 points, the biggest one-day point gain ever.

Yet the news that night didn’t open with “Dow Skyrockets Nearly 2,000 Points”. Instead, it was how many more people had died from Coronavirus.

I don’t believe the media intends to drain your retirement account by bombarding us with bad news. But what’s killing the stock market isn’t the Coronavirus itself; it’s the panic over it, which is being driven by the media.

And if this did lead us into a recession, the media would be the only industry that would benefit from it.

Every other industry gets paid to serve its customers. The media is the only one that gets paid to scare them.

Don’t let them drive you to panic. Everybody wins by being vigilant about Coronavirus, but no one wins by panicking.

In Servant Leadership,

Glenn Shepard

P.S. If you’d like to see the current figures of how many people have recovered from the Coronavirus without media bias, go to Johns Hopkins webpage at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

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