When John Campbell did an item on peak oil someone on Kiwiblog commented that his producer ought to be sent a letter.

Media always has an impact - media and its audience create a snowball effect, feeding off each other.

But the audience isn't all, collectively, interpreting things the same way.

At a general glance - media hyped up the boom for years (numerous renovation reality TV shows) that showed how the average Joe can make a million by buying the cheapest property in the swankiest neighbou........

Now the media is pulling it all down again.

People always blame the media for being overly negative they never blame the media for over hyping the value of their asset.

It's the same diff bro

...hmmmmmmmmm (edited version - sorry)

The Media certainly influence mass behaviour, but we can't really condemn the Media purely for that. We live in an information age - there is masses of data, information, statistics etc... freely available to anybody who wants to tap into it. Most of it is hard to verify, hard to read and difficult to interpret.

What the masses therefore demand is that somebody makes sense of that data for them and explain what it means. "Yes, ok, trillions of dollars of new money is being printed in the US - but what does that mean for me in NZ?"

There's huge demand for media speculation and interpretation of raw data - whether it's relating to the economy, the political landscape, new emerging social trends etc... When we hear credible sounding people in the Media explaining it all to us in bite-sized chunks, we are comforted because we feel informed, knowledgable. Knowledge, as we all know, is power - therefore if we have a perception of feeling knowledgable, we get the warm fuzzy percepted glow of power. Feels good. We are therefore influenced by the Media in one way or another. We make a judgement based on what we read/hear - it's what people do.

There's nothing right or wrong about that, unless of course there is deliberate manipulation of news and reporting. We see this when we look at state controlled regimes, but also when we see items that are clearly being hyped purely because they're going to generate good ratings.

So has the recession been hyped/manipulated by the media? Was the boom time hyped/manipulated by the media? Possibly. Who knows?

Don't worry about it, is my view - just analyse as much information as you're comfortable with and make your decisions based on what you feel you understand. It doesn't hurt to be a little cynical of course, try and filter out what you consider to be hype and get on with life. It's all we can do!

Sure, there are plenty of pundits jumping on the doomsday wagon, but why not temper that with the slurp that the MSM fed us about property over the boom? My bet is that the property hype would win hands down. It wasn't that long ago when we were fed sensational bylines such as "Auckland house prices rise $1000 per day" (and we all know how Fairfax's vested interest from real estate fist pumping). In all reality, I still think you have to search to read the Noubini's, the Faber's, the Schiff's, etc; specifically, they're not going to permeate the Herald in any depth or seriousness.

The suggestion that the media contributed to the global recession is pure nonsense. It might sit well among the inhabitants of the rock that is NZ, but globally the economic reality is very real indeed.

Well said, Mozart. Only human nature to talk up a boom and spread panic when things go into reverse. More and better data can only help, you'd think.

Maybe the disturbing thing is how little real progress has been made with the 'science' of economics in 100 years. Some very smart, highly qualified economists (Greenspan et al) have dropped us into one of the worst depressions ever, and even the Nobel Prize winners can't agree how to fix it.

The print/tv media in particular, as it stuggles for readership and viewers, hype up the pain. Bad news sells.

Good comment about how the information age has affected it though, things happen so much quicker and get hyped up and down with a frenzy. Take Susan Boyle and swine flu for example. Another example was the leak of the stress reports on the US banks a month or so ago, the world markets tanked on rumour and froth.

With due respect to the editor of this site, when was the last time a good news story ended up on the top 10 at 10 for example?(Aside from Dilbert)

There is a blurred line these days in regards to independence of a lot of media, how much publicity will the herald give to plummeting house prices if one of their biggest revenue generator is real estate agents?

But the media just thrives on those two timeless human qualities, fear and greed.

JH:

"When John Campbell did an item on peak oil someone on Kiwiblog commented that his producer ought to be sent a letter."

What did they say? JC say? URLs?

regards

"The culpability of the media (if that is the right word) should be limited to instances of misrepresenting the facts, scaremongering, or, most likely, endless repetition of the same story wearing down people's optimistic resistance."

You have raised my hopes that there is hope after all! The relentless brainwashing that is spewed out day by day by the media scaremongering the populous with catastrophic warnings of the effects of our planet warming.

This leads me to believe that sanity will prevail! The uncertainty and fear will start to dissipate? Politicians will realise they have been hood winked!

Trouble is I doubt it.They are far too hungry for new taxes to fund their delusions and will continue on their unethical journey at ripping the populous off .

You don't see statements like this as frontline news ,what you do see is shock horror and rebuttal.

Gareth Morgans says:
Ireland's economic miracle was driven by Germany. Under Labour, ours is being gifted by Communist China. The Germans sent money, the Chinese are sending people.

To the extent these trends are maintained it could take as few as 60 years before the population is effectively totally renewed. To the extent the sources of the greatest number of arrivals are now in Asia, Mr Peters is quite justified to point out that New Zealand is looking at a social and demographic revolution.

http://nbr.infometrics.co.nz/column.php?id=409

The media that is now majority owned by five multinational corporations, is responsible allright, responsible for normalising the debt based monetary system as generally accepted worldwide best practice, when its has been the common denominator in every human upheaval throughout history. Bring back cross media ownership laws.

nothing is unbiased - it is a human impossibility. Every person has their own beliefs

Media can influnence..but lets look back to the boom...
We had some doom and Gloomsters getting published...on the back page, in a mocking attitude, while the optimists still hit the front page...
yet things fell apart and the optimist blamed the D&Gs...
Even upto recent weeks the media continued to publish realisable hype and very little D&G ists
Sure a few bubbles that cant be established as anymore than that...so yes media can influence...BUT the overall trend on fundamentals continues on its track down.

Media influence can slow, or even suck ppl in who read the headlines and dont check the fundamentals and use basic common sense.
If the media is not doing their homework, promoting optimists when fundamentals are wrong, then the media is just not doing what they are meant to do...Accuratly inform.
Rather they take everything at face value, print who has the loudest voice and combine with what sells papers and increase ratings.