Noise, signal & news

My recent lightness of posting has been because I've been on holiday, in sunny Melton.
Anyhoo, I get back to my hotel on Monday afternoon, eager for a fix of Kay Burley (hotel rooms do strange things to a man's tastes) and one of the lead items on the scrollbar on Sky News is "market falls sharply."
Lummee, I thought. What's happened? Turns out, the FTSE 100 had dropped 69 points. Which is nothing. Assuming annualized volatility of 20%, it's a less than one standard deviation event - the sort of thing that should happen roughly once a week*. It's about as significant as missing your bus.
This is not news - certainly not headline stuff. It's noise, not signal.
Which raises a more general point. So much "news" is like this - just noise.  There's the Nick Robinson-type Kremlinology  that gave us all that wibble about an autumn election, the interest group lobbying masquerading as research that fills up the Today programme,  and pretty much any Guerin-Plett-Keane-style foreign reportage which includes the word "mood."
"News" is a mere artefact.  It's defined not by any standards rooted in epistemology or information theory, but is merely a commodity produced where journalists happen to be - which is why the conflict in Iraq gets more headlines than that in the Congo.
Is it any wonder, then, that there are always pressures to dumb down the news, because it' s close to entertainment anyway?
* Granted, the fall over the three days Thursday-Monday was a more meaningful 1.5 standard deviation event -  but SkyNews never made that point.

Comments

[Paulie]

Do you reckon the reason that they report Iraq more than The Congo is because that's where they happen to have reporters? Or is it because they (the news orgs) see themselves as having to participate in the big issues of the day - to be players - rather than just to be reporters?

[Bruce]

Journalists are in the enterainment business.

[reason]

Huh? Surely reporters are not just randomly sent out in the world (Paulie - you can't believe he meant it that way)??

Nor are news organisations players in (most) world events - at least not more than the long term effect that they may have on public perceptions and hence public opinions.

No the Iraq war versus Congo war is a lot to do with public interest (particular since "our" side is directly involved in one war and not in the other). But once reporters are there because it is seem as interesting, they inevitably produce stories that are "news" rather than news being objectively important new events. I guess that is the point. This sounds a bit like the idea of "work expanding to fill the available time" - Parkinson's Law. You could create a respectable "the myth of services productivity" on this basis - arguing about all the extra and relatively unrelated sales activity that go on in hotels or banks. People are held captive while receiving certain services and are marketed other services at the time. It looks like productivity but in fact is disguising the unproductive time the consumer is forced to endure (like waiting for interesting news on CNN).

[Chris Williams]

Holiday in Melton? _That's_ news.

[Adrian Monck]

Chris - news channels are obliged to fill time to cater for changing audience. The very fact that it obliged you to continue viewing before learning enough to dismiss what was on offer is a small victory for Sky News.