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Don’t Make Me Say I Told You So 163

That’s essentially what the financial media does, and has to
do. They need your attention, and they don’t care what they

have to say to get it and keep it. As radio personality Adam
Carolla said: “The media needs stories. They are a furnace. They

need anything that burns to be tossed into the furnace. They’re
not interested in what’s yours, and what’s right and what’s

wrong. It’s a furnace and they need things to toss in.” TV shows
that cover financial issues day- to-day are not a road map to

making or keeping a fortune. They are entertainment.

One of the reasons that the media has such an impact on

our lives and our emotions is that, over the last few decades,

there has been an information technology revolution that now
delivers news from around the globe continuously, instantly,
and in vibrant color on 50-inch flat screen televisions. As Fareed

Zakaria, author of The Post American World, points out:

The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the

24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant

hyperbole. Every weather disturbance is the “Storm of
The Century.” Every bomb that explodes is “breaking
news.” It is difficult to put this all in context because

the information revolution is so new. We didn’t get

daily footage of the roughly two million who died
in the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s or the

Chapter 4: The Most Common Investor Mistakes