Feast or famine. It’s a cycle that you have to understand if you would like to predict the stories that will be in the newspapers tomorrow.

I’ll start with the famine, or the process by which no one will tell the story at hand straight up. As a reporter, situations where no one wants to talk openly about what’s really going on are relatively common. Since a reporter can’t make things up, they sometimes have little to say. That’s how we are relatively nooze starved about the state of our financial markets – the people involved don’t want the word to get out.

On December 10th I took advantage of this to make a prediction based on the obvious – that either the Federal Reserve would show signs of panic or the stock market would. The prediction was that we’d have a half point cut, showing the Fed was ready to panic, or the market would tank, showing that they’d panic first.

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewblog.asp?authorid=55121&m=12&y=2007&blogid=26241

On December 11th, the Fed cut only a quarter point, and the DJIA dropped nearly 300 points. It’s down about 8% since I made that call. Am I a great predictor of the stock market?

Not really. I simply know how to read the data, and unlike a reporter I don’t have to rely on an “expert” in the field for quotes. Sure, a Wall Street insider can do a better job interpreting the numbers, but they also have a vested interest in avoiding the kind of panic that happens when people know what’s really going on. Anyone can predict tomorrow’s headlines when they can see it’s in the interests of the “experts” to starve the media. Some events, like an economic reckoning, can only be put off for so long. It’s the timing that’s tricky, is all.

The other end of media manipulation to suit someone’s interest comes with the classic media feed or PR campaign. These can be harder to see coming, but in the case of Michael Bloomberg the polling has been going on since last June. We know that he’s serious about creating something more than the worst Constitutional Crisis since the election of John Quincy Adams:

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewblog.asp?authorid=55121&m=12&y=2007&blogid=27214

Think of all the fun we’ll have if the big tickets are Obama-Huckabee and Bloomberg gets into the race. So a Black, a Jew, and a Baptist Minister go into a debate …. I don’t know what the punchline is yet, but it’s a good start. That kind of humor, that nearly writes itself, is what we have to look forward to if Bloomberg really does it – and it looks likely.

How do we know this is really going to happen? Because his chief pollster and close friend Doug Schoen has a book coming out on February 5th, Super Tuesday, called “Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System”.

This is clearly timed to steal coverage away from whoever is the big winner, a person that the press will have been covering for a long time, to the fresh face of Bloomberg. A February run-up to a March declaration of candidacy will make all the momentum anyone has gained through the primaries dissolve. And the press will eat it up.

So do you want to stay informed about the world, but would like to avoid the feast and famine of everyone else’s special interests? Sorry, there’s no good way to do it that doesn’t involve reading far too many websites than could be considered good for you.

If you have that kind of time necessary to watch for media failures on the horizon, you can at least predict what will happen in the nooze. That’s worth something. It might make an interesting career, but that would be yet another special interest in the whole shebang. People unfettered by an editorial board who have an interest in manufacturing nooze and hype are not any more useful than a mass media that is everyone else’s tool for hire.

I think we’re all better off not relying on the feast and famine of other people’s interests and learning how to feed ourselves just what it is we’re looking for. Enough is as good as a feast, after all. Even if it takes a bit of work.