When the Dow is up, news is down

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KAI RYSSDAL: This final note today — and it’s got graphs and charts, so it’s a tricky one to do on the radio but here goes:

The Pew Center’s Project for Excellence In Journalism came out with a new study the other day called “Covering the Great Recession.” The chart that really hit me when I saw it this morning plotted the Dow Jones Industrial Average against the amount of news coverage the economy was getting. I figure you know where this one’s going. The worse the Dow does, the more coverage the economy gets.

So back in March, with the Dow down at 6,500, the economy took up 55 percent of the available news space. Today, with the blue chips better than 10,000? Economic coverage is down near single digits.

Check out the chart.