From the Editor’s Desk: Sensational

I’ve never been a fan of exaggeration or hyperbole, and I guess I’ve brought that sensibility to my writing because I find myself recoiling more and more at the sensational and inaccurate ways in which news organizations communicate what’s happening in the world.

I don’t like this because it puts clicks---money---ahead of common sense and doing the right thing. It’s the culmination of decades of quality decline in news and the steady rise of sensationalism over reality. You can see it most clearly in our partisan news organizations, a term that should be an oxymoron because news, by definition, shouldn’t be biased, it should only be reported. But news is a business, and unbiased reporting does not sell. Scaring people does.

Here’s a typical example. I’m sure you’ve all seen the sensational way in which weather is now reported, at least in the United States. “Snow threatens 110 million Americans,” the headlines bleat, not to mention that most will get a dusting at best. The New York Times and The Washington Post have both sunk to this style of weather headline recently. Shame.

I saw another amazing spin on this type of headline recently on staid CNBC, of all places. “These savings accounts earn a 1,600% higher interest rate than traditional ones, but most Americans don't use them,” a headline in my feed noted. It caught my attention because it seemed absurd. So I had to look.

According to the story, traditional savings accounts have an annual percentage yield (APY) of just 0.23 percent, but so-called high-yield savings accounts have an APY of about 4 percent. If you parked $10,000 in each, the traditional savings account would earn $23 in interest in one year, while the high-yield account would earn $400.

That’s a difference of $377, obviously, and, as obviously, a high-yield account yields more interest than a low-yield (traditional) account, thus the names. But if you do the math on that, the high-yield account earns 1,600 percent more interest that a low-yield account. Thus the headline.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that few people sitting on $10,000 would leave it in a low-yield account unless they intended to use it soon, the article takes its time getting to the fact that customers can’t access money in a high-yield account as easily or quickly as they can with the low-yield account: “it might take a few days to process a withdrawal,” the article finally explains. Ah. Then the two accounts aren’t comparable, and they aren’t used for the same purposes.

This is still good information---some people surely are doing the wrong thing with their money---but the headline is needlessly sensational. And that was doubly interesting to me, because I was recently faced with the dilemma of whether I should write a similar headline.

A month ago, Amazon reported its latest quarterly earnings, and I fell into a very familiar pattern in which I engage in the only kind of math I’m go...