(Why is the MSM so lame?) The stock market tanked on Monday, so why quibble with numbers? 777? 7%? So what?

But the most amazing misuse of this meaningless data point was on the front page of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, where the sober six-column format has been replaced this morning with big headlines and a story on the bailout that takes up the entire top half of the front page. The second graph of the lede story reads: "The Dow Jones Industrial Average sustained its biggest point drop in history and its biggest closing decline since the day the markets reopened after the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks. ..." The New York Times, where I spent 13 years, got it right, though the tone--a two-deck, six-column wide headline--did not signal the kind of sober restraint to be expected in such uncertain times. The Times also relied on a broader and more useful gauge than the Dow, which has just 30 companies, to assess the market. The Times off-lede stated in its second paragraph, "The broad market as measured by the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index plunged almost nine percent, its third biggest decline since World War II."

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Cay Johnston concludes:

Stock indexes matter in terms of percentage changes, not point changes, because the base changes all the time. How many points an index like the Dow or the broader Standard and Poor's 500 went up or down compared to the day before, or over a week, or over another contracted time period is a legitimate measure when trying to figure out the short-term direction of the market. But when you are comparing it to trading from say 2001 or 1987 or 1929, counting points, instead of percentages, is absurd. My first thought when scanning the nightly news programs was that this was just another example of how journalists, broadly speaking, are innumerate and so errors pop up when it comes to numbers. But the subsequent words in the ABC and NBC reports made it clear that someone on the writing and producing staff knew just what they were doing. This was not an error; this was fear mongering.

Have Americans learned anything from September 11, 2001?

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