And Now a Message from the MIM…(the Mentally Ill Media)

Today, I received an important FAX message from one of my personal Coaches Dan Kennedy about the state of the news media and how they "report" on the economic factors that effect us all. Normally, Dan's commentary is "client-priveleged information" and not allowed to be shared with anyone outside of our circle…

I thought that today's communication was especially appropriate for our Real Estate Lifestyle Membership so I called Dan and asked (begged, pleaded) for special permission to share it with you. Surprisingly, (and only after a half hour of begging) he agreed! So here it is verbatim:

Media Mental Illness

Can Be Contagious

When someone compulsively, constantly cuts themselves or obsessively starves themselves, we have clinical names for their condition and consider them mentally ill. So should we for our poor media, which compulsively, constantly reports good news as bad. Here, a TYPICAL example, the boldface type mine; from Crain's Cleveland Business – a city that does not need a mentally ill business editor but nonetheless has one, in fact, one of the sickest of any I read anywhere in the country. But he has no exclusive. Everywhere, local media mimics its idols at the Communist News Network (CNN) and elsewhere, contorting even the cheeriest news item into a dire threat of impending disaster, gleefully exaggerating and sensationalizing every legitimately negative report. The local reporters, columnists and editors – like this pathetic creature given his own weekly forum here in Cleveland – relentlessly denigrate their own cities as well as the state of the union. They have created a unique math: present good news can only be followed by future bad news, thus good news equals bad news. Here's an example:

Commercial site sales hit $1.7-Billion high – but credit woes likely to damp investor appetite for income producing properties going forward

The news here is that the dollar volume of apartment buildings AND industrial real estate AND office buildings AND retail space sold in northeastern Ohio in 07 hit ALL-TIME records, up from 06 to 07 by 34%, 15%, 115% and 35% respectively – and a lot of these sales happened, quote, "after the credit market imploded." But rather than reporting all that phenomenal, FACTUAL news, the reporter felt compelled to add OPINION psychically predicting that this boom won't continue. Pay attention and you'll see this sick formula used pervasively, in print, on the nightly TV news, radio.

Once, the news media was about facts. Now it is about story-lines, facts selectively chosen, emphasized and bent to support the story lines. For example, Barack The Boy Wonder, as John F. Kennedy reincarnated, never mind that JFK was a fiscal conservative and a foreign policy hawk/neo-con. The Foreclosure Crisis – never mind that it is not a zero sum rise, that there are always large numbers of foreclosures, that there is a well-established industry built around their existence, that it plus sub-prime problems represent a token percentage of the real estate and mortgage markets, that there are – this minute – more thriving local markets than there are those in crisis, that new factors like bankruptcy reform contributed to the problem, that federal government interference that forcibly doubled minimum payments on credit cards contributed, and that people knowingly gambling on ever-multiplying real estate values lost their wagers and now must pay up by handing their property over to winners ought be discussed. The Economy Is Awful And Depression Certain Without Massive Government Interference And Giveaways – never mind the 52 consecutive months' net job growth, never mind that more Americans own homes and are investors than ever before, never mind that businesses are investing here, in the U.S., at a greater rate proportionate to their earnings than anytime in the past 20 years. To hear the Dems and complicit, ignorant and mentally ill media the night of the President's late January State of the Union speech, you would believe all of America – save a tiny number of us rich bastards in castles – were huddled together under blankets, shivering and starving in their one-step-from-foreclosure homes, absent heat or bread crusts, all lights dimmed, cars on blocks in garages for want of gasoline, staring dejectedly at the tiny flickering TV screen, desperate for a politician to tell them, as Barack so alarmingly put it, "how government will solve their problems." Never mind that this picture is made silly by the full to the edges mall, shopping center and restaurant parking lots on every night of the week, never mind the mile long lines at Starbucks or – where I just visited – the teeming hordes at Disney, where 1-day park admission is now $71, and, as near as I can tell, over a half-billion dollars in time shares per year are being bought mostly by the "downtrodden" middle class. Never mind any reality. Never mind any balanced view. (And God-of-liberals forbid any suggestion that people ought to accept personal responsibility for solving their own problems.)

A human has a vested, overriding self-interest in not cutting its own arms with razor blades hundreds of times or so starving itself its internal organs collapse, so when a human engages in such extreme self-destruction, we judge it mental illness. Members of the news media get their own paychecks from businesses (advertisers) who require a healthy, thriving economy and optimistic population in order to function, so when the media conspires and contorts to discount or conceal all good news in favor of presenting a picture not in keeping with its own self-interest, its own local city's interests or its nation's interests, let alone facts, we must judge them mentally ill. Those in the business media indulging in such demented self-sabotage can only be extremely mentally ill. Seems we need a new federal program to gently round them up and commit them to psychiatric wards somewhere.

Try not to put too much stock in the rantings of crazy people. Play your own game, play to win, play aggressively, creatively, optimistically. Find opportunities to associate with sane people who do not echo the delusional negativity of the mentally ill media.

~Dan S. Kennedy

I'm an avid student of Dan Kennedy's materials. Here's a rare opportunity for you to find out more about what I'm reading, what I'm listening to, and what I'm studying for FREE to you at www.freegiftfrom.com/jimcanale. There's lots of money-making information available for just a small shipping fee. You should take advantage of this opportunity RIGHT NOW!

To Your GREAT Success,

Jim Canale