Are market reports hurting America?

Chao Deng makes the argument:

Some critics say markets reporters must suffer from A.D.D., because short-term fluctuations in stock indices really don’t matter much in the long run. They say it’s absurd to pin a single narrative on spot news involving countless individual decisions, many of them made by robots. Too often, coverage favors one slant if stocks are up and another if stocks are down when, in fact, nobody really knows.

Felix Salmon weighs in, also, and concludes:

Market reports should not be an everyday staple of news coverage. Sometimes, occasionally, there are stories in the markets. And then those stories can be reported. But when there aren’t any stories, there’s no point in trying to invent them. And so the daily report — let alone the intra-day report — is at heart a stupid piece of journalism. Some are better than others, to be sure. But none of them are any good.