The Ticker Never Sleeps, But Should You Trust What’s Running Across It?

Business news channels don’t just report the market. Sometimes, they move it.

By Harshitha KPM NSB Bangalore

On the 24th of February 2022, the morning India woke up to Russia invading Ukraine, the Sensex fell nearly 2,700 points before noon. The geopolitical reality was brutal, yes. But if you watched CNBC-TV18 or ET Now that morning, you also watched two hours of back-to-back crisis framing, red graphics, and guests who were visibly panicking on air. By the time the market closed, it had recovered more than half those losses. The war hadn’t changed. The headlines hadn’t softened. What changed was the noise level. And that should make you think.

There’s a question that doesn’t get asked nearly enough in conversations about market volatility: how much of the chaos is real, and how much of it is manufactured by the very media covering it? Business news channels in India — and globally — occupy a strange position. They are supposed to inform investors, but they are also, fundamentally, in the business of keeping eyeballs glued to screens. Those two goals do not always point in the same direction. And increasingly, the evidence suggests they sometimes pull in exactly opposite directions.

The relationship between financial media and market movement has been studied more rigorously than most people realise. A 2013 paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics found that media coverage of stocks significantly predicts trading volume and short-term price movements — not because the media has better information, but because coverage itself triggers attention, and attention triggers trades. This is sometimes called the “media sentiment effect.” In India, where retail participation in markets has exploded since 2020, this effect is amplified. A first-generation investor watching a panel of analysts scream about a stock is far more likely to react emotionally than a seasoned institutional trader who is simultaneously reading four other data sources and ignoring the television entirely.

Think about how business news is actually packaged. The visual grammar of channels like Zee Business or Bloomberg Quint is designed for urgency. Red tickers. Loud music stingers. “BREAKING” labels on information that was technically available on exchange filings an hour ago. Guests are incentivised to have strong, quotable opinions rather than nuanced, hedged ones — because nuance doesn’t make for a two-minute soundbite, and it certainly doesn’t make you the analyst everyone’s calling back next week. The result is a media environment that systematically overstates certainty and understates complexity. And ordinary investors, who are watching precisely because they want clarity, often walk away more anxious and more impulsive than when they sat down.

There is a specific mechanism worth understanding here, and it’s one I find genuinely unsettling: the self-fulfilling prophecy of financial coverage. When a business channel runs a segment on a small-cap stock with a “strong buy” recommendation from a prominent analyst, that segment doesn’t just reflect sentiment. It creates it. Retail investors watch, they buy, the price goes up, which then validates the recommendation, which gets amplified further. SEBI has documented multiple cases where this loop has been deliberately exploited — the 2023 crackdowns on certain financial influencers and market manipulators revealed WhatsApp groups and YouTube channels coordinating buys before media appearances. The line between journalism and pump-and-dump starts looking uncomfortably thin when you trace the money. And on television, that line is not always clearly drawn either.

But it’s not all manufactured panic and coordinated manipulation — I want to be careful not to make it sound like the entire business media ecosystem is corrupt, because that’s both unfair and inaccurate. Channels like CNBC-TV18 have broken genuinely important stories: corporate governance failures, regulatory investigations, earnings surprises that institutional investors were trying to quietly digest. During the IL&FS crisis in 2018 and the Yes Bank collapse in 2020, business media coverage forced transparency that would have otherwise been buried in fine print. The problem is not that financial journalism exists. The problem is that responsible financial journalism and ratings-chasing financial entertainment often look identical from the outside, and most viewers don’t have the framework to tell them apart.

Here’s the part that complicates my own argument. Markets are, by definition, information-processing machines. If business news channels didn’t move markets at all, it would mean they weren’t transmitting any real information — which would make them useless. Some price movement in response to media coverage is entirely rational and healthy. A company’s stock should react when credible reporting reveals a problem with its fundamentals. The question is whether the magnitude of reaction matches the magnitude of information. What we see repeatedly — and the Russia-Ukraine morning is just one example — is that media amplification pushes markets further and faster than the underlying reality warrants, and the correction that follows is costly for everyone who reacted in real time.

I’ll be honest: I watch business news sometimes. Not for stock tips, but out of a kind of morbid fascination with how financial information gets performed for an audience. There is something almost theatrical about a live market show — the countdown clocks, the analyst panels, the moment-by-moment commentary on numbers that are themselves already reflecting everyone else’s reactions. It’s information inside information inside emotion. Messy and human and not always trustworthy.

What I think we need is not less business journalism. What we need is a more media-literate investing public, one that understands the structural incentives of the channels it’s watching. A channel that makes money from advertising needs you to keep watching. Panic keeps you watching. Recovery keeps you watching. Certainty — real, boring, long-term certainty, the kind that actually makes people wealthy — is genuinely bad television.

The ticker never lies, technically. But it only ever tells you what just happened. The voice-over telling you what it means? That part, you should approach with significantly more scepticism than you probably do.