The Truth Shall Set Your Wallet Free by Nicholas W. Stuller

Author:Nicholas W. Stuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2018-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

[ Chapter 11: ]

The Media Loves to Bash

The media are partially responsible for the misconceptions and the negative images of financial advisors. Can you recall the last time you read a positive story about advisors? I’m sure there are some, but it would take digging to find them. I bet you can recall reading a negative article about advisors. Now, juxtapose that with the fact that only a small percentage of financial advisors were penalized by regulators.

My Firsthand Epiphany

Several years ago, as CEO of a startup, I was promoting a very new cutting edge application that involved investors and advisors. We had a public relations firm that took me to see many of the New York financial media. We met with nearly every household-named publication, website, and a number of cable and TV stations. We had a standard opening message about the marketplace of advisors and shared that advisors in general are misunderstood. I shared that at that time only 7 percent of all financial and insurance advisors as a combined number had any negative history. At first, in nearly all the meetings, I heard the exact same refrain “Interesting...now tell me about a bad advisor!” I literally had to prepare a statement for future meetings that went something like this: “Given only 7 percent of advisors have some negative history, for the hour we have together, I’ll allocate 7 percent of our time to the negative stories, and 93 percent of our time to the positive stories, does that sound fair?” This consistent interest in the negative forced me to the conclusion that if the only stories investors see in the media are negative, in the absence of virtually no positive stories, then what is the consumer to believe? After this experience I came to the conclusion that the media is one of the drivers of a negative narrative, despite the facts telling us otherwise.

To be fair, it is vitally important for the media to report news, which does educate, especially when crimes are being committed. However, there are thousands of positive stories about advisors which are newsworthy. There needs to be balance that reflects the statistics of reality.

Why the downer approach? Positive headlines supposedly don’t draw readers in droves. But negative ones are gobbled up because of our purported insatiable appetite for stories about crooks and frauds. What better proof than the Hollywood blockbusters and TV crime series that draw big audiences? Are our values askew, or are we easily bored? I’ll let my readers answer that question rather than take the position of moral or ethical arbiter.

Journalists

In the February 2, 2018, “Your Money” column in the New York Times, Ron Lieber wrote in the article “Yes, You Can Find a Financial Planner Even if You’re Not Rich” that:

“But an ugly fact of the financial advice industry has generally been this: There are precious few practitioners who will work with people that are not wealthy, or at least not without pushing questionable, commission-laden investments and insurance policies.”

Ron’s statement is patently incorrect.

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