Media Navel Gaze: February 3, 2014
The Week Unpeeled
The year got off to a pretty bearish, cold start, with the markets turning in one of the worst performances since May 2012–and much worse than many expected–with the Dow down 5.2 percent for January as the Fed "less easy" stance on money shifted perceptions and also hit emerging markets hard (look at Turkey, Argentina, South Africa). In fact, attention has now turned from BRICs to the "Fragile Five," which includes Turkey, Brazil, India, South Africa and Indonesia.
Elsewhere:
- Even so, GDP numbers showed that the US grew at its strongest pace in the last six months since 2003;
- Obama's State of the Union address focused on the use of executive powers to help America improve on wages, savings and jobs, fueling calls of "overreaching" and "imperialism";
- Facebook posted big profits, with more than half of its ad revenues now coming from mobile devices;
- The Washington Post, now under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has announced expansion plans with new politics reporters and data visualization specialists and web designers;
- Chinese New Year celebrated the Year of the Horse;
- Folk-music legend Pete Seeger died; and
- Scarlett Johansson's decision to stump for SodaStream became big media fodder because of the geopolitical issues of where the product is made (one of Israel's settlements); the ad is airing during the SuperBowl (and it contains a grammar error!!!); Fox decision to edit the ad not to offend Coke and Pepsi; and, well, it's Scarlett who has dumped Oxfam, where she was global ambassador, for fizzy water; #anotherreasontowatchtheads
