Panting Media Miss Reality

Please forgive The Business Press Maven's more moderate sensibilities, but it is truly a sight to behold, is it not? As the business media busily interpret any slight underperformance by a retailer as primarily the fault of the foreclosure on customers' homes, they are simultaneously saying that Hewlett-Packard's(HPQ Quote - Cramer on HPQ - Stock Picks) real solid earnings were the exclusive doing of the efforts of Mark Hurd, their latest CEO genius in the making -- without always mentioning Dell's(DELL Quote - Cramer on DELL - Stock Picks) ongoing disfavor in the eyes of those consumers, who are apparently still buying computers even though they are all losing their homes.

You sense a pattern here? That's right. When it comes to how the economy and stocks are portrayed by the business media, they are not biased in any one particular way.

The little devils are just always overreacting, overdoing and overreaching, and it's on perfect display here. The subprime mess is serious and no one has been more negative on housing than The Business Press Maven. But should the performance of every retailer with obvious merchandising issues be seen through eyes of subprime? No.

And should an obviously competent CEO be drawn as an absolute genius, because his most serious competitor has, for reasons he had nothing to do with, been unspooling? No.

Thursday saw J.C. Penney(JCP Quote - Cramer on JCP - Stock Picks), Kohl's(KSS Quote - Cramer on KSS - Stock Picks) and Nordstrom(JWN Quote - Cramer on JWN - Stock Picks) all report good results, and we heard some raised outlooks.

At the same time, we were reading about how Macy's(M Quote - Cramer on M - Stock Picks) underperformed and cut its numbers. Unless I'm sorely mistaken, these retailers are operating under the same sun, no?

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