Time Warner's Loss Due to Writedown

Wall Street Journal, you alarmist little devil, you should know better. Almost everyone else did. It all started when Time Warner(TWX Quote) reported this morning, falling into the red because of a watermelon-sized writedown.

As we all know, when a loss is the product of a write-down, the business media, in the interest of avoiding the even-more-harmful implication that continuing operations caused the earnings beat-down, should mention the writedown right there in the headline. Right?

Well, not according to today's Journal, which, admittedly, is usually more responsible with this sort of thing. Here's its headline: "Time Warner Falls Into the Red."

The Journal mentioned the (ouch) $24.2 billion in write-offs in the first sentence, but by then the damage was done to those (and there are so many) who get their news and notions by skimming the headlines.

While the stately Journal earned an incomplete, the wire cubs at the Associated Press managed to earn an A. They mentioned the writedown in both the headline and subheadline, lest you got the wrong idea: "Time Warner swings to 4Q loss on hefty writedown: Time Warner swings to 4th-quarter loss, weighed down by $24.2 billion writedown."

How did our own TheStreet.com fare this morning? I really wish you hadn't asked that. It went the alarmist route: "Time Warner Posts $16 Billion Loss."

Look, there is enough to worry about in Time Warner's report that I wouldn't touch the stock with a 30-foot pole. But without the charge, it did earn 23 cents a share. This fell below expectations (again, that 30 foot pole), but it's better than the billions upon billions in losses that headlines implies. Moreover, the company announced that it was going to take the loss last month, so it couldn't have come as a surprise to the business media.