Media Stocks Suffer Declines in 2018
With only a few trading days left this year, 31 of the 50 stocks tracked by The Hollywood Reporter are down for the year.
Even after Wednesday’s huge day of trading on Wall Street — one where the Dow Jones index soared nearly 1,100 points — shares of most media companies are poised to close out the year in the red, with some suffering declines not seen since the Great Recession, from 2007 to 2009.
Indeed, with only a few trading days left this year, 31 of the 50 stocks tracked by The Hollywood Reporter are down for the year, and some of the ones focused on digital media have suffered the worse, including Facebook (down 24 percent), Snap (off 63 percent), Roku (down 41 percent), ComScore (down 53 percent), TiVo (down 35 percent) and gamers Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard (each off 26 percent).
The S&P 500 fell 7.7 percent so far in 2018, and half the media stocks tracked by THR are faring worse than that benchmark index. Helios and Matheson Analytics, better known as the parent of MoviePass, which introduced consumers to the concept of movie theater tickets via subscription, is down more than 99 percent.
Luxury theater chain iPic Entertainment, which started to trade publicly in February, is off 83 percent, while giant-screen chain Imax lost 21 percent and AMC lost 5 percent. Bucking the trend among movie exhibitors is Cinemark, up 9 percent.
WSJ RIPS WASH POST COVERAGE OF TRUMP
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page offered a feisty Boxing Day pieceon Wednesday lashing into the Washington Post over coverage of President Trump’s Christmastime visit to the troops.
The Journal focused on this piece by the Post’s Philip Rucker and Paul Sonne, citing the opening two paragraphs and accusing it of needlessly working in unrelated Trump scandals into a piece that did not call for it.
“Can anyone reading those opening two sentences wonder why millions of Americans believe Donald Trump when he tells them that he can’t get a fair shake from the press?” the Journal asked. “The point isn’t to feel sorry for Mr. Trump, whose rhetorical attacks on the press have often been contemptible. The point is that such gratuitously negative reporting undermines the credibility of the press without Mr. Trump having to say a word.”
“These reporters can’t even begin a news account of a presidential visit to a military base without working in a compilation of Mr. Trump’s controversies, contradictions, and failings,” the paper added.
The offending paragraphs were quoted verbatim by the journal:
“President Trump touched down Wednesday in Iraq in his first visit to a conflict zone as commander in chief, a week after announcing a victory over the Islamic State that his own Pentagon and State Department days earlier said remained incomplete.
“The president’s visit to Al Asad Air Base west of Baghdad, which was shrouded in secrecy, follows months of public pressure for him to spend time with troops deployed to conflicts in the Middle East and punctuates the biggest week of turmoil the Pentagon has faced during his presidency.”