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The Margin: Fox News apologizes after being called out over chart comparing ‘the death of black men to gains in the stock market’

Stocks tend to do really well after high-profile cases of brutality and murder in the black community leads to widespread civil unrest, according to a Fox News graphic that answered the question nobody with any sense of the moment was asking. Read More...

The stock market tends to do really well after high-profile cases of brutality and murder in the black community leads to widespread civil unrest, according to a Fox News graphic answering the question nobody with any sense of the moment was asking on Friday.

It didn’t go over well across social media:

The son of Martin Luther King Jr. was one of many voices taking offense, tweeting he was “appalled” and that “a human life DOES NOT compare to a percentage jump in the S&P 500 SPX, +2.62%.

Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois chimed in:

Fox News later apologized.

“The infographic used on FOX News Channel’s Special Report to illustrate market reactions to historic periods of civil unrest should have never aired on television without full context,” the statement read. “We apologize for the insensitivity of the image & take this issue seriously.”

The Wall Street Journal on Friday offered more of that “full context” in a story that took a deeper dive into the numbers to come to a similar conclusion.

“There’s a heck of a lot that the market is seemingly ignoring right now, in addition to the protests,” Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, told the Journal. “But if you look back at the history of large-scale civil unrest … the market tended to sort of look through that. You didn’t tend to see significant weakness either while it was happening or in the aftermath.”

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