For example, when the rand/dollar exchange rate given by TV news broadcasts is, say, R6.75, this is probably based on what banks pay for forex because a quick check at the banks will show that while TV news was quoting R6.75, any traveller buying traveller's cheques or foreign currency at exactly the same time would be paying round about R6.98.
All of which suggests that TV news is assuming that the only people interested in their indicators are foreign exchange dealers, bankers or importers and exporters.
What they should be doing is assuming that forex dealers and bankers don't sit around until 7pm at night to find out what the rand is doing against foreign currencies - they generally have their fingers on enough instant electronic pulses to give them this data hour by hour or minute by minute.
In addition to which the vast majority of viewers of the news are just ordinary Joes who either want to know how much foreign currency is going to cost then for their holiday or business trip abroad or, in the majority of cases, whether they're going to have more or less disposable income.
So, if TV news departments want to provide a real service to their viewers, they're going to have to take a long hard look at giving more relevant exchange rate figures but even more importantly, what they should be doing is giving a quick tabular update on how this exchange rate combined with the oil price fluctuations will affect the petrol price and imported goods.
It would be a simple process that wouldn't take more than ten seconds of air time at most and would be providing a real service to viewers instead of just a rough and fairly meaningless indicator.
It also surprises me that banks and traveller's cheque companies haven't complained to the media about the exchange rates they provide. Because the scene I witnessed in a bank recently, with an irate customer insisting that the bank foreign exchange department was ripping him off by quoting a substantially higher rate than that on TV, must be fairly commonplace.
