The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: Companies With The Worst News (July 7)

Investing

Published: July 6, 2011 9:37 am

Nothing compared to the negative press News Corp (NYSE: NWS) has gotten in the last three days as its The News of The World is accused of tapping the phone of a dead girl and erasing messages in a full mailbox to leave room for more.

The Flame Index started as a research tool in 2008 at the NY Innovation Design Lab (nyidlab). It was used as a general metric to evaluate companies and their risk in the media. Publicly traded Fortune 500 companies are used as a measure to calculate an overall market of negative news and the companies are ranked within that market.

Rank	Company	Ticker	Score	Change in Rank	Comments
3	News Corp.	NWSA	52.659	+585	One of its UK paper, The News of the World, hacks dead girl’s phone
4	National Oilwell Varco	NOV	45.259	+252	Buys Ameron International for $772 million
7	ConocoPhillips	COP	34.577	+553	Oil leaks hurt China output
18	KeyCorp	KEY	25.337	+382	New debt card cap will cost $60 million.
21	Novartis	NVS	24.63	+557	Russian police search its offices
27	Quest Diagnostics	DGX	23.777	+497	UK competitor say Quest overcharged government by $1 billion
35	Pfizer	PFE	22.07	+462	Drug Lyrica does well in Japanese tests
38	eBay	EBAY	21.805	+636	UK Twitter account hit by hackers
42	Autodesk	ADSK	21.379	+508	Large exposure to EU economic slowdown
43	Kellogg	K	21.349	+367	More concern and agri-product costs are up

Data and ranking provided by the Flame Index.

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