The way I prefer to look at this sort of thing is to borrow from Akerlof's nobel winning Lemon Markets theory: if management knows something but isn't sharing it when they could, it must be below expected -- lord knows we'd hear bragging about amazing results! But if we adjust our expectations, surely they'd predict that as well, and so the results must be below even our adjusted expectations. Recursively applied, asymmetric information hoarding suggests a negative result far into the tail of the distribution.

And this is why rumors spread in the absence of information are nearly always negative.