Don’t buy in to everything you read_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Don’t buy in to everything you read

The problem isn’t that the occasional journalist makes a mistake on deadline. We’re human, folks. The problem isn’t big business, or corporate control. It isn’t even the Koch brothers. If you’re a liberal, you should probably want them to blow $600 million on a loss-making newspaper company.

Here are the real problems. And I don’t see any solutions.

1. Speed...

2. Money...

3. Access

In early 2007, when the subprime crisis first blew up, some executives at big mortgage lending companies were going around telling everyone that their companies were okay. But I reported at the time that several of these executives were also quietly dumping stock in their own companies as fast as they could. Six months later one of the companies had plunged into crisis and was sold off cheaply. The CEO was interviewed on TV about the industry. Not once — not once — did the big-name interviewer ask him about the way he had dumped his own stock.

There’s a reason the interviewer didn’t ask that question. It wasn’t her job. She wasn’t paid to break news. She was paid to get what the TV crowd calls “the big ‘get.’” In other words, she was paid to get access. Her job depends on getting the honchos to come on her show. And to get them to come on her show, she had to promise them — implicitly — an easy ride.

A few years ago a Wall Street tycoon was so incensed by a plan to eliminate one of his tax loopholes that he invoked the memory of the Holocaust by comparison. He is still welcome on TV channels. He is still invited to give speeches at lucrative media conferences. That’s because he still has money and power, and the media cannot give up their access to him.