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I feel like this post has a lot of hindsight bias in it. People are going to get things wrong sometimes. I think there's a lot of things to legit criticize mainstream media for, but not having 100% accurate crystal ball isn't one of them.

If the thesis of this piece is that newswriters sometimes get things wrong, or sometimes write sensationalized things, all i can say is, no duh.



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My understanding was the thesis is that paying too much attention to the news is unhelpful because newswriters (“storytellers”) don’t particularly care if what they are reporting is factually correct or not, they have different motives.

Yea, that was my take too. So much hindsight bais.

- If I read Enron's financials instead of the news, I'd have gotten rich.

- If I ignored Hertz's financials AND ignored the news, I'd have gotten rich.

Author focuses on cases where the media hype ended up being wrong, but what about all the cases where the media was right?


With Enron, it's not even that the financials were obviously bad. It takes skill to see danger signs in audited accounts. Recall the fraud finished off their accounting firm, then one of the Big Five.

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