Is it totally impossible that a financial journalist would know his onions?
I am a subject matter expert in a particular field. On a fairly regular basis I see reports in this field from "
journalists" which are clearly a simple repetition of totally inaccurate briefings by officials in local & national government who are seeking to displace responsibility for their incompetence elsewhere. The kind of briefing where if the journalist has spent maybe 15 minutes googling the subject rather than having coffee with their mate in the Department/Council and talking about the rugby they would have easily revealed the total falsehoods they were reporting as "
fact". Of course the same is true of their editors who one would have thought would want evidence of some kind of factchecking before publishing articles in national newspapers.
- I'm also aware of instances of fairly damning documents being released to journalists under their annual trawl of freedom of information requests where either they didn't care about the issues documented therein or they just couldn't bother their backsides even skimming the content (of even the executive summaries) of the documents released to them....
Fake news isn't a new phenomenon, and really mainstream media, particularly the ones which were traditionally regarded as "
of record", bear a huge responsibility for the fact that you can now post the most egregious lie on instagram etc and there's an excellent chance it will gain traction as a fact.
It's not impossible that a specialist correspondent is interested in his topic, and knows his stuff.
Of course it's not
impossible. On the other hand this particular journalist publishes 3 short articles a week in the IT, which used to be 1 long-ish article, and that's his online trail for the last decade and more. His articles suggest more than a passing acquaintance with the facts and the details, which is itself disappointingly unusual in journalistic articles. He mentions owning BH shares— unless he's got another role in the IT which isn't mentioned on their website, it's vanishingly unlikely that he's being paid enough by the IT to support himself and invest at the same time. All of which leads me to the conclusion that the IT is a side gig.
You would be amazed how much 'journalism' these days is topping and tailing a press release and chucking in a few quotes to make an article. Very little knowledge of the subject matter required...
As above, it's my observation of reporting in my particular specialist area that the average journalist knows virtually nothing about research & investigation. And yes, of course there are exceptions.
All of that is a side issue to what I was aiming at with my question as to what PO'M's day job is: presumably at least some of his knowledge/expertise can be gleaned from public sources, and I had the vague hope that a clearer picture of the person writing those articles could provide me with a shortcut to that knowledge/expertise. Because right now I'm reliant on sorting the wheat from the chaff in the available online resources— and it seems to be mostly chaff....
