World’s Largest Hedge Fund Manager Slams Mainstream Media’s Fake & Distorted News Epidemic
By Tyler Durden
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater – the world's largest hedge fund, has “been reflecting for quite a while on the destructive effects that fake and distorted media are having on our society’s well-being,” but it appears a recent Wall Street Journal article about his fund – full of intentional distortions, appears to have pushed the billionaire over the edge at just “how destructive and widespread these 'fake' and 'distorted' agendas are.”
To me, fake and distorted media are essentially the same problem in different degrees. My own experience, which I will share later in this piece, is just one small case within an epidemic. While Bridgewater will survive this case—and even if we didn't, the world would be just fine—it is questionable whether the world will be just fine if this fake and distorted media epidemic is not arrested. As Martin Baron, the Washington Post's Executive Editor, said in reflecting on the problem, “If you have a society where people can't agree on the basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?”
Distorted pictures lead us to make bad decisions. In my opinion, if people don't correct such inaccuracies and don't fight against this problem, continued distortions in the media will prevent the public's accurate understanding of what is happening, which will threaten our society's well-being. We in the financial community now openly talk about fake or distorted media being used to manipulate market prices to the harm of many, and similar conversations are taking place in most areas.
This is not just a fringe media problem; it is a mainstream media problem. And while it is widely recognized, there is no discussion underway about how to rectify it. The Associated Press said that only 6 percent of Americans surveyed have “a lot of trust” in the media. A recent Gallup study showed that Americans' trust in the media has dropped to an all-time low, with only 32 percent of those surveyed saying that they have either a “fair” or “great deal” of trust in the media. That compares with 55 percent having such confidence in 1999 and 72 percent in 1976. The dramatically decreased trustworthiness has even plagued icons of journalistic trust such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, as sensationalism and commercialism have superseded accuracy and journalistic integrity as primary objectives. Many, if not most, “journalists” are trying to write the story that they want to write and fit the facts to it rather than accumulating facts to accurately report pictures of what is true. To be clear, I am not saying that this is the case for all people in the news media as there are a number of true journalists who do seek to convey accurate information; I’m just saying that they are a rapidly shrinking percentage of the total and the poll numbers reflect that.
The failure to rectify this problem is due to there not being any systemic checks on the news media’s quality. The news media is unique …read more
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