Media Lies

Here is an excellent blog post by Robert X. Cringely that points out the hypocrisy of the media:

Last night I was surfing the web and came across a news story titled Ten Things Americans Waste the Most Money On from a web site called 24/7 Wall Street. I’ll save you the trouble of reading the story: we Americans waste our money (in monetary order from most to least) on restaurants, gifts, audio/video equipment, pets, hotels, entertainment admission fees, alcohol, sporting goods, tobacco, and apparel. Or in other words eating, having family and friends, enjoying music, having a dog or cat, experiencing the world, knocking back a dirty martini, exercising, and replacing our worn-out clothing is a frigging waste of money.

Just shoot me.

If we didn’t spend all that money what would happen? The way the folks at 24/7 Wall Street evidently see it, we’d be better-off because we wouldn’t be wasting so much money. Of course being such careful spenders would not only make us dull and uninteresting as Hell, it would also destroy our economy.

Great advice coming from a financial site.

So I ask you, what was the point of this story? The only point I can see is that 24/7 Wall Street writes it and, according to their web site, the story is then syndicated to TheStreet.com, AOL Finance, BloggingStocks, The Wall Street Journal Online, MarketWatch, StockHouse, MSN Money, AOL Finance, Daily Finance, Time.com (TIME.COM!!!), and Newsweek.com.

They publish it, we read it and someone makes money.

A pox on all these publications. They should be ashamed to print such garbage.

This story is less than air, it is vacuum — words stuck together and published solely to fool dopes like me into being exposed to ads. And while one might argue that it has always been so, well I don’t think it was ever quite this bad.

I don’t want to pick on 24/7 Wall Street too much, but they did write the story so here goes.

The story is crap and those who wrote it are hypocrites. For one thing they somehow excluded from their list of wasted money anything having to do with their own line of business. No publishing is mentioned other than cable TV. The Internet, newspapers, magazines (all sites in the 24/7 Wall Street syndicate), and books are never mentioned.

I certainly spend far more each year on computer equipment and Internet service than I do on audio-visual equipment, which is right up there on the 24/7 waste list. For that matter I spend more on newspapers, magazines, books, and telephone service, too, which aren’t mentioned at all.

If you liked that, then you will love this barb he jabs Steve Jobs with to deflate the inflated claims about the iPad 2.

I love Robert X. Cringely. He fearlessly calls a spade a spade. Too bad there weren't more journalists like him.