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Journalism Failures — Big Time

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- In February 2001, Fortune magazine named ENRON the “most innovative company”.

- In October 2007, Robin Hanson, on the Overcoming Bias blog, re-published the falsehood that James Surowiecki (and 3 other book authors in their respective book) made a mistake about Francis Galton in his book, The Wisdom Of Crowds.

- In January 2008, the “BetFair Prof” (Leighton Vaughan-Williams) claimed, on the BetFair blog, that the “betting markets” foresaw the Republican race in the Michigan primary.

- In January 2008, Risk magazine named SOCIETE GENERALE (recently busted by one of its traders, which lead to a loss of 7.2 billion dollars) the “equity derivatives house of the year”.

TAKEAWAY: Either by complete incompetence or by lack of investigation means, journalism is not up to its lofty goal —telling the truth to people.

Risk magazine

(Via Marc Andreessen.)

Jerome Kerviel, soon to be named “person of the year” by Risk magazine? :-D

Jerome Kerviel

Societe Generale Logo

Societe General Tower in Paris

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8 Comments to Journalism Failures — Big Time

  1. January 27, 2008 at 11:40 am | Permalink

    Chris, you identify as a journalist, right? You’re not going to list all the inaccuracies you’ve printed over the years that have required correction?

  2. January 27, 2008 at 6:05 pm | Permalink

    “- In October 2007, Robin Hanson, on the Overcoming Bias blog, re-published the falsehood that James Surowiecki (and 3 other book authors in their respective book) made a mistake about Francis Bacon in his book, The Wisdom Of Crowds.”

    Francis Bacon? hahaha

  3. January 28, 2008 at 3:38 am | Permalink

    Well, you’ve reported inaccurate info about my job title, family members and the question of whether I am a spy for Yahoo! or not, all of which had to be corrected. Hey, I only remember the ones that involve me (well, I remember your Hillary Clinton thing, too), but that seems to have been a lot for someone pointing out other people’s journalistic shortcomings.

  1. By on April 1, 2008 at 8:49 am

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