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Comment by faintrain | Hacker News Reader

I like Ray Dalio. I’m a big fan of his book, Principles and his favorite book recommendation, Lessons of History by the Durants.

However, his LinkedIn post is irresponsible and appears more to do with discrediting journalism than sticking to and stating the facts. It’s becoming more than apparent that some members of the 1% are increasingly threatened about the role that unfettered journalism and left-leaning politics has in critiquing their unchecked power in this time of historically significant inequality.

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I don't understand your point. I like the WSJ myself, and have been a subscriber for 15 years. However, the article is clearly biased, in that they give token space near the beginning to the responses of the actual subjects in the article, and then spend the balance 80% of the article continuing their narrative, regardless of what the subjects themselves said!

Ray Dalio is right. Journalism is not about informing or educating, it is about entertaining, and depending on your media source of choice, you are being pandered to.

This is not about "discrediting journalism" or whatever sob story media pushers want to cry crocodile tears about. They have killed their own credibility, and every day they behave badly, and continue to play victim, the more people wake up and stop trusting them.

Edit -- the big thing that media companies hate is that now with the internet and social media, people being covered have a voice and can speak up. Media companies absolutely hate this loss of influence, and again will attack anyone or anything that chips away at that from them. But again, they exposed themselves, and have wrecked their own credibility, hence the dying out of the industry.

I don't know why you think "media companies" hate anything.

I think that they're just doing whatever makes the most money.

Printing hardly researched often untrue shock-garabage makes a lot of money. It gets traffic from people who agree with it and traffic from people who think it's awful. Even lying outright-- there are no consequences and it's cheap to produce. If anyone cares the controversy just means even more traffic.

No great conspiracy is required. Modern consumption patterns have made essentially tabloid grade 'journalism' more profitable than it was while making traditional modes of journalism less profitable. If the commercial operations weren't producing junk at scale they'd probably be put out of business by grass roots tabloid-content production.

I'm sure there are plenty of journalists who would like to do better, but wishes doesn't put food on the table. They produce what earns money or they find another line of work.

We get what we incentivize.

I think media companies hate it because media companies regularly argue that it's bad. For example, there was a major scandal in late 2016 and early 2017 about the fact that nontraditional news sources sometimes publish lies; every mainstream news outlet I saw at the time argued that this is a new, bad trend, and that we should react by refocusing our trust on mainstream news outlets since they don't publish lies.

There are plenty of publishers like the National Enquirer, which make no pretense to be anything other than shock-garbage. The Wall Street Journal has a different stance.

I agree that we get what we incentivize. But there is really nothing new about this at all.

The idea of news outlets presenting unvarnished truth without slant or bias is a fantasy world that never existed. In fact, while the technology has changed, the journalism of today is much more reliable and objective than that of one and two hundred years ago.

> I think that they're just doing whatever makes the most money.

You're assuming that the end goal is profits, although it is not. Profits are what keeps media companies running, but their main goal is power and influence over public opinion.

It’s not even just pandering. When it comes to industry specific coverage, most journalists have no idea what they’re talking about, and are largely writing for an audience that doesn’t understand the industry either. With respect to finance, for example, there are a handful of reporters like Erin Burnett who know what they’re talking about because they worked in the industry. But guys like Matt Tabbi, who have zero subject matter experience, suck all the air out of the room.

In reality, nobody plugged into finance pays any attention to Taibbi. He's a frustrating personality, but only if you pay attention to him.

Plenty of journalists have done serious, important work documenting finance.

Ray Dalio says journalism makes it so that we have no more heroes. It's funny to see that picture of him at burning man after reading his account. He wants to be a hero, deep down, whether he admits it or not (we all do). A flip side to what you point out is that because of social media now "heroes" also have to listen to people that might not share their worship the same way some newspapers often have. Carnegie and Rockefeller would have been covered differently in these times. I'm not disagreeing with you, and I do think the death of newspapers is not just because of journalists destroying their own credibility.

I agree with you that it seems he’s most bummed about not being a hero in the article. At this point, with every little position paper he publishes, and receives massive (and I think mostly undeserved) attention for, its not hard to see why he’d be bothered by the tarnishing of his image. At the same time, I have met one or two journalists, who are by far the exception, where nearly in the instant of meeting them, I know this person is nothing short of a total asshole. The wsj with its hyper-stylized “hedcut” illustrations is kind of the last place you’d expect to see such people, esp. if you’re the “good” banker... but let’s just take this with a dose of perspective, it’s not like they said he eats puppies for breakfast.

> the article is clearly biased,

The article may be biased -- that doesn't mean its wrong. The same facts can be presented in different ways. The fact that the WSJ is presenting them in a way that makes Ray Diallo unhappy doesn't make them untrue.

> they give token space near the beginning to the responses of the actual subjects in the article

Very often the actual subjects of the article are not objective or disinterested. In fact they are often poor sources of information that may be unflattering

> Journalism is not about informing or educating, it is about entertaining

Journalism is about selling ads, nothing more, nothing less. Some journalists may present it as a vocation to truth etc., but the reality is they exist because there is still a market for reliable robust reporting. In the English speaking world, fake news, biased outlets and muckraking have been the norm rather than the outlier over the past three to four centuries.

> Media companies absolutely hate this loss of influence

Media companies hate that thy're being driven out of business.

But apart from all that, with respect Ray Diallo, money talks and bullsh*t walks. If the WSJ asserted disparaging facts about him, call a lawyer and stop writing cry-baby posts on LinkedIn.

The WSJ article is really weirdly written. It definitely seems very biased.

They state things as facts like "Mr. McCormick, 54, had discussed jobs with the Trump administration. He also chatted with BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Laurence Fink about the possibility of leaving Bridgewater, according to this person and another close to the situation."

And yet, further on, it's completely refuted by both McCormick and Blackrock. "Mr. McCormick said the attempt to reduce his stake “did not happen and I did not make that comment.” He said he has a “terrific working and personal relationship” with Mr. Dalio. He also said “I never discussed a job at BlackRock.” A company spokesman added that Mr. McCormick “never discussed with Larry about leaving Bridgewater.” Mr. Fink said in a statement that “while I think highly of David, and we’re close friends, we have not discussed the prospect of him working for BlackRock since he left Treasury a decade ago.” "

The article makes a bunch of assertions, making them sound real, and then they get massive denials from the actual parties involved, but bias the article towards the rumors.

That's exactly it -- when so-called "journalists" themselves are conflating rumours, innuendo, and gossip with "facts" and "truth", then of course they're killing their own credibility, and that of their publishing institution. Nobody will remember these journalists in the long-run anyway, the real damage is to the WSJ itself.

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