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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> You don't spend money on ads saying "we no longer have a financial stake in this stock"

I don't think they did. The source of this meme seems to be a Twitter ad from CNBC that was teasing an interview with a quote to that effect. That's a CNBC ad selling their show, they don't take paid ads from their guests.

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This is not what happened, I don't know why people keep perpetuating it. The entire source of the "Melvin Capital has closed their positions" thing is an anchor on Squawk Box on Wednesday morning saying that he just got a call from Melvin's fund manager who said that Melvin closed. There hasn't been any other comment besides that one, which is why people think it may have been less than honest.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/27/hedge-fund-targeted-by-reddi...

The more compelling reason to believe they didn't lie about it is because we haven't heard they went bankrupt yet. We probably would have heard that it happened by now, and they certainly would have been bankrupt if they didn't get out of GME in the $100s.

If you are already out you don't have to tell anyone. You simply have exited the market and stopped caring.

Also, it seems like "close my position" could mean anything. Does that phrase have any specific legal meaning? For example, if I own 1 share of GME, then that is my "position". If I buy another share of GME, then I have a new position: 2 shares of GME. I "closed" my first position, and opened a new one.

> they don't take paid ads from their guests.

How do you know this?

They sell journalism under the NBC brand. Is this a serious question? If CNBC was issuing paid advertisement like that it would be a much, much bigger story than a spike in a small cap retail stock.

NBC has double the primetime product placement of it's next nearest competitor, fox.

https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00101603/00001

That's about fictional TV shows, not news.

Only a small segment during the 247 news station day is actually designated as news. Everything else is news entertainment which has different regulations.

I still don't see what this has to do with the point above, which is that a promoted tweet from CNBC for one of their segments is clearly not a paid advertisement by the guest in the segment.

You don't think it is relevant in a discussion about deceptive paid primetime television marketing, that the company in question has the highest documented rate of deceptive paid primetime marketing?

OK, you're just misunderstanding. "Primetime Television" is a marketing term that refers to the traditional TV network programming scheduled between 8-10pm. This is where they put the sitcoms and dramas and reality shows. And "Product Placement" refers not to advertising per se, but paid placement of retail products (e.g. cars, sodas, whatever) into the scenes in the fiction, or to appear as prizes, etc...

It doesn't refer to news programming or other journalism, you just got confused. And I'll say it again: if NBC News, or any other major news media organization, ever got caught teasing a segment because of third party payment, it would be a much, much (seriously: much) bigger story than this minor nonsense about GameStop. They simply do not do what you are alleging, period.

Does a free ticket to the exclusive event count as payment? You know like an apple event where new products are presented and then published in every paper around the world.

You say i'm alleging the opposite of your argument, while I'm merely commentating about the observable ethics of the company in question.

I'm not straw

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