People don't want experts, who probably have at least some stake in a topic, writing about it. And they don't want some theoretically "objective" journalist or other outside observer writing about it. I'm not sure who that leaves. (Obviously some journalists and other writers are pretty knowledgable about the topics they cover but they're still often filtering and interpreting what experts have told them.)

Maybe I should have clarified, that quote came from the bio which you get if you click on the author's name -- not from the body of the article. It does appear in a little "show more" box (at the end of the article) but the juicy conflict of interest bits are obscured by the "show more" link. That's not clear disclosure by journalistic standards.

Journalists put relevant conflict-of-interest disclosures right at the beginning of the article, with emphasis added. This guy is doing the opposite: using the Forbes site to make it look like he's a journalist employed by them, when in fact he's a consultant/investor with the very industry he's writing apologist articles for. Sure, he's not lying... he put it in the bio field. But it's still misrepresentation.