(10-28-2026 01:59 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  

(10-28-2026 01:54 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(10-28-2026 01:22 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  

(10-28-2026 01:18 PM)stinkfist Wrote:  

(10-28-2026 01:13 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  FWIW, JR

Peter Laffin seems (I could be wrong) to be a credible, experienced and respected journalist.

https://muckrack.com/peter-laffin-1/articles

Washington Examiner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Examiner

I'mma gonna bold the importance of his post ... either listen, or pivot ... it matters naught ... there's a reason they DO NOT TEACH THIS SHITE!!!

I basically understand JR's overall point, Stink, I was simply noting that he might not want to be fully dismissive of the assessment from Laffin. Maybe he wasn't (the Laffin piece clearly was not the thrust of JR's argument).

What's in a name, huh Bill? Journalists are bought and paid for since conglomerates took over the print industry, which is dying anyway, and just another reason what they write is usually provoking somebody. Creating the pissed off sells papers and drives views if online. Attention whore and credible are not descriptors usually used within the same context. And here you are making a case for it. George Will was once considered credible. H.W. Bush pretty well destroyed that, and it was before the print media was horribly impinged by the internet and desperate. Desperate people in besieged industries are inherently untrustworthy sources for straight information. Put it in D.C. where allegiances are constantly changing at the whim of advertisers and sponsors and it defies reason to trust anything purported for either side. End of Story. You should always not only consider the source, but its circumstances and audience.

Using this logic (and you make strong points) ... I may as well resign from my job as a business journalist as not a single one of us journalist can be trusted. Maybe I could land work as Stink's personal assistant. I just hope he can afford to pay me $20 an hour.

There is plenty of work available for good business analysts paying more than $20 an hour. What is the endangered species soon to be extinct? It is the journalist. Corporations love to tell a version of history friendly to their world view. Hell, the local newspaper here was edited in Virginia and the plates digitally created with the edited version for the paper to run. They were not edited for grammar, correct word usage, spelling, or anything that once was part of the hallmark of newspaper integrity. They were edited for stories that might impact the company's stock positions, and to reflect the company's social values, which was simply word salad for politics. There's no integrity in that. If you want to maintain your integrity while preserving a livelihood then use your skills to analyze the businesses that you write about in ways that highlight what they do well, while alluding to things they could do to enhance their bottom line. Suggestions on enhancements make midlevel management that reads your bylines look better to their bosses, especially since those educated in the last 30 years haven't been taught skills in critical thinking.

You have knack for straddling fences, actually a good skill to have at times, but also finding the path between the horns of a dilemma. It's that last one that will make you worth a higher paygrade as it is a rarer skill than the labor force, and professional pool of advisors can readily demonstrate.

I've always found that by understanding as completely as possible all sides to an issue but not raising them in the context of my remarks, that I could offer a view of the situation which could get the parties to focus on the locus of mutual self-interest. That works unless of course there is no locus of mutual self-interest then it's time to layout a path that would be the most productive even in one side loses. And even then, I had only the obligation to lay it out. I didn't have to own it, the deciders did. The beauty of being an analyst is you deliver hard data with recommendations. A recommendation never winds up being your responsibility if you clearly place the decision in the hands of others.

Just a recommendation to any journalist writing about a technical or commercial field.