The Fake and Distorted News Epidemic and Bridgewater’s Recent Experience With The Wall Street Journal
While I just recently read The Wall Street Journal’s article about Bridgewater and was surprised by its intentional distortions, I have been reflecting for quite a while on the destructive effects that fake and distorted media are having on our society’s well-being.
To me, fake and distorted media are essentially the same problem in different degrees. My own experience, which I will share later in this piece, is just one small case within an epidemic. While Bridgewater will survive this case—and even if we didn’t, the world would be just fine—it is questionable whether the world will be just fine if this fake and distorted media epidemic is not arrested. As Martin Baron, the Washington Post’s Executive Editor, said in reflecting on the problem, “If you have a society where people can’t agree on the basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?”
.. The failure to rectify this problem is due to there not being any systemic checks on the news media’s quality. The news media is unique in being the only industry that operates without quality controls or checks on its power. It has so much unchecked power that even the most powerful people and companies are afraid to speak out against it for fear of recrimination.