Michael Knudsen
Peterthis is sharp as hell. https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/
HilaryEven if had not included the phrase "a club of brunchlords and trust fund nepobabies", which it does...
Yeah, as sharp as hell
Evan
Kai@peter Agree on that. CEOs are often treated as experts in the field, even though they are not. Why writing about what Altman thinks about AI and not asking an AI scientist? Why asking Musk about brain interfaces and not somebody who works in this field? Not only do CEOs often lack deeper knowledge, they also have clear financial interests. They very likely won't say the truth, but only what benefits them. It's like writing an article and citing an tv advertisement clip as source
Ntropic
Jer-Bear, Not Going Back@peter ooh, good reading, I’m going to be on the lookout for “CEO Said A Thing” pieces in the outlets I follow.
Similar vibe: https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-tweeted-a-thing/
Dźwiedziu
Garth Cummings@peter kin to “a president said a thing” which thing we already know is false.
MattChippytea@peter this bit “It's a sort of journalistic Ken Doll with the genitals sanded off to a smooth hump to avoid offending anyone” is absolutely spot on.
IPng Networks@peter OMG yes. I ban outlets that do that.
"Elon Musk says"
"Sergey Brin opines"
"Jensen Huang claims"
"Sam Altman thinks"
"Mark Zuckerberg believes"
With the benefit of hindsight, these brainwaves are laughably inaccurate and fairly indurable.
And pretty much zero of these articles has much of any intellectual value.
It's the clickbait of the 2025+ era.
human_powered@peter
Parroting CEOs insults my intelligence; reflexively I veer away.
Quoting that sharp article,
"good reporting is certainly peppered in the morass"
Yeah, let's grow a list of those peppers ! --
a) Heather Richardson
b) Peace Talks radio
c) meditationsinanemergency.com
d) https://the.ink/p/stop-despairing-start-building?publication_id=70374&post_id=192080345&isFreemail=false&r=9dxl9&triedRedirect=true
#massmedia
...
Taran Rampersad@peter Sharp as hell.
Adding this to my hopper. :)
Gaëtan Perrault@peter the last paragraph is great and sad and so telling:
I'd end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it's abundantly clear they don't want to.
Jacques Chester
Toni Aittoniemi@peter The unit of authoritarianism is submission, willfull submission and obedience.
opny721
fedops 💙💛
Angela Scholder@peter It definitely is the standard now...
Chewie@peter we need to use a hashtag for this crap on articles! #CEOSaidAThing
The Penguin of Evil@peter It's not really anything new. When I worked for 3com we won a magazine award for a product that didn't yet exist. When I was involved in lobbying the trick was to give most journalists a paste together article. When you wanted your embedded dev tool to take off you supplied it with free course materials to lots of lecturers (esp in India). Companies had pet journos.
The difference is we also used to have some journalists with values and a voice, now we have almost none.
Jonathan
Daniel ☀