Friday, July 9, 2021

Ignorance writ large

Oh dear lord.  Say it ain't so.  

Ben Rhodes' 

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change.

They literally know nothing.

was never so true.  Well, in this instance, half true.  The author of this monstrosity is 44.  But handicapped by a twenty-three year career in journalism which can both kill neurons and crowd out actual knowledge with nonsense.  Notably, Dickler is 44 with degrees in PoliSci from Johns Hopkins and an MPA in Media and American Politics.  Apparently she never had economics though.  One might quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb 

You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.

Still not certain about that intellectual part.  Credentialed might be a better description. 

Twitter has had a field day mocking this ignorance and CNBC has had the decency to modify the headline of the offending article to It’s not certain rising wages will be enough to outpace inflation by Jessica Dickler.  Of course the original headline is still and forever in the url. 

I did like some of the responses:

And from Alejandro

They go on in that vein.

It does raise an interesting point.  In corporations and large enterprises, one of the obstacles to better and more targeted process improvement is obtaining timely and accurate feedback.  Journalism gets immediate social media feedback.  But accuracy and plain common sense seem to remain as elusive as ever.  


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