Is that bad, when you spot an article in Fortune, and it reads like a singing tractor workers piece in Pravda, circa 1962?
Bethany MacLean, one of the more marginally talented of the apparently captured journalist crowd, has delivered an uninspired, insipid, and largely obligatory piece covering the Overstock suit against Rocker and Gradient, wherein she manages to selectively filter the info at a level rarely seen outside of totalitarian regime information ministries.
Now, I enjoy a good hatchet job as much as the next guy, but I tend to like them filled with venom and vitriol, not obviously tired and worn out. This reads like someone called her on a Friday afternoon, and told her to cobble together 1000 words within a few hours, the goal being to parrot the laughable and largely erroneous allegations of the Rocker counter-suit.
Of course, no hatchet job would be complete without painting Patrick as either larcenous or berserk or both, and Bethany manages to get the point across, if in a rather wooden and obvious way.
Apparently, the NY financial press can't seem to ask questions like, "What the hell does that have to do with anything?" To whit, Rocker makes claims that Patrick is a bad man, and manipulated his stock up, but at no point does it occur to Bethany to wonder aloud as to what that has to do with his now abandoned free speech defense (remember that gut-buster?), or the allegations in the OSTK suit, or really anything at all. No, it is just a rather stilted recitation of the suit's unfounded allegations.
I know for a fact many of them are inventions and lies, as I briefly skimmed the suit, and came across where it claims that I published photos of Marc Cohodes' son on Yahoo - something that apparently nobody in the crack legal team that concocted this nonsense took the time to figure out is impossible to do on Yahoo, and was never claimed in all the slanted, trumped up coverage of that period. Of course, given that has nothing at all to do with OSTK anyway, one could ask why it is even included in the counter-suit, but why spoil the party?
Does it matter that it is mostly lies? Is a judge going to care if so much is so easily shown to be BS? Do they take the position that if you find 10 lies or inaccuracies, that the rest of the work is likely as flawed as those areas, or is it just lie away, and hope nobody is paying attention? The legal team clearly was trying to come up with something, anything, that would justify billing a grand an hour to contrive this nonsense, however one would think they would at least attempt cursory quality control.
Sigh. Good help is so hard to find these days. This is what happens when you let the paralegals write the briefs after a hard weekend of paint huffing and Jim Beam swigging.
But back to Bethany. She also manages to miss the fact that the OSTK suit against Rocker/Gradient is a flyspeck compared to the much larger and more on-point suit against the prime brokers. Maybe the voice on the phone failed to mention it? Maybe she was advised not to confuse the readers with relevant data?
I could go on, and say mean-spirited things like Bethany, sweetie, please, stop phoning it in, nobody's fooled....but I won't. That would be beneath my stature as a holiday rodent who is such an object of unrequited love for so many hedge funds and shysters.
Read all Bethany's breathless prose, and consider whether it's any mystery to anyone anymore as to why the majority of the country views the mainstream media as a bunch of lying liars who would lie when the truth would serve them better. And folks at SABEW, before you use that slogan as your theme for next year's Greenberg party, I would ask you consider that last year's "We will crush anyone opposing us like dung beetles" soirée was a huge hit, and it might be better to keep with the "We can say or do anything we want, as we are Gods to these ants" theme.
Just trying to help. Hhmmm 'kay?