FIRE EYE OR BLOOD SHOT – FINANCIAL TIMES WEAPONIZES REPORTING TO SAVE FINANCIAL COLLAPSE OF BUSINESS
By John Helmer, Moscow
A fact which nobody can verify is usually a fiction, sometimes a lie. In the business of reporting news for sale, the demand for lies is less than the supply, so profit is bound to turn into loss. The only successful business models for reporting and repeating lies are government propaganda and commercial pornography.
Last July, when the Japanese Nikkei group paid £884 million for the Financial Times – saving Pearson Plc from reporting a loss for the financial year – Nikkei’s chief executive Tsuneo Kita said: “Our motto of providing high-quality reporting on economic and other news, while maintaining fairness and impartiality, is very close to that of the FT. We share the same journalistic values. Together, we will strive to contribute to the development of the global economy.” If Kita was asked how much money he would spend on Sam Jones to sell lies about Russia three times a week, he would do more than ask: “Sam Who?”
There are 558,000 people named Jones in the UK; 1.6 million in the US. Altogether, 2.2 million. Among the Sam Joneses, of whom there are more than a thousand, the majority would never think of repeating, unverified, every word passed in a classified file from US intelligence, British MI6 and NATO. There is just one Sam Jones in the world who does that. At the Financial Times office in London, he is called “defence and security editor”.
In Boolean searches on the internet, the AND operator returns a value of TRUE if both its operands are TRUE, and FALSE otherwise. If you are paying Nikkei for the Jones defence and security stories each week, you are getting double the falsehood for your money.
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