To discourage New Yorkers from voting for Zohran Mamdani, the Wall Street Journal published ten op-eds in a single week casting him in a negative light.
Even more sad, its more of an apsirationally, i see myself as a rich business person, oriented propoganda.
Its for wannabes and the low to mid level management crowd, small business owners who like to pretend they understand economics beyond ‘underpay my workers’.
WSJ readers are basically the people who watch SqwuakBox and Jim Cramer…
Actually clever rich people may read the WSJ from time to time, but they’re gonna be spending more time reading esoteric industry specific journals, following the actual appearances and conferences of the people who the WSJ writes about, to make actual investment and business strategies with.
Education is Ignorance
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995, pp. 19-23, 27-31
… Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, two economists, in their work on the American educational system some years back… pointed out that the educational system is divided into fragments. The part that’s directed toward working people and the general population is indeed designed to impose obedience. But the education for elites can’t quite do that. It has to allow creativity and independence. Otherwise they won’t be able to do their job of making money. You find the same thing in the press. That’s why I read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and Business Week. They just have to tell the truth. That’s a contradiction in the mainstream press, too. Take, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. They have dual functions and they’re contradictory. One function is to subdue the great beast. But another function is to let their audience, which is an elite audience, gain a tolerably realistic picture of what’s going on in the world. Otherwise, they won’t be able to satisfy their own needs. That’s a contradiction that runs right through the educational system as well. It’s totally independent of another factor, namely just professional integrity, which a lot of people have: honesty, no matter what the external constraints are. That leads to various complexities. If you really look at the details of how the newspapers work, you find these contradictions and problems playing themselves out in complicated ways….
So for starters, I agree with Chomsky broadly here, he isn’t wrong that… its good to keep up on what a class or segment of people read if you want to know how their brains work, how they think, what they often do not even realize they hold as unchallengeable beliefs… and that when you’re in a cultural (?) space for corpos, you get to see what they’re actually worried about, vs what they project outward to a more general, mass audience.
To specifically answer your question:
No, it hasn’t changed that much.
WSJ, FT, The Economist…
yeah, they’re all generally in that same boat, I am just telling you as a former corpo, former executive level data analyst, that most of what is in those is basically just the bougie version of a gossip rag, lifestyle pieces.
A bougie lifestyle piece just is the latest ‘enlightened’ perspective to have on monetary nterest rate policy or whatever.
Its like Patrick Bateman.
Most of them don’t really care, beyond perfecting the brand that is their own corporate persona.
The people that actually know what they are talking about may yes, read these occasionally, semi-regularly, just to generally keep abreast of things, but the really powerful data and announcements are in industry journals, and most of the time, the really important conversations and missives are not publicly available.
If you have access to or know how to read those, you have a 90% chancd of knowing what the FT, WSJ, and Economist are going to be talking about in 6 weeks to 6 months.
Even more sad, its more of an apsirationally, i see myself as a rich business person, oriented propoganda.
Its for wannabes and the low to mid level management crowd, small business owners who like to pretend they understand economics beyond ‘underpay my workers’.
WSJ readers are basically the people who watch SqwuakBox and Jim Cramer…
Actually clever rich people may read the WSJ from time to time, but they’re gonna be spending more time reading esoteric industry specific journals, following the actual appearances and conferences of the people who the WSJ writes about, to make actual investment and business strategies with.
Reminds me of this, though:
Education is Ignorance Noam Chomsky Excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995, pp. 19-23, 27-31
https://chomsky.info/warfare02/
WSJ changed a lot since then?
So for starters, I agree with Chomsky broadly here, he isn’t wrong that… its good to keep up on what a class or segment of people read if you want to know how their brains work, how they think, what they often do not even realize they hold as unchallengeable beliefs… and that when you’re in a cultural (?) space for corpos, you get to see what they’re actually worried about, vs what they project outward to a more general, mass audience.
To specifically answer your question:
No, it hasn’t changed that much.
WSJ, FT, The Economist…
yeah, they’re all generally in that same boat, I am just telling you as a former corpo, former executive level data analyst, that most of what is in those is basically just the bougie version of a gossip rag, lifestyle pieces.
A bougie lifestyle piece just is the latest ‘enlightened’ perspective to have on monetary nterest rate policy or whatever.
Its like Patrick Bateman.
Most of them don’t really care, beyond perfecting the brand that is their own corporate persona.
The people that actually know what they are talking about may yes, read these occasionally, semi-regularly, just to generally keep abreast of things, but the really powerful data and announcements are in industry journals, and most of the time, the really important conversations and missives are not publicly available.
If you have access to or know how to read those, you have a 90% chancd of knowing what the FT, WSJ, and Economist are going to be talking about in 6 weeks to 6 months.
That’s very interesting, thanks