Facts Matter
Capital Thinking • Issue #570 • View online
It’s really too bad that reporters don’t pay attention to facts and don’t do the hard work of actually digging through the story to report the facts instead of shaping the news.
-Jeff Carter
Silly Journalists Facts Are For Kids
Jeff Carter | Points and Figures:
Yesterday I saw an article from Bloomberg that talked about how a meat plant in South Dakota had an incidence of Wuhan Flu. Smithfield shut the plant down. South Dakota doesn’t have a lot of the same restrictions as other states. It’s pretty Republican there.
The tone of the article was that America is in danger of running out of food because of Wuhan Flu. Here is a quote.
“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.
It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running. These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation’s livestock farmers.
These farmers have nowhere to send their animals,” said Kenneth M. Sullivan, president and chief executive officer, for Smithfield.
You know who owns Smithfield right? If you guessed the Chinese you’d be right.
As we have learned, if you are owned or work for the Chinese you don’t have freedom of speech.
What’s the executive going to say?
Reporters just aren’t that smart these days.
They have zero curiosity. Not only that, most of report via the blue lens which only furthers their bias.
Wouldn’t you think they might fact check Mr. Sullivan?
Wouldn’t they look at a market to see if what was going on in the market matched the statements of executives?
Probably not since we all have been taught markets are broken, rigged, fixed or something else.
The truth is free markets allocate resources and disseminate information better than any centralized authority.