To Read, Or Not To Read

Yesterday, Christopher Mims of MIT’s Technology Review took on the challenge of taking a step back from the screaming to look into what’s really going on behind the latest Bitchmeme. Reading his take, it occurs to me that Mims, and probably many others, are completely missing something very fundamental going on here.

Mims argues that investments make us unreasonably biased and conflicted, yadda yadda. Same argument, different day. He even cites this tweet:

…which is funny because from 1997 until 2005, Disney owned a Major League Baseball team, the Anaheim Angels. Guess who else Disney owned during that time? Yep. ESPN. 

From 1993 until 2005, Disney also owned the National Hockey League team, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Again, they owned ESPN at the time as well. 

If you want one other example (there are many), how about the fact that The New York Times owns a stake in the Boston Red Sox.

Weird, huh? This all must be very hilarious to Downtown Josh Brown. 

Anyway. The very obvious point that Mims and others fail to mention is that no one is forcing anyone to do anything. If you don’t want to read what Michael and I write, don’t.

If you think we’re unreasonably biased and conflicted, do not visit our sites, cite our work, etc. Why would you? 

The real problem our critics have is that an ever-increasing number of people do read what we write. The old guard doesn’t like that one bit because we’re not doing it their way. But they can’t do a damn thing about it besides bitch and moan. Too bad. The readers ultimately decide, not you.

Meanwhile, our conflicted coverage of the Path situation this week included information such as the fact that while there was no question that Path needed to (and did) fix the issue, many others were guilty as well. As was Apple. And we noted that Apple was on the verge of fixing this whole situation.

Sure enough, scanning the news today: Yep. Yep. And yep.

You could have gotten early insight into all of today’s news by reading our posts over the past week. Instead, the cycle turned into a shitstorm of nonsense that ultimately doesn’t matter in the slightest. 

The fact remains: if you want to read, great! If you don’t, great! It’s completely up to you.