New York Magazine's Boy Genius Investor Made It All Up

http://observer.com/2014/12/exclusive-new-york-mags-boy-genius-investor-made-it-all-up/

by ColinWright • 12 years ago

226 132 12 years ago

danso• 12 years ago

Between this and the Rolling Stone U.Va-rape story...this has been a bad month for New York-based magazine reporting (and a boon for media critics). The NYmag reporter insists she made no error, because her lede paragraphs talks about a "rumor". Yeah, but the point of being a journalist is to find out the truth behind rumors, not just to say, "Hey, did you know that there are rumors about a high school boy?"

The reporter claims she saw "bank statements"...the validity of which seem to be in question if the boy has recanted everything. I wonder if she got taken in by the good-ol edit-the-HTML-of-official-documents-with-the-Web-inspector trick?

On the upside, at least this teenager doesn't have to bear eternal Internet shame for being part of a public prank/lie. His name is pretty much Google-proof, or at least as Google-proof as someone named "Jesus Christian" would be. That said...I just Googled "Mohammed Islam" and was pretty surprised to see all the top results relating to the young man at hand. I would've thought that Google's algorithm would've associated such a query with Islam the religion and the prophet Muhammad.

kristianc• 12 years ago

It might be Google's recency algorithm coming into play, or he could be coming unstuck through the variable spellings of Mohammed (of which, I think Muhammad is actually the most common, at least in the West.)

kmfrk• 12 years ago

Also Gladwell's plagiarism in the New Yorker.

hnnewguy2• 12 years ago

but the point of being a journalist is to find out the truth behind rumors

Agreed. Defending the story as reporting a rumour is even worse. As a journalist, being duped is one thing; not caring enough to print a real news story is another.

throwaway90446• 12 years ago

In both of the stories you cite, it's a case of journalists beginning with a narrative and then seeking a story to corroborate that narrative. Whether it's feel-bad narratives like "rape culture is rampant in fraternities" or feel-good narratives like "downtrodden teenager wins big with his pluck and smarts", journalism has become driven by narrative. It no longer reports news.

bobcostas55• 12 years ago

Cowen did a great talk against narratives a few years back: http://lesswrong.com/lw/8w1/transcript_tyler_cowen_on_storie...

Fede_V2• 12 years ago

I completely agree. It's also a consequence of trying to compete with outlets like Buzzfeed that produce a huge amount of low quality stories on a shoestring budget, then optimize the hell out of SEO to get very high traffic.

judk5• 12 years ago

What do you mean by "become" and "no longer"

jonifico• 12 years ago

I suppose Google's algorithm also bases itself on the current information trends at the time of searches, and with the ridiculously large amount of news stories about the kid, it is to be expected (I live in South America, and we also got a lot of reports about the kid).

Now, the kid is not your average school-goer, but definitely petite enough to get himself in this situation. I blame him, but definitely not as much as the reporter, this looked like a load of BS right from the moment I saw it.

jebus989• 12 years ago

In fairness the original "reporting" was for some buzzfeed-y 12 reasons to love New York, alongside "Because We Were All Taylor Swift Once" (which seems to be some tautology about being excited about NYC, not really sure). Anyway, over the last few hours Pressler switched her twitter to protected so I don't doubt she's getting sufficiently called out for this error.

kingkawn• 12 years ago

Do you think this is a reflection of New York-based magazine reporting in general?

nemanja5• 12 years ago

Yes, this story made me cringe really hard as I was reading it last evening. First off, if the reporter just bothered to speak with only one person who ever traded derivatives, she would have learned this was a complete hoax. Simply put, even if the kid started with $1m and ended up with say $60m after two years (being generous all around given the context), that would still amount to 6,000% return. Here is why that couldn't happen -

He made directional outright bets. In other words, say he bought call options betting for the price of the underlying security to go up. This is akin to buying underlying security with massive leverage. If the bet goes your way, you could make a massive return (for example, in Oct '05, I made ~1,000% one-day return on a very small amount buying Google out of the money calls expiring the next day and selling them in the money after stock picked up following earnings report). This is an incredibly dumb strategy and it is completely unscalable to the figures quoted in the article. First, public/listed options are incredibly illiquid in most stocks/securities, and particularly at strikes that could yield this return. This would limit him to making really small bets. Second, you would need a catalyst for a significant price move, which doesn't come too often, so most of the time you would just bleed your option time-value ("theta decay"). Finally, and most importantly, no one is lucky 100% of the time and this type of directional strategy is sure to backfire on you and cost you ~100% of principal (trust me, been there, done that)

He traded volatility. This is effectively a hedge fund strategy, where you buy the option and short the delta of the option in underlying security ("delta hedging"). The hedge gives you protection against the price moves in the underlying and you effectively make money for small moves in the security, regardless of whether it goes up or down (due to "convexity"). Most of the time, you earn pennies on the dollar as the price fluctuates a bit and you trade your delta, and perhaps some of the time you make a bit more if the price moves a lot ("gamma event"). Now, here is the kicker - this is not fool proof either. The strategy trades the risk in the price of the underlying security to the risk in volatility - in other words, if you buy volatility high and sell low, you will still lose money. Most listed options have notoriously bad bid/ask volatility spreads and retail investor would unlikely make any money consistently and reliably enough following this strategy. Needless to say - no way to scale it to the numbers quoted in the article using listed options. Hedge funds and derivative desks at banks mostly trade in OTC (Over The Counter) options which are bespoke bilateral contracts with a ton of protective provisions (averaging periods, stock borrow protection, illiquidity protection, etc) and they still have to take a view on volatility and they do get it wrong sometimes. Even for professionals who are wicked smart and do this day in and day out, the only reliable way to make money is to buy volatility on the cheap in a special situation.

There are a few other strategies that come to mind (e.g. Black Swan) but there has been either no catalyst to make it work or they would be inaccessible to a high school kid from Queens.

The second part that really made me cringe were all the negative references to SV by the kids and by the reporter in her subsequent Tweets. Reality of the situation is that, whatever you may think about early stage bubble in SV, SV tech companies actually create real value, have actual products and serve actual customers/users.

Finally, what is sad about all this is that Mohammed appears to be a smart talented kid and I can't help but think he tainted his prospects quite a bit with this debacle. On the other hand, all this makes a hell of a "what I learned from a failure" college essay.

judk5• 12 years ago

Colleges love celebrities, it gets their name in the news.

michaelochurch4• 12 years ago

I can't help to think he tainted his prospects quite a bit with this debacle.

I don't see it as a major mark against him. First, it's unclear that he, himself, tried to create the lie. Second, social proof arbitrage (which we both know isn't a real "arbitrage" but the hacking of peoples' reference-counting algorithms in order to establish personal credibility) is something that everyone does, especially in Silicon Valley where it's just a necessary social skill. It's just a bit juvenile to attach it to a rather verifiable claim of having made $72 million. The best social proof arbitrage is when you dishonestly represent the opinions of influential or reputable people, rather than creating false facts (that will eventually be refuted).

danielweber4• 12 years ago

He got one over on the media. His PR reps were in the room overruling questions. He knows exactly what he's doing.

applecore• 12 years ago

The claim was that his main markets were gold and oil futures, not other derivatives. It's technically possible in those markets to earn 100x in two years, albeit with extreme amounts of leverage. (You may be able to borrow twenty times the amount of funds you have in your account.)

noname123• 12 years ago

Ditto.

I was once told that in vol trading, if you're "making more than 60% a year, you're doing something wrong". The point being that with any option spreads, there is a risk-reward ratio, professional's care about money management than profit. You're trying to earn on the theta decay or vice versa, facing theta decay and banking on gamma moves. So you're either facing the death of a thousand paper-cuts with option time premium eroding your bankroll, or you're facing the LTCM catastrophic loss with the wrong kind of risk management.

Even when you trade directional, this past year, both realized and implied vol has been low, with VIX bouncing between 11-20 with median at 13 or 14; you can make lots of money long OTM options in 2008 or flash crash, basically you're playing Nassim Taleb's "long-tail"; this past year simply doesn't warrant that kind of performance unless you're doing some kind of OTM buying on biotech companies and betting correcting on a majority of your catalyst events.

judk5• 12 years ago

Google favors recent news sites over old general knowledge.

aikah2• 12 years ago

You forgot the BitCoin creator story,that was entirely fake.The guy didnt even know what Bitcoin was.Just because he was called Satoshi it was good enough for the journalist.

nodata• 12 years ago

It looks like at least one story is still up: http://nymag.com/news/articles/reasonstoloveny/2014/mohammed...

Can't find a reaction yet.

Edit: they updated it. "We presented it as a rumour all along".

couchand• 12 years ago

An unbelievable amount of money for anyone, not least a high-school student, but as far as rumors go, this one seemed legit.

thret• 12 years ago

This sounds suspiciously like the plot of a Farrelly brothers movie.

Rainymood• 12 years ago

No fucking shit. Seriously guys? Was this a surprise to anyone?

If it's too good to be true, then it probably is. Words to live by.

tomp• 12 years ago

On the other hand, Facebook did buy WhatsApp for $18bn.

frakkingcylons• 12 years ago

When they were bought, WhatsApp had hundreds of millions of users every month in parts of the world most companies barely reach.

This was a high school student supposedly beating the market to the tune of $72m during lunch period.

silverbax88• 12 years ago

I have to agree. I only saw the headline yesterday, but even quick mental math led me to think the headline was just clickbait.

nchlswu• 12 years ago

How much do PR firms cost? and how well off do you have to be to afford one?

ep103• 12 years ago

I'm going to guess in the ballpark of 72 million

MertsA• 12 years ago

I'd be really interested to know if the New York Magazine is footing the bill for the PR firm, it already looks quite bad on them and it could make sense for them to do so just to save face.

imjk2• 12 years ago

Not that this is the case here, but crisis PR firms would love the publicity from an event like this and many would be willing to take this on pro bono. If you think about it, this is a really easy case for the PR firm that brings huge amounts of publicity, so they're really getting their bang for their buck. The clients in this case are just high school "kids" whose story got taken out of context and exaggerated by the manipulative "media". Any wrong doing can really be swept under the rug with a sincere apology. Who can't relate to the follies of youth, esp when there's powerful media enterprise trying to exploit them?

bvm• 12 years ago

The fact the name of the PR firm is mentioned in the article probably means it's (at least in part) PR for the PR firm as much as anything.

filmgirlcw• 12 years ago

sigh

aroman2• 12 years ago

One thing I'm still confused about: if the parents have literally excommunicated him/functionally (temporarily) disowned him, who's idea was the PR firm, and moreover, who is paying for it?

awwstn• 12 years ago

They might be working for free as part of some sort of partnership. In the aftermath of this, a good PR firm would have no shortage of ideas for monetizing these kids' infamy. In fact, it's quite possible the NY Observer paid a pretty penny for this exclusive interview.

imjk2• 12 years ago

A crisis PR firm would love the publicity from an event like this and many would be willing to take these clients pro bono (not that they did in this case).

pavel_lishin2• 12 years ago

I doubt he's literally disowned. This sounds like some hyperbole on his part, as well as theirs. Look at the quote:

So what did your parents think when they’re reading that you’ve got $72 million? Mohammed Islam: Honestly, my dad wanted to disown me. My mom basically said she’d never talk to me. Their morals are that if I lie about it and don’t own up to it then they can no longer trust me. … They knew it was false and they basically wanted to kill me and I haven’t spoken to them since.

He didn't say they haven't spoken to him; they didn't say they did disown him. I've had my parents angry at me, to the point where they've yelled and said "I could kill you!" - but they're not literally going to murder him, and they're probably not literally disowning him.

aroman2• 12 years ago

I didn't mean to suggest they were literally disowning him — that's why i said "functionally" and "temporarily".

gadders• 12 years ago

Did anyone actually believe the story when they first read it? My first thought was "Yeah, right."

jonnathanson3• 12 years ago

I doubt anyone here believed it. The rest of the Internet? All bets are off.

Look at how many Buzzfeedy hoaxes get passed around like wildfire on Facebook, week after week, often by the same people in your circle. Some people -- and by "some," I mean a disappointingly large proportion of people -- don't think critically about what they encounter on the web. For them, it's not about the article. It's about the headline, and how the headline makes them feel about themselves, about the world, or about their friends. By the time they see a catchy or feel-good headline, they're already racing out to share it with everybody. If they actually get around to reading the article attached to the headline, the reading is incidental.

pwthornton2• 12 years ago

Honestly, this story is so unbelievable that it leads me to believe that many journalists have no idea how investing or the stock market work. Even if he started with $100,000 to invest, it would be an insane annual yield. A yield so high, that even crazy frauds like Bernie Madoff wouldn't promise it.

It's not that you couldn't make $72 million dollars by investing in the stock market in a few years, but rather that it would usually take a rather large principal to do so.

This isn't the same as the UVA rape story, as that took months of reporting and fact checking. That's one of the biggest journalistic mess ups in the last decade or so, and will have far reaching consequences for Rolling Stone. We'll be discussing the UVA rape story for the entire next episode of my podcast.

This is the more run-of-the-mill story about how a lot of journalists have so little knowledge about things outside of journalism that they get duped by these stupid and false feel good stories. This is more embarrassing than harmful.

talmand• 12 years ago

It seems that many "journalists" these days can't be bothered to learn much about anything that they "report" on.

I miss the old days of "two sources or we don't print".

danielweber4• 12 years ago

Just a few days ago the New York Times took a google translate of an Italian Huffington Post article as the source for a papal proclamation.

aikah2• 12 years ago

well nobody but advertisers is paying for that.How can you expect anything serious when your client isnt the reader?

ghshephard• 12 years ago

Bernie Madoff offered returns in the 10% range. If he had started with $100K, after three years, he would have claimed to have $33K in returns, for a total of $133K. Just to put these kids claims into perspective.

pwthornton2• 12 years ago

Yes. Madoff offered higher-than-normal returns but still something that looked plausible. Returns that could plausible food people.

There must be people who really think you can become rich just from trading stocks. But that's not how it works. When you have a lot of money, you can make more money by buying and trading stocks, index funds and other similar vehicles. Once you have enough money, you could certainly make millions a year in stock, but that requires you to have millions of dollars in the first place.

But the idea that you could take a small amount of money and a couple of years later have almost $100 million just from buying and trading stocks is not believable to anyone who has ever bought and sold stocks. This sounds like the plot of a bad (good?) Disney movie.

Most of my money is tied up in retirement accounts, but I do have some stock as well. If my individual stocks made 10% a year for several years in a row, I'd be very, very happy. With compounding interest and dividend reinvestment, that money can grow at a robust rate, but it's not going to make me rich.

This story almost sounds like the reporter kind of confused this with investing in IPOs and the current tech boom. You can make a much bigger return off of investing in startups early, but most random teenagers aren't able to buy into startups.

Fede_V2• 12 years ago

This is the really dangerous consequence of chasing after stories that have nice narratives. If a story fits your ideological narrative perfectly, you should be twice as skeptical - real life stories are messy, imperfect, and very rarely perfectly illustrate whatever theory you have in mind.

defen• 12 years ago

If a story fits your ideological narrative perfectly, you should be twice as skeptical

That's exactly what Richard Bradley said (first prominent person I know of who publicly doubted the Rolling Stone UVA story; he was Stephen Glass's editor at George magazine)

http://www.richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2014/11/24/is-t...

"The lesson I learned: One must be most critical, in the best sense of that word, about what one is already inclined to believe."

danielweber4• 12 years ago

On another forum I was on, there was a guy with the handle Japhy who coined Japhy's Law: that which you most want to be true is that which you should be most skeptical of.

It came up all the time in political discussions as various participants would pull in sources showing how their side was right, but would crumble when subjected to the slightest examination.

jordache• 12 years ago

Yes because ordering freshly squeeze apple juice at a place of eatery denotes baller status..

the author is crazy

omarchowdhury• 12 years ago

Well he's under 21 and a Muslim, so can't really drop $10K on the goose.

austenallred4• 12 years ago

The average person would be blown away at how sloppy (and really non-existent) fact-checking has become in the Internet age. Most people on HN seem to be a little bit pessimistic about it, but it's likely way worse than you think. Of course, we know that random people retweeting garbage on Twitter aren't fact-checking, but I'm talking about the largest media organizations around -- they just don't care enough to check.

We don't need to look any further for this than ISIS. Not only is ISIS controlling the whole world's talking points by carefully crafting what news they'll release, but they're spreading stories all the time that are completely bogus. Look, for example, at this story about ISIS crucifying one of its own members for corruption: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/06/27/.... It all started with a tweet from a now-deleted Twitter account, because ISIS wanted to spread the idea of how intense they are and how strongly they fight their perceived evil. So they plant a story about how they crucified one of their own members. Every media organization knows that's free pageviews, so they report it.

But look at the feature photo in that story, which constitutes most of the "tip" from the tweet. Do a reverse image search and you find the original source: It's a Danish Roman Catholic reenacting Christ's crucifixion in the Philippines. http://d.pr/i/183Sf. The story of the ISIS crucifixion was made up out of thin air, based on a photo that was easily discoverable (and in the AFP database), but now the lie is in every mainstream media publication I can think of, from CNN and The Telegraph to The Guardian and the New York Times. They didn't even have time for a reverse image search. And ISIS wins.

A lot of what my startup does is fact-check stuff that's going on in the media (it's a newsroom for the Internet - https://grasswire.com), and every media organization (and I mean every) from Al Arabiya and the New York Times to Newsweek to Rolling Stone and New York Magazine are quite frequently full of inaccuracies and intentional lies. Sometimes people catch these lies, a few people freak out for <24 hours, and we all forget about it.

The notion that a publication's relevance is based purely on its accuracy is, in my opinion, false. We don't have the time or energy to process which media organizations we trust and which have mislead us, because, unless we're ruthlessly sitting behind a computer fact-checking stuff, we probably don't even know that they're making mistakes in the first place. For every one person The Daily Mail pisses off by publishing its false stories, 100 people are reading it and saying, "Wow, The Daily Mail does some daring reporting." Very few people care anymore -- we don't have time to.

In Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, Ryan Holiday talks about how easy it is to get lies to spread throughout the Internet, and thereby all of mainstream media. The premise is very simple. You find someone at the bottom of the press pyramid - the person responsible for putting out 4 or 5 articles a day so that his or her publication can get enough pageviews to stay alive. There's not a chance that person can do any sort of verification. You send them a "tip," get a few smaller blogs to write about it, and the snowball starts rolling.

These publications all read each other, and most of them just want to pick up stories from each other and ride the wave of whatever's going viral. That's not just cat videos; that's stories about ISIS and Russian fighters in Ukraine and what we consider "hard news." The stuff we all talk about in the United States is mostly driven by PR folks who are carefully planting stories that push their agenda forward. In most other countries it's even worse. Few of my Russian friends are even aware of the fall of the Rouble and the pending collapse of their own economy.

I don't know what the solution is (I'm trying to find/create one), and I don't want to pretend like this has only happened since the Internet came into existence, but I find most people put way too much trust in the press machine we've created. I would like to think that somewhere there are independent reporters and people who are digging up stories, but I've come to realize that most stories aren't ever dug up - they're pitched.

coob• 12 years ago

There are websites that fact check politicians, call them out on big lies, give them ratings etc. Why isn't there the same for mainstream news?

austenallred4• 12 years ago

I don't know; I'm trying to create one (https://grasswire.com)

judk5• 12 years ago

http://fair.org

Who is going to pay for it?

bsg754• 12 years ago

Probably because fact checking can be a time consuming, and therefore costly process, and by skipping it, mainstream news can push more "live feeds" (news from Facebook and Twitter), in an attempt to be First and Exclusive.

There is a negative ROI on research for the media, and thus they have no incentive to be accurate or factual, because consumers lap it up even when it is sensational, unbelievable, or just plain wrong.

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

I can't believe I'm doing this, but relevant XKCD. https://xkcd.com/978/ I fully agree that this is a problem, and social networks just make it worse.

hnnewguy2• 12 years ago

And ISIS wins.

Honest question: what exactly is ISIS "winning" by depicting their group as crucifying members that they couldn't accomplish by, say, actually crucifying members?

Don't get me wrong, I agree with essentially everything in your post; the planted stories, how virality works, the lack of any diligence in fact-checking, the state of modern media in general. I just don't understand your reasoning for ISIS wanting to plant the story, rather than some stupid teenager in Wisconsin.

austenallred4• 12 years ago

It's not about ISIS crucifying or not crucifying its members; it's about ISIS constantly deciding exactly what we're talking about.

Most of ISIS's PR strategy would rightly seem insane to most of us, but ISIS wants to amplify how extremist they are. They want to be perceived as a group willing to do anything for their cause. With every story they're saying, "We are creating a perfect Islamic state, and nothing in our way will stop us. You should both fear and respect us."

There's an interesting PR term called "agenda setting." You can't dictate whether or not people agree with you, but you can decide which angle they're looking at you from.

The beheading of US journalists was completely intentional. They wanted us to be afraid of how ruthless they are. Now we're getting stories of "Teenage boy from country X left his family to join ISIS." That's just them recruiting.

The sad part of all this isn't that ISIS has a PR machine, but that we're so awful at detecting it, and that we let them get away with it even when it's made up out of whole cloth.

typicalbender• 12 years ago

My guess is ISIS has a public reputation they want to uphold which is an amplification of what they're actually doing. By planting the story they benefit from the extremist world view without having to actually commit the act that the story is about. Its also faster to make up a story and leak it than going out and actually finding corruption and do the act for real.

kordless• 12 years ago

Control the conversation.

carsongross3• 12 years ago

4th Generation warfare is mainly about legitimacy, particularly of non-state actors. ISIS is fighting to be seen as the legitimate representative of Iraq and a broader caliphate, and self-policing corruption furthers that goal.

I highly recommend reading Bill Lind's stuff on 4G warfare, which helps make sense of lots of things in modern warfare: why massive armies don't win wars, why the pentagon is infatuated with expensive technologies, why 4G combatants act the way they do, etc.

ilamont• 12 years ago

You're right, it didn't start with the Internet. But the arrival of the Internet, and the simultaneous dismantling of publishers' editorial checks, has amplified the trend.

It's also led to this weird reverberation effect, as false news is sometimes rediscovered and re-reported on secondary blogs, news sites, and forums. One example is this bogus quote, supposedly uttered by Mariah Carey:

"When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world. I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff."

In the summer of 1996, the quote appeared on a satirical news site and was re-reported as fact by MSM sources, including The Independent and the San Francisco Chronicle. Fifteen years later, the hoax was still being perpetuated by celebrity blogs and online forums.

DenisM• 12 years ago

I'm paying good money for NYT subscription, and I would easily pay a bit extra to have another party fact-check it. Say, $20 per year is a no-brainer.

You'd have to do it well, though - if you screw up, which you will on occasion , I expect a full report as to how it happened.

bsg754• 12 years ago

I would easily pay a bit extra to have another party fact-check it

As would I, and likely many HN readers. But I expect most of the NYT subscribership who would be willing to pay extra are a small minority.

Agustus• 12 years ago

As we struggle through this point in our history of what news is, we must remember that journalism ebbs and flows on its integrity. Look back to the 1880's where yellow journalism was rampant (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Puck11218...) and could be faulted for the Spanish-American war.

Journalist and the newspapers they work for must find a way to get you the reader to part with your money to fund their enterprises. The online sites do this through link baiting, local newspapers do this through circulars/coupons and piggybacking onto the latest outrage (classifieds died when craigslist was created), and the TV stations rely on murders, perceived and actual racism (George Zimmerman's audio recording being doctored to appear racist) and missing children to get viewers.

The amount of time that it takes to properly source, investigate, corroborate, and expose a story is nothing compared to the piggybacking approach. Example 1 is the University of Virgina fraternity rape story: A single reporter writes up a fantastic expose on a UVA fraternity hazing procedure that includes an alleged gang rape, friends pleading to rape victim not to go to police, and a university system appearing not to care. The correct approach would be to interview the victim, the alleged perpetrators, the university, and the friends to get an idea. Each of these individuals must be contacted, a source found, agree to be a source and then be on record, this all takes time; if you estimate a week per source (very generous) and there are 15 must contact sources (those involved with the alleged gang rape and those friends), that is 15 weeks worth of just putting together information. Then write up the story, anywhere from one to two weeks. Get the editor and the ombudsman to sign off on the sources and information, one week. You have almost 20 weeks invested into a single article, for Rolling Stones that is 5 magazines before getting a single article. And then, at any point the story could turn out to be suspicious to bogus.

Now, be any of the TV shows / newspapers and you simply pull a Puffington Host and extract parts of the story and refer to them in snippets and viola, you save yourself 20 weeks of time and money. That is why the Ryan Holiday stuff is not too surprising.

sharkweek2• 12 years ago

Exactly - Look at the Serial podcast, I'd consider this one of the better pieces of journalism in the past few years. But it took her six months (maybe more?) and countless hours of research, investigation and interviews to produce. At the end of the day, this piece will do pretty well, but in those six months, The Huffington Post's on the internet have put out tens of thousands of articles garnering billions of ad impressions. Fortunately we're left with an extremely interesting story in Serial, but imagine if 2-3 months into all that hard work the whole thing fell apart? All that work for nothing? Not worth the risk for major publications.

No idea what the solution is here, very difficult problem.

drgath• 12 years ago

In 1835, the New York Sun (a serious newspaper [0], 1833-1855) published some articles [1] describing alien civilizations on the moon that can be seen through a new telescope in South Africa.

From Wired,

The Sun, ever the champion of the public good, claimed, no joke, that it was actually all a public service… to get the nation to stop worrying so much for a second about that whole slavery thing.

So, there are good journalists, bad journalists, "journalists" who aren't even journalists, and they've all existed since the birth of the printing press.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_%28New_York%29

[1] http://www.wired.com/2014/12/fantastically-wrong-thomas-dick...

United857• 12 years ago

Why link to an screenshot of the crucifixion story, and not the source itself? I was quite interested in taking a look at the original article.

austenallred4• 12 years ago

Because you had to dig through the "slider" to get to the image being referenced, and I feared it would be confusing. Here's the original story http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2014/04/20/20...

michaelochurch4• 12 years ago

Charismatic falsehoods are a real problem in the media, especially because they're usually connected to an underlying truth that they take down, as well, when they're shot down.

Take the UVa rape case. This sort of thing happens often (and definitely not just at UVa) and the perpetrators often get away with it, because they tend to come from upper-middle and upper-class backgrounds and have access to the best legal representation their parents can buy. It's disgusting. Unfortunately, the holes in this particular story are going to lead people to conclude that fraternity-house rape isn't a problem because this one case was "refuted" (even though it's not clear that it has been refuted, only that she recalled some of the details incorrectly).

The "boy genius" making $72 million is another charismatic falsehood. The underlying truth is that the upper classes aren't any smarter or more competent than the middle classes. We like being reminded of that, when a public-school student (granted, from one of the best public high schools in the world) beats the pants off the market. Sadly (?) it turns out this was achieved in simulation rather than with real money, and 'nemanja already addressed why it would be hard to pull off on the real market. Unfortunately, the rich twats who control all the social access and the jobs where one can actually have a $72M impact are going to read this story and conclude that "the poors are just dishonest".

Being somewhat of an expert on the startup career, I'm familiar as well with the aggressive use of charismatic falsehood that people have to use to advance their own careers and gain credibility/worthiness in front of investors. They concoct a story that is factually false but, as they see it, betrays an underlying truth (pertaining to their own competence). Unfortunately, if they get caught, it takes down (i.e. falsely refutes) the underlying truth along with the (usually small) lie.

usefulcat• 12 years ago

"Sadly (?) it turns out this was achieved in simulation rather than with real money.."

Actually he says directly that he doesn't know where she got the $72M figure. He doesn't say in this interview exactly how much he would have made in simulation, only that "The simulated trades percentage was extremely high relative to the S&P". The point being that I don't see any evidence here to support that claim that he made anywhere near $72M even in a simulation.

bsg754• 12 years ago

Charismatic falsehoods are a real problem in the media,

No, printing false information is a real problem in the media.

Charisma is a whitewashing of the real problem - honesty in journalism. By failing to do the most basic topic research, or any fact checking of any kind, they are simply publishing falsehoods and lies in the name of profit. Essentially the same motivations that drive the issues above.

connie_lingus• 12 years ago

yes...at a lower level i believe its called "confirmation bias" and we are all guilty of it, no matter how hard we try.

glenra2• 12 years ago

Take the UVA rape case. This sort of thing happens often

By "this sort of thing" you mean the violent premeditated (large) gang rape of a sober, unwilling victim as part of an official fraternity event? No, that does NOT happen often. It seems unlikely that it has ever happened even once outside of fictional stories. Which is exactly what made the claim newsworthy.

Think about the situation described - it implies that 9 (nine!) young men with everything to lose conspired to commit a felony act that could ruin all of them if discovered and believed - an act easily traceable back to them - and then released the victim knowing that nobody would ever believe her word over theirs AND knowing none of them would ever spill the beans.

This is a movie-plot threat.

The story is only plausible if you start out with the assumption that frat members are ALL an oddly incorruptible strain of pure mustache-twirling cartoon evil AND you also assume that "rape culture" values completely guarantee the woman wouldn't be taken seriously.

Whereas relaxing either assumption in favor of ordinary common sense renders the UVA story absurd.

even though it's not clear that it has been refuted, only that she recalled some of the details incorrectly

She recalled ALL of the details incorrectly. Essentially every claim that could be checked has not borne out.

jazzyk• 12 years ago

Define "often" - rape rates have declined dramatically in recent years in the US, but you would not know it, judging by media-driven hysteria.

Let's go by the numbers, not by emotions:

The decline in rape since 1993: 60% [http://www.statisticbrain.com/rape-statistics/]

dpweb• 12 years ago

In defense of the mag, this kid did produce a forged bank statement. They didn't take just his word on it.

danielweber4• 12 years ago

From the linked article. (Maybe a better headline would be "Stuyvesant kid has PR reps.")

Where did Jessica Pressler come up with the $72 million figure?

I honestly don’t know. The number’s a rumor.

She said ‘have you made $72 million’?

[I led her to believe] I had made even more than $72 million on the simulated trades.

At this point the PR reps jumped in with Law & Order style objections. A conference outside the room ensued. Back into the room came Mr. Islam.

eastbayjake2• 12 years ago

The author's Twitter account is now protected, but when it was public yesterday she was tweeting about the bank statement:

"@helaineolen @felixsalmon @ReformedBroker We saw a bank statement confirming the eight figures, & I'm comfortable with what's in the piece"

— Jessica Pressler (@jpressler) December 15, 2014

Source: http://twitchy.com/2014/12/15/reporter-who-broke-bogus-72-mi...

makomk2• 12 years ago

Something similar happened with the story about 4chan supposedly threatening to release nudes of Emma Watson a few months back. That was started through a plausible-looking but completely fake news site run by the hoaxers, who also set up a website for the hoax. A few seconds Googling would've shown that the news site was fake - there were months-old articles linking it to the hoaxers behind it and explaining how they'd tricked the mainstream media before - but enough sites were willing to jump on the story based on that one bogus report on a fake site, and then their stories helped to convince the rest of the media to go with it, and soon everyone was reporting on it. Critical facts like the claim it was started by 4chan had literally no source other than the fake news site, but by the time it hit the major news sites they'd been thoroughly laundered of their source.

wavefunction• 12 years ago

Pretty sure that the "hoaxers" were a PR firm trying to get 4chan shutdown.

seventytwo• 12 years ago

Seems like it's ripe for an overhaul of journalism based on more scientific principles. Seriously, a business model where everything is vigorously fact-checked, sources cited, and reason applied. This form of news will be slower to print than the "shoot now, ask questions later" form of journalism we see today, but I think there is a real thirst for it in the market place.

I don't have the time or energy to sift through 10 metric tons of bullshit or spend three hours in my day doing my own investigation. I would prefer to hear the news a day late, but know it is well-researched and factual.

Make all of this super transparent and apparent. Make it very well known that your site will be slower, but more accurate, and that you rely on donations/subscriptions. Make it very well known that by supporting you, the readers are undermining the awful state the media is in and usurping the corporate/governmental tentacles in other forms of media.

untog2• 12 years ago

This form of news will be slower to print than the "shoot now, ask questions later" form of journalism we see today, but I think there is a real thirst for it in the market place.

Unfortunately, I suspect you are wrong.

gaius• 12 years ago

Seems like it's ripe for an overhaul of journalism based on more scientific principles. Seriously, a business model where everything is vigorously fact-checked, sources cited, and reason applied

Like say the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

superuser2• 12 years ago

What you are describing used to be the goal at respectable institutions. At some, it was even the norm. My dad was a copy editor for 25 years - this is what they do. Ask any of the thousands of professional copy editors laid off by city papers in the last 10 years; they would all be elated to do real work again.

The market has become to efficient to allow for a large staff of professionals who do slow, technically unnecessary work and don't contribute to revenue growth.

If you can find a way to pay for it, you win. But traditional newspapers have tried - their business depended on it - and none of them cracked it. So everybody laid off most of their staff and became a thinly veiled BuzzFeed.

I can tell you that there are hundreds to thousands of disgruntled idealistic professionals collecting unemployment/"freelancing" and if you offered them a decent middle-class salary to do their jobs again, they'd flock to you instantly.

zevyoura• 12 years ago

Sounds like The New Yorker's model (along with Harper's, etc. though the NYer is probably most known for its rigorous fact checking department[0]).

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/09/checkpoints

hindsightbias2• 12 years ago

How do we know they really didn't crucify one of their members and the IT guy just got lazy with pics because the camera phone one was fuzzy?

I don't disagree with your overall point. My assumption since the invasion of Grenada was every domestic source was trying to mislead me. I listened to RCI, DW shortwave coverage of the invasion for 8 hours before the embargoed US networks mentioned it.

Today, I doubt there's any delta between domestic and foreign sources. RT is a propaganda organ, but I trust it more for US foreign policy coverage than US sources.

vitd2• 12 years ago

There's a general rule when trying to determine facts. The one making the claim has the burden of proof to prove it true. If you say you crucified someone, it's on you to show that you did that. If you're too lazy to take and release a reasonable photo, it's not on us to believe you actually did it. Same goes for bigfoot, UFOs, and reporting who won the Super Bowl.

tim333• 12 years ago

but now the lie is in every mainstream media publication I can think of, from CNN and The Telegraph to The Guardian and the New York Times. And ISIS wins.

I've just been googling for a few minutes and I can't find it in any of those. Maybe it was and they took it down? The most mainstream source I could find that still has it is Yahoo news uk / IB Times (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/isis-militants-brutally-execute-co...)

I think the internet's power to debunk things must help a bit.

2600• 12 years ago

What's your opinion on Infobitt? http://www.infobitt.com/

digikata2• 12 years ago

I would love to subscribe to a news outlet that did nothing but put popular stories under the microscope, fact-checking and even putting an uncertainty value of various facts - not just presenting them in black and white, and then putting the story into a larger context. e.g. here are the facts for this plane crash, but here are how many of this class of plane crash per year in the last x years, etc...

There would be lag, but maybe if they timed things right, they could be able to hit the final downslope of a story, becoming the best & last word.

vitd2• 12 years ago

NPR's "On The Media" has been doing this for decades. They have a podcast you can subscribe to for free. It's an hour each week and usually dissects the weeks news stories, often pointing out when the stories were completely wrong. You can find the podcast on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts from.

scintill76• 12 years ago

But look at the feature photo in that story, which constitutes most of the "tip" from the tweet.

I'm late so I doubt you'll see this, but I don't understand what you're saying here. The Al Arabiya feature photo clearly states it's an AFP file photo. There are no references to a tweet, and certainly no direct claims that it's an actual photo of the executed man, or that it's their "source" for claims that ISIS crucified someone. Maybe they are giving too strong of false implications about the photo, but I don't follow your jump to "made up out of thin air" just because a file photo was used for illustration. I could agree the story sounds shaky, but not based on the evidence you gave here.

joeblau2• 12 years ago

Is there anything in place to ensure accountably of news releases in news organizations? I'm pretty sure that if enough of this happens; the reputation of the news organization will suffer.

TheOtherHobbes• 12 years ago

Is there anything in place to ensure accountably of news releases in news organizations?

News organisations are in the business of shaping public opinion and/or providing public entertainment. They're not in the business of encouraging informed debate - which is a minority interest at best, and bad for business at worst.

So - no. There is no accountability in journalism or in media ownership.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

Is there anything in place to ensure accountably of news releases in news organizations?

Who do you want ensuring accountability? A government? Another private entity?

joeblau2• 12 years ago

Say I'm a news Agency with multiple broadcast mechanisms and I continually post incorrect information that in turn ends up destroying private citizens lives; Is there any recourse that private citizens can take against the organization?

For example, can you take legal action for defamation of character?

stale2002• 12 years ago

Good on these Stuy kids!

The media will print anything, and they deserve to be messed with every now and then.

All in all, it was a really funny prank!

dkrich• 12 years ago

I don't understand why anybody would be blaming them. This is 100% on the author of the story and NY Mag. They published the story, it's their responsibility to fact-check it. I for one think it's hilarious that they got this story run at all, although I can understand the stress of being at the center of a hoax and all of the attention it brings.

cmollis• 12 years ago

wait.. is this story a lie too?

judk5• 12 years ago

Didn't we just have the bogus story of the kid who made $300k on penny stocks?

kyleblarson• 12 years ago

He pulled numbers out of thin air to artificially inflate returns and paint a rosy picture of his personal economy? I'm sure the US Federal Reserve is already actively recruiting him.

michaelochurch4• 12 years ago

This feels slightly "Black Mirror" but, to me, it's inevitable. It's a charismatic story. It's somewhat of an advertorial, not just for a person, but for an idea: that someone at Stuyvesant (which is full of high-talent, mostly middle-class, students because the truly wealthy go to schools like Dalton that deliver Harvard if you show up for class, and Stanford as a consolation prize) can make $72 million on his wits alone. I would want to believe it, were I not knowledgeable enough on finance to smell the bullshit.

The current corporate world is built on lies, repeated often enough until they become truth (reputation, prestige, credibility). There are facts, and occasionally those hit back against an aggressive lie; but most of what drives economic life (especially at the individual level) is brand and reputation and social proof. How many corporate executives got there without lying about their CVs, polishing their career histories and accomplishments, and generally manicuring their reputations using a number of tools including deceit? Probably zero. Occasionally, some corporate executive gets caught in a lie and is scapegoated, usually because he was stupid and lied about something easily refutable like where he went to college... even though they all do it.

The sad thing here is that we're talking about a teenager who (a) stood to gain next to nothing and (b) probably didn't intend for any of this to happen at all. The disgusting thing is that, if he takes a fall for this, then he'll have fallen not because of any deception but because of social class. A middle-class kid makes the middle-class mistake of (possibly) lying about something that can be refuted, and gets burned. An upper-class kid gets a $5 million seed round on parental connections and Stanford Welfare (a more pernicious lie, because it looks like merit) and gets away with it, being allowed to play CEO for years until "adult supervision" is brought in to administer a company that he still owns.

bullbozer• 12 years ago

Whoa, slow down there. Your post is littered with assumptions.

Probably zero How do you know this, exactly?

even though they all do it Again, how do you know this?

An upper-class kid gets a $5 million seed round on parental connections and Stanford Welfare (a more pernicious lie, because it looks like merit) and gets away with it Simply making up a hypothetical scenario does not support whatever point you are attempting to make here. Is there a specific example you are referring to? And besides, what exactly is this hypothetical upper-class kid "getting away with"?

coverband• 12 years ago

If anyone fron NYMag is reading this -- I'm the son of late Nigerian king Joseph Mabadu and would like to share my billion-dollar fortune with him if he can help me transfer my wealth out of the country. As a show of good faith, I'm also willing to hand him over my title for the Brooklyn Bridge. Please call urgently to discuss...

bsg754• 12 years ago

There are no journalists anymore. Just a bunch of social media junkies rushing to be "first".

larakerns• 12 years ago

The average news consumer expects bite sized, outrageous chunks of information to wash down with lunch – it's a two way stream of degradation.

eastbayjake2• 12 years ago

The real shame is that this article would have still been great even if she'd done the fact-checking and found out he was lying. You've got two kids in suits buying apple juice and caviar, trying to convince a grown woman that he's worth $72 million. It's the makings of a great Vice article. I would have loved to read about these two kids as they try to pull a highly-transparent confidence scam while all the adults in the room know they're lying.

wnevets• 12 years ago

People enjoy pretending hard journalism is the rule rather than the exception. Having the internet & cable news destroy it is just another part of the fantasy TV shows like The Newsroom enjoy telling.

razzaj• 12 years ago

In my opinion the VAST majority of people never fact check, and most of the remaining people don't fact check unless the reporter's views strongly conflict with their own. In the current case being discussed, some embarrassment, and probably some figurative spanking are the aftermath.

In other more serious cases (crime, armed conflict, group terrorism, state terrorism) the aftermath of such a pattern is much more dramatic.

The hard truth is that media outlets need money to survive, to get that money they do two things: publish News/views that won't upset people paying for ads; and publish scoops that sell. No one is going to read a magazine or news "paper" that is broke.

But the hard question is: how do you effectively encourage properly done objective journalism? Is there a Reddit style karma scheme for news outlets? I imagine this will be effective if taken into account as an SEO signal.

mbesto• 12 years ago

And the real winners here? The media.

New York Magazine's Boy Genius Investor Made It All Up

Related Stories