By Karl Bode

There are, in my mind, a few rules for "CEO said a thing!" journalism if it's to qualify:

• You can never directly challenge anything the CEO said, even if the CEO has a long history of false or misleading promises and claims.
• You can never include any useful historical context about the company or executives' past statements, even if they've been proven repeatedly wrong. The CEO's comments should always exist in a magic vacuum.
• You should never, under any circumstances, actually take the time to talk to, and quote, an objective expert or academic in the field you're writing about, especially if they're inclined to criticize the CEO. This can slow down publication time and impact the quest for news-cycle ad traffic.
• You can never return back to the claims to inform your readership whether they were actually true (this is especially true of CEO promises made before giant, pointless, disastrous mergers).

When I entered the journalism industry sideways as a telecom beat reporter, I quickly noticed that most U.S. journalism – especially U.S. business journalism – wasn't particularly interested in context or the truth. 

I'd look around and read mainstream coverage of the broadband giants I wrote about, noticing they didn't mention these were lumbering, anti-competitive, unethical monopolies coddled and created by corruption. I thought it was weird, but young and insecure, I thought maybe the problem was somehow me. 

But as I got older it became very clear to me that most of these outlets really weren't interested in conveying factual reality to readers. They were interested in building an elaborate alternate reality with one central function: coddle unchecked wealth accumulation with a vast scaffolding of strange mythologies.