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).
By doing the exact opposite kind of journalism as this, it ended up being a very good article!
I think all of those rules are explicitly against actual journalism, unless they’re supposed to be ironic. It is unwise to make ironic rules. Ignorant and autistic people that either do not understand how they’re ironic, or just miss the irony, will be learning the wrong lesson.
The original post mentions them as things that demonstrate bad journalism - I was indeed facetiously mentioning them here because I’m impressed this article is excellent because it avoids every one of them and does the exact opposite (e.g. “don’t quote an expert”, immediately quotes an expert to rebut the claims)
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I’m not a big fan of the tone of my original comment either, but I’m not sure how to fix it (besides the edit at the bottom)
This article breaks almost every rule of proper “CEO said a thing” journalism!
By doing the exact opposite kind of journalism as this, it ended up being a very good article!
I think all of those rules are explicitly against actual journalism, unless they’re supposed to be ironic. It is unwise to make ironic rules. Ignorant and autistic people that either do not understand how they’re ironic, or just miss the irony, will be learning the wrong lesson.
The original post mentions them as things that demonstrate bad journalism - I was indeed facetiously mentioning them here because I’m impressed this article is excellent because it avoids every one of them and does the exact opposite (e.g. “don’t quote an expert”, immediately quotes an expert to rebut the claims)
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I’m not a big fan of the tone of my original comment either, but I’m not sure how to fix it (besides the edit at the bottom)