RUTHFULLY YOURS

Common decency and morality, not to mention US law, prohibit not hiring an individual on the basis of race, creed, gender, religion, national origin or physical challenge.  Merit should be the basic hiring criterion.  In recent years this lofty ideal, admittedly not always practiced, has been modified with additional criteria of affirmative action and diversity which often clash with and negate the former.

But now Randall Lane, chief content officer and editor of Forbes Magazine, which specializes in business and technology, publicly announced a “truth reckoning” as he calls it, a new discriminatory  business relationship  and future content policy towards anyone or any business daring to hire prominent staffers who worked in President Donald J. Trump’s (R) administration.

Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

Hmmm, so this hollow threat suggests that when Forbes works with, writes about others in the business world who are not tainted with “Trump’s fellow fabulists” they will not “scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet” and will therefore be more likely to accept anything they say; print their public relations puffery verbatim.  Or maybe with slightly altered nuance as he later slightly qualifies, “this standard needs to apply to liars from either party,” thus admitting that up to now Forbes hasn’t done that scrutinize, double-check thing very thoroughly very often; that Forbes itself is “a potential funnel of disinformation.”

Here is some scrutinized information: For the past six and a half years, Forbes is now majority owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments based in…wait for it…Hong Kong and, as Isaac Stone Fish writing in the Washington Post asked three years ago,

When a Chinese company buys a major American magazine, does the publication censor its coverage of China? There is only one example so far, and the results are discouraging. In 2014, a Hong Kong-based investment group called Integrated Whale Media purchased a majority stake in Forbes Media, one of the United States’ best-known media companies. It’s hard to demonstrate causality in such cases. But since that purchase, there have been several instances of editorial meddling on stories involving China that raise questions about Forbes magazine’s commitment to editorial independence. (emphasis added)

O-o-oh!  Lane neglected this truth reckoning.  In other words, Forbes’s old motto, “Capitalist Tool,” has been unofficially changed to Forbes, Chinese Communist Tool.

You have been warned — be wary of Forbes and its content; limit your dealings with companies who advertise or work with the magazine.  Instead do business with those businesses that certainly will be started by talented former Trump administration staffers or those who hire them.