This past Friday, S.H.A.M.E. Project's expose of Megan McArdle got a shout out from financial blogger/commentator Barry Ritholtz, who called our profile of the Newsweek/Daily Beast hack "one of the most brutal takedowns I have ever seen." Ritholtz—author of the excellent 2009 book Bailout Nation, frequent Bloomberg TV pundit, and the man behind the popular finance blog The Big Picture—advised his readers that "if you have any interest in media or journalism, it is absolutely must read material."
Ritholtz wrote that the SHAME exposé revealing McArdle's profound corruption and conflicted ties to the Kochs was so shocking and devastating that he vowed to stop reading any outlet that continues to publish her:
I never cared for McArdle’s work — I always found it shallow and intellectually dishonest (see below). I erroneously assumed that some of her less intelligent statements were the result of ignorance. But I never suspected her to be an utterly corrupted pseudo journalist.
Now I know better. She is simply appalling, and any publication that publishes anything in the future under her byline is off my reading list.
This is exactly why we launched the S.H.A.M.E. Project in late May. As we wrote back then, the purpose of S.H.A.M.E. is not to merely document media crimes, nor simply to humiliate or call out hypocrisy. The project is about providing useful and effective tools the public can use to protect itself from being manipulated by sophisticated public-relations con-artistry. Our job is to provide the down-low on media corruption so that people can decide for themselves whether someone can or cannot be trusted.
As a side note: Barry Ritholtz called McArdle's profile "one of the most brutal takedowns" he had ever seen. But it's brutal because it's true. One thing that we've come to realize while doing these profiles is that, in the end, the truth always turns out to be weirder, more disturbing and much more shocking than we have ever anticipated going into it. It's a sign of just how corrupted and degraded our media has become, and why we need S.H.A.M.E. now more than ever.
If you haven't done so already, check out Megan McArdle's S.H.A.M.E. Profile™ for yourself:
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Yasha Levine is co-founder of the S.H.A.M.E. Project and author of The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.
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