Why Old Media Is Failing: Sloppy Journalism From Time Magazine

Check out this video from this morning's CNBC Squawkbox program.




First, the Fortune managing editor contradicts their own company's press release and embargoed pre-publication article text, saying greed wasn't the main force behind their so-called "Decade from Hell."

Michelle Caruso Cabrera reads from the text she has, provided by Time, that the article says it was "greed." Not so, says the managing editor.

The managing editor's glib analysis of the last decade is simply laughable. Not to mention that, according to him, the decade's experiences for the US were its own fault. Katrina and the 9/11 attacks don't seem to fit, so they basically redefine them.

Finally, the article says it was the "worst peacetime decade," but, then Andy Serwer, the Fortune managing editor contradicts that, saying it wasn't a peacetime decade after all. But it wasn't a wartime decade, either.

Then he says, well,

"Is that semantics? It's a battle. It's a horrible battle. But it's not a wartime decade."

So much for the 9/11 attacks opening the decade's War on Terror. According to TimeWarner, your country hasn't been engaged in a war at all. It's just, you know, "a battle."

I'm guessing neither managing editor has immediate family in the military who has served in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

However, that's a relative sideshow to the main impression this clip left me with when I saw it live this morning.

Here's a major old media publishing company supplying two managing editors for an interview, and they can't even agree with their own magazine's article's main point. Then they rather baldfacedly deny it's been a decade in which the US has been at war.

No wonder old media companies, including TimeWarner, are failing. With "reporting" like this, who would buy their product?