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According to Ray Dalio, the Wall Street Journal just launched a hit piece on him that is fake news. In a LinkedIn post Ray Dalio responded as follows: "The Wall Street Journal just published an article about me and Bridgewater that is filled with intentional factual errors. It is one of those classic cases of false and distorted media that I described in several LinkedIn articles (you can read them here and here). Ironically Mike Milken just wrote about the problem of false media in a Wall Street Journaleditorial in which he criticized The New York Times for doing what The Wall Street Journal just did. Because this case is about me and about what’s going on at Bridgewater, because it is loaded with factual errors, and because it exemplifies the failure of too many writers and publishers in media to produce truth, I will describe what really happened so that you will understand. The two writers of this article—Rob Copeland and Rachael Levy—had a goal and story in mind long before there were any facts. They are investigative journalists that The Wall Street Journal hires to dig up dirt on successful people and companies and to write negative articles about them. The Wall Street Journal and other publications don’t have investigative journalists write complementary articles on people because those articles don’t sell, which is why our country has no heroes (read my thoughts about this in my recent LinkedIn post). This case is especially interesting because one of the writers—Rob Copeland—had previously interviewed at Bridgewater and wasn’t hired because he wasn’t up to doing the job. Because we had concerns about his objectivity, we told The Wall Street Journal’s editors of this apparent conflict of interest and asked them to either remove him from writing about Bridgewater or to review his stories for accuracy. They refused to do either. You see, these writers want to write the stories they want to write in an uncontrolled way that they claim is their journalistic freedom, so there is no objective quality control process. This lack of an objective quality control process is the main problem in “journalism” today. To make matters worse, those who know the true facts are reluctant to speak up because they are afraid to fight the media.   The way such investigative reporters work is to speak with everyone who will speak with them who is around the targeted person and/or the targeted company and gather whatever negative bits and pieces they can come up with. They hope for something big, but they will take whatever they get. For example, if they can get someone to complain about something that they can weave into the narrative they want to write, they will take it and use it. In the worst cases, as happened in this case, they threaten to disclose personal information or include the sources’ names in the story if the sources don’t deliver the “dirt.” After they collect these bits and pieces they send a “fact check” to the person or company that consists of questions that are the equivalent of “we hear that you have been cruel to this person,” which we all know is not true and the person who is supposedly being treated cruelly denies it. They then dismiss the on-the-record statements about the inaccuracies, saying that they are inconsistent with what they heard from their undisclosed sources. So, here we are reading statements that we know are wrong.