Every so often, a sponsored Forbes post will pop up in my facebook feed, and it’s usually just some crappy clickbait title with some bullshit advice that only someone with a business degree would be tricked into thinking it’s useful.
But the latest one is just amazing. It’s the same old Buzzfeed-bullshit, where you have to click through 10 pages in order to see 10 short sentences (and generate 10-pages-worth of advertisement impressions….), but the author just lets the cat out of the bag on page 1:
“Readers have admonished me for failing to research each profession, but to do that properly, I’d need weeks if not months of reporting. I’d want to talk to at least two dozen people in each of the fields listed and to evaluate many other job titles, and my publishing schedule is such that I simply don’t have the time.” – Susan Adams
This kind of admission is amazing, and I’d like to dig into it a little more.
First let me be clear: this article is not a criticism of Susan Adams per se. Adams, by the standard of Forbes, is a perfectly adequate writer, so it would utter bullshit for Forbes to fire her over this particular article.
What Adams is saying here is ‘I’m perfectly aware of what it would take to do a minimally decent job on this article, but that’s not how we roll here at Forbes, so……. Please generate some ad revenue for us?’
It’s pretty rare for the person behind the curtain to lift it up and reveal the fraud themselves, but it’s a refreshing change of pace to see such honesty at Forbes. Then again, given the demograph that Forbes is aiming for (“business people” aka people who overpaid for a degree worth the same (or less) as a BA), this kind of revelation is unlikely to hurt their bottom line….
[GARD]