The lead story of the July 25, 2016 issue of New York Magazine is titled, “The Case Against the Media“. The article is a compilation of comments from noted journalists about what the media is doing right and what it does wrong.

This article really nailed what I’ve observed over the course of nearly 30 years: media rarely reports on long-term care insurance (LTCi) accurately or objectively.

Readers, please take note. Journalists themselves admit to using inflammatory headlines and lead paragraphs to hook in readers. Right now they are doing just this with the current wave of LTCi rate hikes on policies sold through the federal government. I have already examined a few federal LTCi rate hike letters. Rate hikes on federal LTCi plans can be ameliorated pretty easily while still conserving effective LTCi performance. You will never read this in the media. It does not sell copy.

The pseudonymous proprietor of a fake news site National Report says, “I just wanted to see what people were willing to believe.” He wrote articles about people using bank debit cards to buy marijuana in Colorado and President Obama funding a Muslim museum. Some of his stories went viral. He says, “There’s hints of the truth, of course, but you can make up anything you want, really. The headline needs to be very specific and kind of hard-hitting, draw in the anger, the emotion. The first couple of paragraphs of the story need to sound fairly legit, and after that you can just get into crazy town. Nobody reads past that, I mean, seriously.”

Journalists admit to general media ignorance and not knowing enough about technical subjects. This is certainly true of most articles on LTCi. When asked if the media is hard enough on its subjects, this anonymous quote expresses exactly what I’ve been saying for many years, “Fewer reporters, smaller budgets, 60-second news cycles clickbait, online garbage disguised as writing and reporting – it all leads to a lack of depth, follow-up, asking tough questions that require time and resources to dissect, consider, illuminate.”

I have been saying this for years. These truths seem pretty obvious to me.