Mass media revisionism

To borrow from probability theory, one can apply the "memoryless" property to our news media: it appears that current news reports do not need to retain memory of past news reports.

The other day, I commented on new reports about doping that suggest that there is widespread belief that steroids are not abused by small-time athletes because they have no chance of winning--when for the longest time, the belief was that steroids were not abused by big-time athletes because they had too much talent or worked too hard to require extra help.

So now there is an article on ZDNet about Groupon that states with a straight face:

There was long speculation that the daily deals craze would eventually die out, with many analysts deeming the model unsustainable because of its contentious relationship with merchants. Seemingly realizing its shaky future, Groupon attempted to refocus its business more around e-commerce, but the company's best efforts appear to have fallen short.

As I documented in Numbersense, the mass media was in euphoric consensus about Groupon's world-conquering prospects... to the tune that the company was able to raise about $1 billion in the public market (most of which immediately went to pay off initial investors).

As a reminder, this was a post I wrote before Groupon's IPO pointing out the flaws in their business model.

The majority of the business and technology press was not speculating that the "daily deals craze would eventually die out". In fact, we were told Groupon would become the next eBay or Amazon.

Beware of mass media memoryless revisionism.

 

 

 

Comments

[zbicyclist]

There was double speculation at the time. There was the euphoria you note which enabled the IPO, but you also weren't the only skeptic at the time. This probably qualifies as "many analysts" even though they were a minority.