Apple Investors Misled by Media

Some kook (or some degenerate who stood to make a quick profit) spent two seconds braying on the Internet on Friday that Apple's(AAPL Quote) Steve Jobs was rushed to an emergency room with a heart attack. The market promptly attacked Apple's stock.

Since then, the business media have been analyzing the incident to death. In the ever loyal service of you, the savvy investor, The Business Press Maven has put on his hip-high boots to wade through all this analysis. I've fished out some of the best and worst so that you can move on into the future safely, without any leftover misleading notions from this misleading event.

A common takeaway from the mainstream media was that citizen journalism should not be trusted. True enough. You should never automatically trust what you read -- and you need to be even more careful when a writer (or brayer) has no editorial oversight. But headlines and leads such as this pair from the San Francisco Chronicle leave a big element out of the equation:

Headline: "CNN discovers downside of 'citizen journalism.'"

Lead: "The Jobs incident was the second time in a week that mainstream media organizations have been embarrassed by their online citizen journalism arms -- sparking debate about the accuracy of reports from these Web sites and showing how it takes only a few minutes for a scurrilous rumor, placed on a site without sufficient editorial checks, to inflict damage."

That citizen journalism should not be trusted is obvious, but the inherent implication that edited journalism can be trusted is a dangerous one. Remember that the Steve Jobs obituary was released by Bloomberg, and it was CNBC that reported that Warren Buffett called the dollar "worthless" when he said it would be "worth less." Professional journalist outfits both.