Categories: OLD Media Moves

Where is the media apology?

Business journalist Gary Weiss, writing for Portfolio.com, notes that the litigation by a small biotech company against a hedge fund and a research firm has ended with an apology from the company and money being paid, but the media that ran stories sympathetic to the cause of small companies being shorted by investors have yet to apologize or update their viewers.

Weiss writes, “A few months before CBS News broadcast its atrocious Biovail segment, Dateline NBC ran a segment about the equally sad story of Eagletech Communications, a company with a ‘hot new invention’ that was supposedly under attack by short-sellers. But the NBC program omitted a bunch of stuff, including the fact that registration of Eagletech’s shares had just been revoked for failure to file required reports with the SEC. (An appeal by Eagletech, blaming the short-sellers for its troubles, was rebuffed.)

“NBC has never revisited its Eagletech story, and neither has CBS clued in its viewers on the denouement of its Biovail story, either on the air or in the long article that CBS published on its website at the time of the broadcast. Not one word about the guilty plea, the SEC woes, or last week’s apologies.

“It seems to me that another apology is needed: an apology from CBS, not to Gradient or SAC, but to its viewers.”