I worked for years as a copy editor in business news in Johannesburg. I've never had such contempt for journalists in my life. They live for the freebies, they will literally sell their souls for a sausage roll at a corporate presentation. And boast about it, they love parading their freebies, somehow they take them as validation.

I had to resign from one job because of a particularly sickeningly sycophantic interview with an absolute scoundrel called Brett Kebble, one of the worst criminals we've ever seen in business. I told them this interview would cause trouble, we were allowing this crook to slander all kinds of people without any checks or balances. I said I couldn't work like this. I was a temp, so I left very quietly. Very shortly afterwards, Kebble allegedly told his security team to kill him in an "assisted suicide". It was sensational news. The body was identified by the chief bodyguard who later admitted to carrying out the murder. I don't think that body was really Kebble. But anyway, I was right. That interview we printed was the last he ever gave and there was big trouble brewing.

Who actually put his finger on this issue with financial journalists long ago was Stieg Larsson. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he says this (quote from Perplexity, it looks right). His protagonist in the novel, Kalle Blomkvist, has strong feelings on the subject:

"Blomkvist did not mince words. In the last twenty years, Swedish financial journalists had developed into a group of incompetent lackeys who were puffed up with self‑importance and who had no record of thinking critically. He drew this conclusion because time after time, without the least objection, so many financial reporters seemed content to regurgitate the statements issued by CEOs and stock‑market speculators – even when this information was plainly misleading or wrong. These reporters were thus either so naïve and gullible that they ought to be packed off to other assignments, or they were people who quite consciously betrayed their journalistic function. Blomkvist claimed that he had often been ashamed to be called a financial reporter, since then he would risk being lumped together with people whom he did not rate as reporters at all…”

Stieg Larsson died of a massive heart attack at age 50. I have a feeling he trod on one toe too many, but it's just a feeling.