Nassim's take on journalists

Nassim Nicholas Taleb isn't surely a fan of the present-day journalist. Below are lines from his Fooled By Randomness. Actually, makes sense! Or, does it? (This last line has been added after debating this issue with a couple of friends!).

1) "On the rare occasions when I boarded the 6:42 train to New York I observed with amazement the hordes of depressed business commuters (who seemed to prefer to be elsewhere) studiously buried in The Wall Street Journal, apprised of the minutiae of companies that, at the time of writing now, are probably out of business. Indeed it is difficult to ascertain whether they seem depressed because they are reading the newspaper, or if depressive people tend to read the newspaper, or if people who are living outside their genetic habitat both read the newspaper and look sleepy and depressed. But while early on in my career such focus on noise would have offended me intellectually, as I would have deemed such information as too statistically insignificant for the derivation of any meaningful conclusion, I currently look at it with delight. I am happy to see such mass-scale idiotic decision making, prone to overreaction in their postperusal investment orders - in other words, I currently see in the fact that people read such material an insurance for my continuing in the entertaining business of option trading against the fools of randomness. (It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent 'studying' the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world. This problem is similar to the weaknesses in our ability to correct past errors: Like a health club membership taken out to satisfy a New Year's resolution, people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.)

2) "The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic. I will say here that such respect for the time-honored provides arguments to rule out any commerce with the babbling modern journalist and implies a minimal exposure to the media as a guiding principle for someone involved in decision making under uncertainty. If there is anything better than noise in the mass of 'urgent' news pounding us, it would be like a needle in a haystack. People do not realise that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word."

3) "To be competent, a journalist should view matters like a historian, and play down the value of the information he is providing, such as by saying 'Today the market went up, but this information is not too relevant as it emanates mostly from noise.' He would certainly lose his job by trivialising the value of the information in his hands. Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist."