They also play more direct role.
http://www.deepcapture.com/category/2-the-journalists-tried-to-be-players-but-became-pawns/“You want to know what just happened? I’ll f—ing tell you what just happened. Here’s how it works. Those two guys are part of the short-seller community. Cramer especially is part of this ring of hard-charging short-sellers on Wall Street. I’ll bet you anything that one of his buddies is short your company. Whoever it is saw your earnings release, saw you blew your numbers away, got on the phone to Cramer and said, ‘Don’t you dare let this thing start moving. Don’t you f—ing dare let this move!’ So Cramer goes on TV and screams that nonsense at you. I bet my last f—ing dollar that’s what happened. It’s been like this all my career, but it’s never been like this.”
Later that week, a fund manager who had seen the interview told me, “That was the most unprofessional interview I have ever seen in my life.” In time, others would mention it to me, so that months and even a year later, I’d meet people who said, “I saw you on with Cramer one time. That was the craziest interview I ever saw.”
That was the first time I heard the joke, but I did not get it until I heard it the second time, a few weeks later, in February, 2004, while I was in Kabul (because it is a natural next question: I was in Afghanistan searching for artisans to become suppliers for Worldstock). Our PR Director at the time, a calm, mellow Californian named “Scott,” had sent an urgent message saying that a BusinessWeek reporter, Tim Mullaney, was going to write a story attacking the price comparisons listed on Overstock’s website. Mullaney was asking about a set of products which were precisely the same products that another two reporters had called asking about that same week. Since Overstock had about 12,000 products at the time, the coincidence was odd. In addition Scott said, Mullaney was acting as though he wanted us to know he planned on writing a hatchet job.