Forbes

Forbes is clickbait hot garbage founded in 1917. It has the hilarious motto "The Capitalist Tool." The magazine publishes long lists of people richer than you and things you cannot afford. These days, it has also become a terrible website that should largely be ignored. It reels in unsuspecting readers with sensationalist titles e.g. 'Shocking secret of the next iPhone', but the actual article itself reveals no such 'shocking secret'. The Forbes website is also infested with ads, which requires using an ad-blocking software to circumvent if one is somehow foolish enough to still visit it.

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“”He who dies with the most toys wins.
—Malcolm Forbes

"Most Powerful"

Not to be outdone by Walgreen's checkout lane, Forbes hosts its own yearly popularity contest. Putin wins every year.[1][2] He's the Meryl Streep of plutocrats.

There is a certain ghastly irony in Putin winning "Miss Popularity" because one of Forbes' journalists, Paul Klebnikov,File:Wikipedia's W.svg was murdered in Moscow in a contract killing in 2004.[3] The publisher of the Russian edition of Forbes stated that the murder was "definitely linked to his professional activity,"[4] and it has been speculated that Forbes's publication of a list of wealthiest Russians was specifically linked to Klebnikov's murder.[5] The motive presumably was that one or more oligarchs were angry that their ill-gotten wealth was being revealed to the public. Forbes' main list of the world's wealthiest people is still a thorn in the side of Russian oligarchs because — rightly or wrongly — the 96 Russians on the Forbes' list are synonymous with those that are on the U.S. Treasury list of Russians subject to economic sanctions.[6]

Forbes.com

In recent years, Forbes has decided to destroy its brand by hosting non-editorially reviewed blogs. One of these is White Coat Underground, most are OK for random blogs by any bozo, many are comically awful (Heartland Institute shills,[7], other random industry shills, Bitcoin scammers,[8] and Austrian schoolers among other forms of crankery).

The site does a roaring trade in op-eds ghostwritten for corporations. Amy Westervelt, an ex-Forbes journalist, describes how it works:[9]

… $50 a post, which doesn’t really allow for the sort of reporting time required to write a decent story—the click-bait incentives (a $500 bonus if you hit 30,000 uniques, plus a penny more for each unique after that), and the fact that the site had been all but taken over by CEO “thought leaders” and industry shills. But wait, that’s not the punchline. It’s this: Over the past year, I’ve contributed a half dozen more stories to Forbes.com. Not under my own name, but as a ghost writer for a couple different CEOs. For that work I was paid—no exaggeration— TEN times what Forbes ever paid me to write for its site, but Forbes paid nothing for those pieces.

Any page whose address starts with forbes.com/sites/ is just some random bozo with a blog, even if they try to make out that writing for a Forbes blog makes them more reliable than writing for Examiner.com.[10] If someone references a claim to "Forbes," look more closely. If their bio does not say they are actually a Forbes staffer, or that the article is also in the print Forbes, it should not be credited to "Forbes".

So quit your unfounded fear mongering about global warming [11] [12] and get back to work living the American dream of paying for your own healthcare, [13] [14] like Ayn Rand. [15] Do You Believe That?

Bizzarely, in spite of publishing some of the most migraine-inducing denialist articles in the past (see above), Forbes recently began running articles in support of reality the consensus view on AGW: like this one[16] by a meteorologist.

Good Forbes blogs
gollark: Imagine how bad it could be with active deliberate effort to enhance badness.
gollark: I would make it fill out the paperwork itself. Much easier.
gollark: Not even very memetic memes.
gollark: Yep. This is the trouble with free-ranging them.
gollark: No, my chickens got killed by a fox...

See also

References
  1. Power! Unlimited POWEEAAAAAH!!
  2. "This is the third year in a row Mr Putin has taken out the top spot, and this year's results mean Mr Obama is the first sitting US president to slide out of the top two power rankings", ABC.
  3. Editor's Death Raises Questions About Change in Russia by C.J. Chivers et al. (July 18, 2004) The New York Times.
  4. The Last Independent Newspaper in Russia by Alexandra Poolos (May 2007) Frontline: World (PBS).
  5. Iron Curtain Redux: The assassination of a prominent investigative reporter underscores the increasingly repressive climate for journalists in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. by Sherry Ricchiardi (March 2007) American Journalism Review.
  6. The tribulations of 'oligarch' No. 27 by Steven Mufson (August 3, 2018) The Washington Post.
  7. Heartland fellows write their columns.
  8. Forbes may be the most prolific peddler of Bitcoin in the mainstream media.
  9. https://blog.growth.supply/content-used-to-be-king-now-its-the-joker-d40703c18c73
  10. This has, however, resulted in Forbes publishing pretty high-caliber video game criticism and analysis from, for example, scientific and feminist perspectives -- so much so that said critiques are among the first results when Googling analyses. (Stopped clock strikes again.)
  11. http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/09/22/your-move-global-warming-alarmists-science-has-exposed-your-unwarranted-hysteria/
  12. http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/09/22/your-move-global-warming-alarmists-science-has-exposed-your-unwarranted-hysteria/
  13. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/13/unspeakable-realities-block-universal-health-coverage-in-the-us/#47ab17e5186a
  14. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/06/13/if-universal-health-care-is-the-goal-dont-copy-canada/#fbe9b6878d58
  15. https://www.thoughtco.com/ayn-rand-welfare-queen-government-assistance-3975224
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