A Fox Business Channel commentator was paid $50,000 to tout stock, which is about as bad as it gets in the media scruples world.
To Fox's credit, when they found out about it, they fired the guy.
Although, those scruples have only been recently added to their approach, according to this little excerpt buried in the Marketwatch article...
On Tuesday afternoon, though, Fox terminated Smith’s contract on the basis of its contributor policy, according to a spokesman. Smith, by text message, confirmed the news. Asked earlier whether he had violated Fox’s rules, Smith said, via text message, “that policy was added late last year … my contract was not subject to that clause …”
I'm not going to quibble. At least they did the right thing.
I have a friend who follows the markets closely (as his job), and he always tells me to ignore any stock being pushed by any television commentator. "Once they are pushing it on television," he tells me, "you can be sure they've already sucked all the money out of it. Now they are making money off of you. The smart money is peddling it to the dumb money."
And the dumb money is me and you.
