Remember the Sherlock Holmes story about the letter that was hidden in plain sight? That’s how I think of the business pages of our daily newspapers – business boosterism that’s so obvious we tend to overlook it.
Having said that, these pages, including the Albuquerque Journal’s Business Outlook section, can be useful and entertaining.
What jumped out of James Hamill’s tax column in this morning’s Business Outlook was his aside that "Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, Americans have swayed form viewing corporate leaders as magnates or robber barons. We’re back to the robber baron phase…."
Remember André Agassi’s old commercial slogan, "Image is everything"? Hamill is interested in how corporate leaders are seen, not how they act. (Hint: Sometimes as robber barons, sometimes not.)
No great surprise, of course. We are not reading one of the few exceptions to the boosterism rule, like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times