Slashdot Mirror
A Well-Known Expert On Student Loans Is Not Real (chronicle.com)
mi shares a report from The Chronicle of Higher Education: Drew Cloud is everywhere. The self-described journalist who specializes in student-loan debt has been quoted in major news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and CNBC, and is a fixture in the smaller, specialized blogosphere of student debt. But he's a fiction, and "his" site -- an invention of a student-loan refinancing company.
"Drew Cloud is a pseudonym that a diverse group of authors at Student Loan Report, LLC use to share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face with funding their education," wrote Nate Matherson, CEO of LendEDU (the company that owns Cloud's website, The Student Loan Report). Before that admission, however, Cloud had corresponded at length with many journalists, pitching them stories and offering email interviews, many of which were published. When The Chronicle attempted to contact him through the address last week, Cloud said he was traveling and had limited access to his account. He didn't respond to additional inquiries. And on Monday, as The Chronicle continued to seek comment, Cloud suddenly evaporated. His once-prominent placement on The Student Loan Report had been removed. His bylines were replaced with "SLR Editor." Matherson confirmed on Tuesday that Cloud was an invention. Pressed on whether he regretted deceiving news organizations with a fake source, Matherson said Cloud "was created as a way to connect with our readers (ex. people struggling to repay student debt) and give us the technical ability to post content to the Wordpress website."
"Drew Cloud is a pseudonym that a diverse group of authors at Student Loan Report, LLC use to share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face with funding their education," wrote Nate Matherson, CEO of LendEDU (the company that owns Cloud's website, The Student Loan Report). Before that admission, however, Cloud had corresponded at length with many journalists, pitching them stories and offering email interviews, many of which were published. When The Chronicle attempted to contact him through the address last week, Cloud said he was traveling and had limited access to his account. He didn't respond to additional inquiries. And on Monday, as The Chronicle continued to seek comment, Cloud suddenly evaporated. His once-prominent placement on The Student Loan Report had been removed. His bylines were replaced with "SLR Editor." Matherson confirmed on Tuesday that Cloud was an invention. Pressed on whether he regretted deceiving news organizations with a fake source, Matherson said Cloud "was created as a way to connect with our readers (ex. people struggling to repay student debt) and give us the technical ability to post content to the Wordpress website."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Crocker
Is my name
That's a pretty suspicious looking name.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and by NBC.
So major fake news sites quoted this fake journalist without even verifying he was real? No surprise
I stumbled onto that site too once through /.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
I thought it looked mighty fishy. Sea mammal sized fishy.
I think student loans are a reason to support Elisabeth Warren.
Industry analysts Chad Sudonim, Ima Puppet, Travis Hoxe, and Gnome DePlume all denounced the deception.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Next you will be telling me Betty Crocker and Sarah Lee were not real but fictional characters dreamed up by corporate suits....
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The term "identity theft" is to limited. It should be called "identity fraud", and these people should be prosecuted for it.
disclosure: I work in a tech/marketing position
astroturfing is nothing new, in most brands you're always encouraged to consume the product or service being sold to you. Student loans appear to have taken a page from the luxury automotive industry in this case. Luxury auto brand advertisements often feature sultry evenings, fancy clothes, modern homes, and posh gatherings along with esoteric screeds on technology and futurism. The marketing of a luxury automobile does not include these references because they have anything to do with successful, rich, or famous people. These elements of a successful ad for a luxury car exist because theyre your aspirations, rebranded. Legitimately rich people looking to experience a mercedes simply buy one without any real conditioning. if they dont like it, they sell the car and buy a new one. What automotive brands are doing is conditioning you to sidestep your self interests and reason in order to consume a product that is far and away more expensive than the average consumer can afford. Projecting the success of these products, most luxury automotive brands will sponsor the humbler bay yacht race, or Wimbledon, but not to sell cars to the rich. These events are sponsored in order to maintain the illusion that luxury vehicles are in some way intrinsic to wealth and success.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I know Drew Cloud - he's great - I talked to him just last week on the phone about how we were going to find more students to sign up for loans so we can afford all those corporate tax cuts. I mean, working people tax cuts. Fake News! SAD!
Not the first time something like this has happened... Back in 2000 Sony Pictures created a made-up film critic called David Manning just so that they could put "quotes" from him on their posters and other marketing materials, even went as far as to attributing him to an actual weekly that did film reviews.
People eventually got suspicious and when Newsweek contacted the weekly he supposedly worked for they flat out said they'd never heard of him. Sony obviously didn't think they did anything wrong, which is hardly surprising seeing how around the same time they were caught having employees posing as movie goers in commercials, but they did eventually settle when sued.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
A company created a fake expert to fraudulently advance their agenda? What is the world coming to?
It's one thing to create a fake persona for marketing purposes, but to present them as a genuine expert to media outlets? That seems like it should be crossing some sort of legal line.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And the (Trump) plan now is to decapitate the CFPB? With this sort of nonsense going on?
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/02/598820472/trump-official-wants-to-put-tight-leash-on-consumer-watchdog-agency
I used to read the Tom Swift, Jr. series of novels as a kid, and was crushed to find out that "Victor Appleton was a house pseudonym used by the Stratemeyer Syndicate and its successors, most famous for being associated with the Tom Swift series of books." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This did not reduce my enjoyment of the books but did make it seem much more commercialized, as is this case, Drew Cloud may have provided some valuable information, but may have been slanted toward 'it's' ad clients.
hear me out on this one. Yes, the media leans left on social issues (gay rights and abortion mostly). But for anything that really matters (e.g. economics) they're entirely pro corporate. Hell, it's come out that MSNBC, the supposed bastion of the left wing, actively blocked coverage of Bernie Sanders in favor of his pro-corporate rival Hillary. Also, there's every indication we bombed an anti-venom factory in Syria but not a single major news source covered that.
These days in America if you want any news that isn't pro corp you need to go on Youtube. Bernie's got a channel along with the Young Turks & Secular Talk who are more or less arms of the Democratic Party's left wing (aka the "Justice Democrats" as they're called). But what's funny is you can't shake that "Left Wing Media bias" moniker even though it's objectively not true on economics.
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Nicolas Bourbaki asks me to tell you that he is not impressed.
Really, how does it matter? What matters is how true and relevant what they wrote is. Knowing who they are may shed some light about that, especially when financial gain is involved, but it is only a proxy.
I'm glad, that in the era of fake news, the news organizations are fact checking each story they publish and not just blatantly copying each others feeds.
For the "Washington Post" , CNBC, "The Boston Globe" and others to run stories based on this fictional person passing propaganda, is telling.
The media today, does little if any due diligence or fact checking. When FakeNews get thrown around, it is also because of lazy and incompetent "journalist" who will take any source, to allow them to write a story fast and cheap.
See Subject: last night cdreimer came home dressed as a pirate with a few other guys similarly dressed
He told me that he and his merry band were there to pillage my ass and have me walk the gang plank
They all fired in my hole
APK
P.S. => Afterwards they took turns flogging me and put me in my proper place because we all know my kind... apk
That makes me wish my student loans weren't real!!
so they're still right wing there. The leaders of the Democratic party are right wing too. The mega corps have bought out everything, so they control the message. Hell, they guy who runs the Consumer Protection Bureau just openly admitted to accepting bribes and it was barely covered. NY Times, WAPO and the left wing Youtubers covered it. CNN buried it in an opinion piece. You'd think this would be national news.
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Forget the student loan expert, a well known Slashdot poster, BeauHD, is not real.
Got any examples of them saying anything that is not true and then doubling down on it instead of issuing a correction like a proper journalistic outfit does, because I haven't seen them report on anything that wasn't veritably true. Hell, that's half the problem with Left Wing media. They've got journalistic principles, so even guy's like the Turks will present both sides a lot of time time. That Secular Talk guy goes out of his way to praise right wingers when they do something right, like when they stand up for free speech.
There's a lot of bad shit going on right now and they're covering it. Just because you don't like believing it's real doesn't mean it isn't. As Gore Vidal said, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a conspiracy analyst.
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Please don't tell me that Rob BigData is a pseudonym too!
It's called FRAUD. Go go lawyers go!
They say he is a huge dick in real life!
Washington Post = FAKE NEWS
Broken digital clocks usually don't display anything.
His real name is Woodrow Nimbus. He changed it for obvious reasons.
A group of people formed an organization. To relate to the greater public, they created a persona around their ideals. How is this any different than Flow or the Gecko selling auto insurance?
Also, how is this any different than the founding fathers of our country publishing political statements under pseudonyms? How is it different than me posting as A/C?
People need to stop getting bent out of shape so easily.
captcha: pronouns
But here's the question that comes up for me and it comes up in conjunction with another article I saw recently (no, I don't have a link) in which a passing mention was made along the lines that millennial wealth, housing, etc difficulties wasn't due to not being able to earn enough in absolute numbers, but earning enough in relation to the debt they carry (student loans).
Which way is/was this figurehead steering? Is/was it steering? Why use a pseudo person for this? Doe sit make what is being presented more "believable"?
private student loans need to have bankruptcy or rules like max rate / max pay back time / min income aka if you are under this you pay 0 / etc.
The schools and banks need accountability with student loans just having easier to get chapter 11 or 7 can fix issues with them.
Right now the schools and banks can push high costs and be like it's ok to have $250-$300 textbooks vs with accountability for defaults where they can say lower your text book cost or we will pick some other place to get them from.
So how is this any different than lobbyist groups targetting political entities for support of their interests, with mostly not-so-transparent financing from all-industry heavy hitters with money to spare in "deep marketing" and whatnot? What about Media conglomerates partially or totally owned by pollitically-inclined organizations? Or even TV channels, newspappers fully flavoured to a social entity? Isn't every part of the pollitical spectrum supposed to have the right to the same alloted audience? Or should it be limited to a time-slot on national TV on campaign period?
Democracy "sucks", because, like communism, its correct implementation depends on trusting everybody granted power will use that power for the sake of what it was granted for. In demoracy, part of the relevant people don't vote because they are part of a no-voting-biased demography, and thus situations where Republicans find comfort in southern states and the elder folks for their patriotism and sense of responsibility, or Democrats finding comfort in winning California (unless, you know, it gets split into 3 or gets reduced college votes, like many are trying to make true). In the meantime, elected governments go on to break down the rules that were first made to preserve elected, democratic power transition. Just see Russia, Turkey, China, and even the U.S. on things like consolidation of power or the lack of separation of powers. The same way, in communism, the most relevant people being parties, unions and, once again, those with transient, temporary power, are easily corrupted or engage in corruption of the system itself, and abuse Media, either by keeping a tight grip and ubiquity of state-sponsored Media outlets or flat-out undermine Media outlets that attempt to offer unbiased reporting, let alone opposing reporting.
True democracy needs untainted, direct, and constant interaction from all the interested parties - actual people within legal age to vote. A country's population should engage directly in legislation, and not be restricted to referendums (a.k.a. the pollitical scap-goat of any government not wanting guilt over a divisive, controversial decision. People need to have direct legislative power. Not elected college votes that may or may not vote to their polls will, and that effectively elect a legislative body to act on "trust" alone. There is no trust in the democratic chain anymore.
I'm not saying democracy should mandate the vote - like in Brazil - but there should be a very informed, very publicized, transparent education on voting up until individuals reach voting age. That is the only way direct, people-based legislation can be a thing. Voting (and why it matters) should be the second most important educational factor after alphabetization, and it just isn't for some reason in every single democracy that I have heard of. You see more initiatives for people to buy stuff and engage in consumerism than to effectively engage in the public forum of suffrage, and that goes to show how flawed the democratic system is - it has a tendency for capitalism and pseudo-meritocracy.
In other news, Drew's composite girlfriend was unavailable for comment.
...I suspect the media outlets who quoted him knew, but are going to claim that they are incompetent and that they were deceived.
I leave it as an exercise to an enterprising reader to *really* follow this news through and find out if the media outlets are really as innocent as they claim.
Hey, the porn star thing is awesome. This is how we almost took them down about 20 years ago, and we might succeed this time.
Let's all remember that the first time, the president wasn't in trouble for the sex: it was the lying, afterwards. And it was a special kind of lying that happened to probably be against the law (since he did it under oath while being questioned about possible sexual harrassment of someone else).
Similarly, this time the president wasn't really in trouble for the sex, but he knew it would cost him votes, so he paid for a coverup (a type of lie). But it was a special kind of lying that happens to probably be against the law (he paid for it during a political campaign without disclosing this "ad of silence").
The porn star isn't a distraction. It's how our country tries to get its enemies to self-destruct. People freak out about sex, and that can be used to manipulate them. When they're dumb enough to fall for it, what's not to like about that? If Clinton/Trump had more balls, it wouldn't have worked but since we so often try to elect insecure pieces of shit, it does. This is turning out to be one of our country's more useful self-defense mechanisms.
What is happening with Trump-Cohen-Daniels triangle is fucking beautiful. This isn't about something that happened a decade ago; the president probably committed a crime during the campaign, and better yet: he's stepping in it right now, fucking up with every move, further exposing himself. Why wouldn't you embrace this? If you're scared of Pence, don't be. He's a piece of shit too, but he's also a total tool who can probably be kept in line. We could have possibly gotten the same thing with Gore in 1998, and really: it totally would have worked out fine. It'll work out this time too. Let the president self-destruct and if he looks like he starts to slow down, just troll him into digging his grave deeper. This president is particularly special; smarter ones have known how to STFU so they wouldn't have to keep lying and getting caught, but this one can't, so he's just going to keep lying and getting caught, until nobody is left who can support him.
Trump's chaos appeared to be armor, but people finally decoded it and now he's going to do exactly what they want: remove himself. It's popcorn time!
There's nobody named "Slashdot"? Aw, man.
From Matherson, quoted in the article: "For context, it is very common practice for online media companies to own or acquire additional media assets."
Except you're not an online media organization. You're a finance company. Who sells student loans/refinancing. Who created a fictional character, to seem "just like you [the borrower]", and presented yourself as an independent person collating and commenting on news related to student loans.
maggots
The Washington Post = propaganda The Boston Globe = propaganda, and CNBC = propaganda.
Case closed.
That is odd. I am in education and have never heard of Drew Cloud. Maybe the report from the Chronicle of Higher Education is a false flag operation? Maybe BeauHD is not actually High Definition in real life?
when Clinton (Bill) moved the party to the right to get the money he needed to win the presidency. You didn't notice all the awful shit he did because the .com boom was happening and the economy was doing so well nobody noticed it. You noticed it in 2008 when his Wallstreet Deregulation finally caught up with us and the world economy collapsed....
If you are actually left (meaning you believe food, shelter, health care, education & transportation are natural rights) then you are now _far_ left. If you're a libertarian type... well, that's not being leftist, that's being "everyman for himself"ist. You're either going to eventually admit that folks have a right to a decent life (and be leftist) or button down and declare that society shouldn't guarantee anyone anything. Even if you don't do that it's the inevitable consequence of libertarianism. You get outmaneuvered by the corportists and the ruling class because your goals are too vague.
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President Donald Trump is also not real?
It worked for POTUS.
Any lawyers/law-oriented persons out there that can explain \why there isn't a class-action suit pending against the company for false advertising?
Nicolas Bourbaki, the hydra of mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.