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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."
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.
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.
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.
On some social issues they lean left. On healthcare, they usually depict "Single Payer" (that's what the NHS would look like if Thatcher had reformed it) as "leftist" or "far left". On Welfare they're continually wringing their hands saying it has to be cut to save the deficit. On Social Security they bought into the fiction that it's somehow going to go bankrupt and the only thing that can happen now is for all Millennials and Generation Xers to expect to never receive a penny.
They're mostly right wing, but because the leaders of the Democratic Party think highly of their views, the Democratic Party usually ends up with most of the same policies, which means they end up supporting the Democratic Party by default. And because the Democratic Party is to the left of the Republican Party, they get portrayed as "liberals" with a "left wing bias".
It's nuts.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Why is this a surprise to anyone at this point. I mean the major News operations have been running "RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION" story for over a year now, on innuendo and whispers from "unnamed sources". Hey look a Porn Star!!!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's really more a product of the 24-hour news cycle combined with an increasingly online, and therefore difficult to monetize, audience. Journalists have to churn out story after story without time to do adequate research, and cuts to editorial staff means lower and lower quality stories get published. There's not a day that goes by now that I don't see a typo or garbled sentence in a story on a major news organization's website. It's a problem that is not likely to be solved any time soon, especially given the current political climate and the views a certain subset of American society has towards the media, as your post so clearly demonstrates.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil