Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden Talking Straight with Chris Martenson

Straight Talk with Tyler Durden:

The U.S. Is Free-Falling Into Bankruptcy

12/15/10
Chris Martenson.com
Chris Martenson (A Must Watch: Crash Course)
Adam's Blog

1. What led you to start Zero Hedge? Was there a particular story or moment? For many of our readers, you have become the CNN of the Great Collapse (this is seen as a positive thing). Is this what you set out to be?

Zero Hedge was started two years ago in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crash, as coined by Bill Buckler, when we realized there is a substantial vacuum in information distribution, and to a lesser extent, processing. The financial media world was (and to a great extent still is) dominated by journalists who were learning finance on the job and thus were incapable of putting the dots together on most stories under investigation.

Others took an even more inappropriate approach, and instead of covering the stories, took a major shortcut and began to cover the people who made up (literally) the headline news, and in abject adulation of these “universal masters” wrote op-eds, and shortly thereafter, books, that purported to explain the underlying narrative by covering the personalities.

The financial media learned that the way to mask its greatest weakness - its lack of understanding - was by redirecting the narrative to far more simplistic and digestible profile stories. To be sure, there have always been fringe reporters/analysts in the periphery of the media world who were great experts in one area or another, but rarely was there a medium that successfully meshed the macro with the micro, fusing topics between the equity, credit, FX, commodity, and derivative worlds, and, increasingly more importantly, the political arena.

Zero Hedge has attempted to fill this hole.

As for whether or not we have a bearish bias, that is debatable. We judge the prevailing sentiment by feedback from our readers, who constantly opine on any latest story, thus preventing an echo-chamber effect. Some may find it surprising that we have just as many bullish as bearish readers.

But more to the point, we pride ourselves in always providing a fact-based perspective that at least attempts to dig behind the headlines, which in our day and age are becoming increasingly more biased by outright propaganda. Instead of screaming that the end is nigh (which it may very well be; after all, we now live in a world in which the ultimate backstops are two perfectly human, and thus error-prone, individuals - Ben Bernanke and Jean Claude Trichet), we prefer to debunk prevailing lies and popular myths, borne out of either stupidity or laziness. It is not our fault if the end product of such an activity ends up revealing a less than optimistic result.

Ultimately, we strive, no matter what, to present the objective and verifiable truth. Which is perhaps why each week brings us new record numbers of readers: As we assumed on day one of Zero Hedge, Americans are not as stupid as the administration would believe they are, and are starved for the truth, unmarred by a political bias or corporate affiliations, two niches which we strive to fill without a conflict of interest, each and every day.

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