I’d never paid much attention to financial and stock market news, but after following the GameStop saga for these past months, I see mainstream financial news outlets as nothing but market manipulation machines – owned or influenced by powerful financial institutions. Nearly every recent story about GameStop has been written to drive investors away from this so-called “meme” stock. And, instead of acknowledging that many posters on Reddit are experienced, intelligent investors, they are portrayed as brainless teenagers playing a game that would lead to their financial ruin. The ridiculousness of articles I’ve seen concerning GameStop has caused me to completely disregard and reject any information coming from CNBC, Yahoo Finance, The Motley Fool, Bloomberg, and most other well-known financial news sources.

Some really stupid headlines I’ve seen:

• “Move over, GameStop: Reddit traders are targeting silver now”
• “WallStreetBets Redditors go ballistic over GameStop’s sinking share price”
• “Women are missing from the GameStop news. Experts blame this ‘fratty’ subreddit.” <— My favorite.
  There’s no way anyone can know this – there’s nothing in a Reddit subreddit to indicate the gender of its users. I know for a fact that there are many women posting.

I’ve seen some guest analysts on CNBC accuse Reddit investors of manipulating stock prices. As if mobilizing some investors on an internet group is any different than pushing stocks on CNBC! If anything, subreddits have a much smaller audience than a financial news channel. Clearly, some hedge fund managers are outraged that the little people can contradict the message they’ve carefully concocted.

One thing the financial powers-that-be count on, rightly so, is that the average viewer/reader is too uninformed/busy/lazy to understand the complicated inner-workings of a highly manipulated, heavily shorted stock like GME. I totally fall into that category 99.9% of the time, except when in the daily presence of someone completely engaged in a complex situation. As with many other topics in American society, most people respond to a short simple message of good versus evil, and in this case, the Reddit community is being deemed evil, or worse, stupid and gullible.

Oddly enough, Fox Business is one organization that has actually reported on the GameStop situation with some accuracy.

*I’ve updated the link to the current, most legitimate GME subreddit referenced above, as it has changed a couple of times. Hedgefund shills have infiltrated the past subreddits to post obvious misinformation. I may sound like a nutty conspiracy theorist on this, but with billions of dollars on the line, it’s not surprising that the short sellers are desperately trying to convince GME stockholders to sell by any means. The rules to post in the GME-oriented subreddits is quite strict, and in fact, I haven’t met the requirements to post and I’ve been a Reddit user for years.