If you haven’t seen Jon Stewart’s evisceration of former-baseball-star-turned-investment-guru-turned-bankrupt Lenny Dykstra, as well as some of his fawning admirers in the press, take a few minutes to watch a classic.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Lenny Dykstra’s Financial Career | ||||
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Our interest here is the business-press angle, of course. Now, “liberal media” scourge Bernard Goldberg of Real Sports isn’t exactly David Faber, but he reported a business story—one that made Dykstra out to be some kind of financial genius—so good enough for me. This from HBO’s summary of the segment:
Leaving the game in 1996, Dykstra went head-first into the business world, embarking on another winning career. Most recently, he became a prominent, remarkably successful stock investor and consultant, writing a column for TheStreet.com, and serves as president of several privately held companies. Correspondent Bernard Goldberg goes behind the scenes with high-flying California native Lenny Dykstra, the business world’s most unlikely mogul.
The Daily Show catches Goldberg with some gems:
Now the guy who probably couldn’t spell “financial guru” in his playing days has become one.
Followed by a devastating segment in which Goldberg finds out Dykstra is, well…
GOLDBERG: You don’t read books because they might hurt your batting eye?
DYKSTRA: Yeah. Them little words? Plus it makes you think too much. It’s too confusing. I just don’t like to read.
You’d think that would give a reporter, um, pause.
As Stewart says (with the benefit of hindsight, of course, but I mean—really): “Who better to trust your investment portfolio to than a not-so-literate horseshit-chomping man named Nails?”
But Goldberg isn’t alone in looking bad here, and at least he has gone back for another report on the mess Dykstra has made. I haven’t seen anything yet from Fortune, the New Yorker or Jim Cramer and TheStreet.com, each of whom looks equally as bad or worse. Because Nails has proven brittle since these reports aired.
Dykstra got a fawning six-page writeup in Fortune in December 2006 headlined “How He Nails the Market.”
Fortune allowed Dykstra to claim, without any apparent fact-checking, that 95 percent of his options tips made money, which sounds implausible on its face.
Which brings us to CNBC house clown Jim Cramer. Dykstra made those options tips in a $1,000-a-year newsletter for Cramer’s TheStreet.com called “Nails on the Numbers” for which he earned $1 million a year, according to the New York Post.
Cramer was all-too-eager to hype Dykstra’s investing “prowess,” as the Daily Show clip shows, excruciatingly, with a clip of Goldberg interviewing Cramer on the set of CNBC’s Mad Money:
I think people don’t think of Lenny as sophisticated. But I am telling you, Bernie, he is not only sophisticated, but he is one of the great ones in this business. He’s one of the great ones.
Interestingly enough, Forbes, which as far as I can tell was the first major publication to raise questions about Dykstra, wrote in June of last year that he had odd connections to a former TheStreet.com writer:
Yet a close look at Dykstra’s portfolio raises doubts about whether the baseball All-Star turned TheStreet.com guru has been picking many of those stocks or relying on a seasoned stand-in.
Forbes found this in a lawsuit by publisher Doubledown:
There, Doubledown claims, “At Dykstra’s insistence, Doubledown began negotiations to pay Richard Suttmeier, a stock analyst, to provide Dykstra with research assistance for the Dykstra Report and who, upon information and belief learned subsequently, provided Dykstra lists of recommended stocks daily.”
Who is Richard Suttmeier? A market strategist for financial Web site RightSide Advisors and formerly a contributor to RealMoney.com, a subscription Web site owned by TheStreet.com.
And:
Dykstra, who speaks in a slow drawl and now sports a hefty paunch, likewise denies that Suttmeier is picking his stocks. “It’s a bald-faced lie. Not even close,” he says during a brief interview.
Not even close? FORBES compared Dykstra’s buy recommendations as they appeared on TheStreet.com from Apr. 1 through May 1 with those in Suttmeier’s weekly Sector Report during the same month and before. Among Dykstra’s 17 buys, 11 had appeared days earlier in Suttmeier’s newsletter.
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I saw Goldberg's original report and found it to be cloyingly fond of Dykstra--with a slightly sickening the schlub-does-well tone. The whole thing felt, even at the time, to be an unquestioningly simple-minded look at how anyone with a little gumption can strike it rich in America. It's a common theme among conservatives seeking to explain away poverty--if only they tried, they could have a big piece of the pie--look at Lenny! It refused to take any sort of critical look at the man and felt very ideologically motivated, which sadly seems to be a recurring issue for many conservative journalists (see: Fox News etc.). Hopefully, Goldberg learned something about reporting. I doubt it.
#1 Posted by Trip, CJR on Fri 17 Jul 2009 at 06:36 PM
I wonder how well Dykstra's portfolio actually did. Note that he entered the investing game sometime in 1996. A basic index fund investment made in mid-'96 would have gained 120-150% by late '07 (the peak). I think this story is a pretty good example of how boom times can make foolish people think they're geniuses.
But that index fund would still be showing about a 50% gain today, while Lenny Dykstra is bankrupt.
#2 Posted by D. B., CJR on Fri 17 Jul 2009 at 11:29 PM
I couldn't help notice the simple-minded comment from "Trip", and realize how perfectly it matched the mindset of this horrific piece of...ahem....journalism.
First, Bernie Goldberg did not do the intro. As you should be aware, those pieces are often done by producers or someone else. Unless you know that Goldberg is responsible for it, you have no business trying to pin it on him. But you don'r have much of a story without that intro, do you ?
Now let's address your so-called journalistic standards....
In the report, Goldberg says...
"Now the guy who probably couldn’t spell “financial guru” in his playing days has become one."
Goldberg also has this exchange:
GOLDBERG: You don’t read books because they might hurt your batting eye?
DYKSTRA: Yeah. Them little words? Plus it makes you think too much. It’s too confusing. I just don’t like to read.
And what follows is your absurd comment..
"You’d think that would give a reporter, um, pause."
No. That should give the viewer pause. Goldberg has done his job, pointing out that Dykstra was not thought to be very bright in his baseball career, and in Dykstra's own words, Goldberg got him to admit he does not like to read.
That is a reasonable amount of skepticism. If any viewer saw that and did not question Dykstra's financial acumen, whose fault is that ? It is not Goldberg's job to "take down" Lenny Dykstra in the manner that liberal reporters try to take down any and every conservative, facts be damned.
But here is yet one more asinine, completely biased comment by the author of this sophomoric article...
"And check out this sweet ESPN investigation from April on Dykstra, which portrayed him as unstable and reported that he had been sued twenty-four times in the last two years—meaning at least one of those happened before Real Sports’s report. Indeed, some dude on the Internet who wrote a review of the program at the time noted that Goldberg “surprisingly” didn’t mention a recent $111,097 suit against Dykstra for failing to pay his bills"
So, "at least one" lawsuit had been filed against Dykstra. Yet, this so-called journalistic piece has no more info on when the others were filed-- and this is long after the Dykstra HBO segment. You try to suggest Goldberg was negligent by mentioning 24 lawsuits, I suppose to muddy the truth, even though you are reporting that "one" was filed that Goldberg was supposed to know about. And, as we all know, one lawsuit should have given Goldberg "pause". Yet you have not lifted a finger to see if there might have been more. Nice effort. One lawsuit is not damning, but 24 might be, so I understand why you try to cloud the facts a bit.
Dykstra may have been worthy of more investigation (You could have done it yourselves, even) at the time, but not every story has to be an attempt to destroy a person, as we are used to from biased liberal stories about Palin, Limbaugh, Bush, Cheney and anyone else whose politics you disagree with.
Goldberg, from what you yourselves have presented, did his job. But since he regularly criticizes liberal fools, you used a very broad brush to try to smear him a bit.
Your graduates will be very much at home when they join the mainstream media.
#3 Posted by benjamin k., CJR on Sat 18 Jul 2009 at 05:33 PM
Yes, benjamin k., Goldberg did his job: setting up Dykstra to be some kind of idiot savant. 'Come one, come all! See the dummy pick great stocks! It's a miracle!'
The pitch pivots on Dykstra's imbecility. May I suggest you look up the word 'credulous'?
#4 Posted by knowbuddhau, CJR on Sun 19 Jul 2009 at 10:28 AM