{"id":19126,"date":"2019-12-04T10:00:24","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T16:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/?p=19126"},"modified":"2019-12-04T11:26:52","modified_gmt":"2019-12-04T17:26:52","slug":"corporate-accountability-reporting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/corporate-accountability-reporting\/","title":{"rendered":"Corporate Accountability Reporting and Roddy Boyd’s Hobby"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a little chuckle this week when Roddy Boyd and his paid hobby, Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation<\/a>, put out a plea for donations and referred to their “work” as corporate accountability reporting.<\/p>\n

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You see, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Roddy Boyd’s lack of ethics<\/a> as it relates to a large donation from investor Marc Cohodes that influenced Roddy’s reporting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Roddy fancies himself an investigative reporter. He has done some good work in the past (10 years ago), but nothing particularly notable. He hasn’t won any journalism awards of any great importance, which isn’t the end of the world, but it’s also a signal about his work. The closest he came to an award was Huffington Post calling him a “dangerous” person in financial media<\/a> in 2012. (Funny enough, the article mentions Overstock.com, precisely the company that got Roddy into the ethical dilemma I have been writing about.)<\/p>\n

It’s no secret that I have a problem with SIRF being a non-profit. Donations to SIRF are tax deductible, and yet the organization isn’t charitable in any way. It’s simply a way for Roddy to make a living since he chooses not pursue a traditional journalist job. I don’t have any problem with someone creating a job for themselves, but I do<\/strong> have a problem with people getting tax deductions when they give him money.\u00a0 Deductions for charitable contributions should be reserved for money given to actual charities.<\/p>\n

In fairness, Roddy does masquerade as someone doing things for the public good. His SIRF website<\/a> has a tagline of “In-depth financial investigative reporting for the common good.” I wrote last month:<\/p>\n

And yet there is no \u201ccommon good\u201d to the work Roddy is doing. He says \u201cinvestigative journalism is a critical tool for ensuring corporate accountability.\u201d In theory that\u2019s true. In reality, Roddy\u2019s work doesn\u2019t scare any companies into being accountable.<\/p>\n

Who benefits from Roddy\u2019s work? Certainly not the public at large. I\u2019m sure he\u2019d make a argument that work like his helps keep companies honest. But the truth is that almost no one cares about the companies he is writing about and no company is afraid that Roddy might expose them.<\/p>\n

Boyd sets forth a lie that no one benefits from his work:<\/p>\n

We are funded solely through the tax-deductible contributions <\/a>of individual donors and foundations, none of whom derive any professional or economic benefit from this support.<\/em><\/p>\n

Untrue. Short sellers who bet on the companies Boyd writes about benefit, and it is his hope that they will donate to him as a \u201cthank you\u201d and to ensure that he will continue to write about companies they bet on.<\/p>\n

A recent comment on one of my articles on this site:<\/p>\n

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Naturally, I don’t have any way to verify the information here, but this isn\u2019t the first time I\u2019ve heard rumors to this effect. I have heard from a couple of parties that Carson Block (of Muddy Waters Research) had an interest in targeting Fraser Perring, but wanted others to do the dirty work for him.<\/p>\n

Let’s go back to the charade of corporate accountability at SIRF.\u00a0 I would argue that the first step to\u00a0 accountability journalism<\/a> is independence. I think that for a long time, Roddy appeared to do a good job at this. But then he had financial troubles and needed to pay his mortgage. In steps Marc Cohodes with $328,750<\/a>, and how could Roddy say no?<\/p>\n

But once he took that donation and thereby agreed to not write about Overstock.com, his independence was compromised. He made it worse by buddying up with Cohodes and sidekick Frasier Perring for some “reporting.” And then denouncing Perring after Cohodes and Perring had a falling out. The timing of these things looks bad and doesn’t look coincidental, no matter what Boyd now claims.<\/p>\n

Roddy thinks of himself as a hard-hitting corporate accountability reporter. In 2019, he published articles on 6 dates. In 2018, he published articles on 5 dates. In 2017, he published articles on 5 dates. In 2016 he published articles on 12 dates. That’s hardly ambitious.<\/p>\n

What’s more, Roddy writes the stuff and calls himself the “editor.” It’s a one-man shop that puts out a story every two or three months. And for that Roddy is paid $180,000 per year plus $15,600 in benefits.<\/p>\n

Why don’t we take a look at salaries for employees of organizations that really<\/strong> do accountability journalism so we can see if Roddy earns his keep. (Thanks to Gary Weiss<\/a> for pointing me in the direction of these organizations and their salaries.)<\/p>\n