Something Is Terribly Wrong, Just Not With Apple

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- As if you didn't know this already, there's a serious problem in the financial media.

Pardon my French, but with a few solid exceptions (they know who they are), the people who staff newspapers and Web sites that cover the stock market are lazy bastards incapable of or afraid to offer an original thought.

They follow a formula that contributes heavily to the very real notion of Wall Street as a rigged casino.

Make no mistake: What happened with Apple (AAPL) Sunday night is an absolute travesty. The people at the Wall Street Journal who perpetrated it must be taken to task, held accountable or whatever ends up necessary in this case.

It's not even a case of whether the WSJ report is accurate or not. That's not even the issue. It's the way the whole thing went down.

I hate to give the reporter who "broke" the "story," Juro Osawa, airtime, but it's important to watch this video he taped from a Rupert Murdoch-boiler room in Asia for the WSJ Web site.

Let's go over this.

As Osawa (first I had ever heard of him) notes in the video, "we" heard from "our sources" that Apple reduced iPhone 5 component orders. Typically vague. That's the first problem. We've become so desensitized that we no longer question the validity of statements such as people familiar with the situation. The media abuses these broadstrokes. I could use that line practically everyday to break a story, but I don't because I'm not a hack.