I used incendiary language because the original poster used it. It’s apparently in the Techdirt manual of style to snarkily insult “management”. That’s fine, but I think it’s important to call people on errors and/or a basic misunderstanding of the industry’s fundamentals.

Joe described growth via acquisition in the media business as putting “lipstick on a pig”, and “not a wise growth strategy”. First, he clearly didn’t understand that this is the basic M.O. of big media, and has been for the last fifty years. It’s managed to be a fairly successful strategy, though there have been some high profile flops as well. Second, he didn’t know what company was being acquired, making the statements speculative at best and likely negligent.

I think this lack of thought is worthy of being called out, and thought that borrowing from the manual of style would be appreciated by other TechDirt readers.

To the commenter that said my point wasn’t backed up, it’s hard to know how much data ws truly needed. All of the companies I listed grew from small companies via near-constant acquisition, so those with a reasonable familiarity with their businesses would understand my point. I expect that everyone else was still high-fiving about the lipstick-on-a-pig comment, so didn’t bother to elucidate. Plus, listing what they’ve done is an exhausting task. Here’s a News Corp chronology, for example:
http://www.ketupa.net/murdoch2.htm