Why is the Financial Times doing access journalism ?

After the surrender of the NYT and the Post to Trumpism, with the Economist sailing indecisively between the imperialist Scylla of Blair and the isolationist Charybdis of Johnson, with the LA Times being the West Coast promo man for Big Pharma, the FT is the best that remains but one must read it critically.

The FT does good work, especially on those companies or funds that are now sailing in fine weather with no forecasts of monsters or whirlpools. The recent portrait of Chris Hohn’s fund is an example. The FT’s coverage of climate is good, especially given that climate denialism is so well-funded and so delusionally aggressive that the publishers could see surrender as the safest course. The paper’s coverage of Guggenheim Partners and what it is doing in the US insurance business has been educational. It has avoided pimping crypto (too much). It has shown the costs of the Trump/Netanyahu wars: a sub-head this week—“Trump’s challenge: $40tn debt, 6.7% mortgages and $5 diesel” is spot on. It is honest about the long-term costs of the Iran war (“Are America’s vast Gulf bases worth rebuilding?, Jacob Judah, FT, 22 August 2026). The FT has even shown some skepticism about the cult of Javier Milei.

Despite much good work, and despite being usually superior to the alternatives in English, the FT has recently published pieces of access journalism that are more suited to today’s New York Times. I give three examples in what follows.

Scott Bessent

The FT allows the US Treasury Secretary to lie on its front page (“Scott Bessent: an Economic D-Day is coming for Iran”, the FT, 23 August 2026). One possible motive for the editors granting this privilege is respect for Bessent’s office, but this is laughable and one imagines that the editors know that.

The US has “significantly dismantled Iran’s military capabilities”; the destruction by Iran and the subsequent abandonment of US bases in the Middle East to the extent that the USS Lincoln could not be re-supplied shows this assertion to be false;

The US has “weakened Iran’s nuclear programme”; Even after the shredding of the JCPOA in Trump I and until the assassination of Iran’s leaders in February, Iran had no nuclear weapons and was not progressing toward those weapons. Now ? No one knows. We do know that the Trump regime has given Iran full incentive to develop the bomb as North Korea has done.

“Iran’s enablers purchase and transport its petroleum”. This is not technically a lie, but it is worse—it is a meaningless threat to someone whom Bessent, bold slayer of Scylla, somehow fears to name.

The “total financial isolation” [of Iran] is feasible and will benefit the US. The US attempt at commercial and financial isolation of Iran will do nothing more than strengthen alternative global mechanisms, as we see in today’s flight from the dollar, in the boom of renewable energies among Iran allies, notably China and Pakistan, in the loss of a US presence in the Middle East, and in the global loss of US credibility as a political ally and economic partner.

If anyone wants to understand what Bessent is doing in Iran and in the Middle East more broadly, beyond stamping his tiny feet and threatening to hold his breath until 100, they should skip the FT and subscribe to Shane Yirak’s Firebrand Project.

Kevin Warsh

Suppose a policymaker has a problem. Warsh’s problem is struggling to control inflation while defending the dollar and protecting the personal interests of the Man Without the Mustache. So what does he do ? He calls his communications people, maybe they can think of something. Now Warsh has two problems—he has no effective policy and no one believes his comms strategy.

The FT piece on Warsh (Claire Jones, “Kevin Warsh seeks to soothe investors’ nerves as signs of economic strain mount”, FT, 23 August 2026) is tolerably honest. It reports an FT poll of “academic economists” about inflation being “harder to tame had been the case earlier in the year”. The article quotes an academic as saying “What is unsettling is Warsh’s unwillingness to provide a clear and open assessment of the situation and the outlook for the US economy.” A “former head of the Boston Fed” informs us that “The communication strategy is driving a loss of Fed credibility”.

Still, the FT cannot resist stroking VIPs, as we saw when it gave space to Scott Bessent. The tenor of the FT’s article is that a better comms strategy would improve US monetary policy. FT quotes Deborah Lucas of MIT as saying “Warsh is willing to stand up against the vested interests in the status quo to try to reverse [the Fed’s micromanagement of the capital markets].” One understands why Professor Lucas talks nonsense—she is perhaps eying a seat on the Fed—but why does the FT insist on printing it ? Does anyone think that Warsh, a wealthy man married into a fortune, a man who conspired for 20 years to get the Fed job, has any notion of standing up to “the vested interests in the status quo”, interests which are as closely aligned with his as they are with those of the Man Without the Mustache. The FT piece ends with more pandering to the nascent cult of Kevin Warsh by, citing another economist who worked at the Fed under Powell, that “Warsh had allayed concerns that he would pander to pressure from Trump, who has consistently called for the US central bank to slash borrowing costs despite high inflation”. Warsh is of course pandering to pressure from his boss in refusing to raise rates and, in so doing, is damaging the Fed’s long-term credibility.

By focusing on communication, the FT is participating in a cover-up of the real story: the politicization of the Fed. Warsh’s main problem is not that he doesn’t communicate with the markets; it is that he cannot do the obvious thing because it would hurt the interests of his boss. The FT in promoting the fairy tale that the issue with the Fed is “communication” is trying to have it both ways—keep Warsh and his pals as sources while trying to be an honest newspaper. That cannot work. If anyone wants to understand the Fed, they should subscribe to Claudia Sahm and Nathan Tankus before checking the FT.

Does anyone remember Yahoo ?

On August 23, the FT announced that “Yahoo, the internet’s OG, wants to win over Gen Z”. 1The paper began its anastasis upon the exhumation of Yahoo by announcing “Yahoo wants to convince a new generation of users that one of the internet’s oldest services can be one of the new AI winners, with the Apollo-backed company seeking to develop its brand alongside the launch of an in-house AI tool and consumer products. “

There is a certain aphasia in this piece. One sees the relevance of the experience of Yahoo’s current CEO, Jim Lanzone, who worked for Tinder, a site where subscribers are easy to attract, a reality which may have given the Apollo people some brief succor about Lanzone’s appeal (as a manager). One understands the turnaround potential--Lanzone inherited a company worth about US$120 billion in 2020, one which was sold at less than US$5 B to Apollo in 2021, and is today worth some unknown amount, so why not think big ?²

What the piece does not do is to give an honest appraisal of the turnaround strategy, (beyond needing to borrow at 11%, a fact which suggests a certain lack of enthusiasm for the venture among the Apollo principals). The turnaround strategy is to build from Yahoo’s existing footprint (news, email) and to leverage what the FT calls Yahoo’s “decades of proprietary search, content and user data to help differentiate [a new AI product, to be called “Scout”] from rivals built primarily on models trained using the open web”. It is difficult to see what old emails and search data can add to the development of a new AI model, though perhaps Ken Starr might find such material useful in his current work. Google has a vastly greater stock of data (email, video, search, clicks on ads³). There are many AI models that already work, more or less. There is the fact that many people hate AI. There is the fact that many people (again, the FT commenters) like Yahoo Finance for its simplicity and don’t want to pay more for formulaic answers that they could have found for free.

The FT, in its haste to fluff what Lanzone claims to be doing, lets him get away with “[declining] to disclose financial details”. Failure to give simple synthetic tables (eg, every article on debt workouts) is a general irritant with the FT, but here the paper could have at least constructed a hypothetical balance sheet of Yahoo 2 as a check on its informant’s claims.

The FT is a great paper but it must do some re-thinking about speaking truth to its sources.

NOTES

1. The FT’s commenters, who can be rude at times, had fun with “OG”.

2. There is a separate Japanese Yahoo (YAHUY).

3. Lack of ad revenue was what sunk Yahoo in the first place.