It also pays to put out dishonest hit pieces against competitors, or dishonest reviews of your own products to make them seem better than they really are.

Really good, cheap or free info about the present and future tends to lie not in a consumer paper but in dense, wordy PDFs that are cast offs of internal researchers at major multinationals and government bureaus. Those documents are often released to tell investors and taxpayers "here is how we view the situation and why" and their structural mission is to get the assessment right so that they make correct moves. There is little storytelling or human interest to these documents, but they are valuable for the same reason that knowing about the weather is valuable.

Within the industry there is a herd tendency.

Results of models which are far off from others get tweaked. Once data is sufficiently in line, only then does it get reported.

I agree to this though, there's going to be a dense PDF somewhere.

Indeed these tend to be more data oriented but they are still not without their great faults.

Case and point: the echo chamber of 2008 that culminated from the reports of the ratings agencies, academics, financial analysts, government regulators et al who were all pushing the same false narrative to the detriment of the investors and tax payers