You feel like you have it all, you have one final move to make. It is right in front of you, you pick the piece up and move towards the final spot, then out of nowhere comes the leaders of the stock market who wipe out the whole board right in front of you. Their reasoning, “This is ours now.” You’re left sitting there wondering how something like this could happen so quickly, they took what you needed right out from under your feet. How could this happen? Everything was going right, all I had was one last move to make and I was in the clear, there must be something behind these people. Can a business really do this to me, is this even fair?

Apple, one of the biggest growing companies in the U.S. has been reportedly option manipulating, which involves companies artificially boosting executives’ options by backdating the awards or timing them to coincide with the days when the price was low in the stock market, allowing the executives to buy shares when they are cheaper than the price they were of that date. With this ability are the businesses really being unfair, or is it just the status quo?

A recent case has come up with the company we call “revolutionary”, Apple. The founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, has been put under the spot light for supposedly option manipulating. In many of the recent articles regarding this so called “scandal” Steve Jobs has been portrayed as a thief. Now rumors in the past have brought up many different ideas of what was reportedly happening, although these rumors have reportedly been released by The Street which has a very poor accuracy rate when exporting information to investors and companies themselves.

As rumors continued to spread, according to Koenen, Apple had released the information that contained the restatement of its earnings for backdating, and surprisingly enough the reaction of the market was “ho-hum,” (The Real Scandal). This reaction hadn’t surprised me since Apple had only been one of hundreds of other businesses to backdate the stocks during this time of dotcom bubble, “nobody considered it a big deal,” according to Carolyn of San Francisco Chronicle.

This was interesting to me because it brought to my attention that it may not be just the businesses crossing the line but it may also be the news releases pushing their actions over the edge.

“The story really wasn’t about wrongdoing, but the fear that something bad might happen to Apple. The reporting often got the story wrong and commonly failed to provide any relevant context.” Says Wolverton and Cavuto. Now does this mean that this scandal wasn’t what it was portrayed to be or was it what the news releases may have wanted it to be, that is the question.