I have to go back to my assertion that you take this too personally, but again, you are a investor.
No, my friend is not a part of any attempted or actual news planting etc...although this practice, intentional or not has been in use for as long I have been in the markets...(long time..70s) he does not do that. What he does is read the tea leaves...especially the options activity.
Like a poker game there are tells. if you can read them, and he does, you can become wealthy, and he is....
I have known him since his second or third trade back in 2009. He was a novice and I helped him. He has since surpassed the master by a factor of ten, but he was well educated and is very intelligent.
I take truth and lies personally, Cold. . . and these "anal-cysts" play loose with both. When the same Yahoo Finance writer claims one number for AAPL at 8:30AM PST as the Street number for earnings expectations. . . and then when the market closed that day, as Apple was starting the CC at 2PM PST, claims that the Street number for the earnings was another number over $2 billion higher so he could claim that Apple missed the Street expectations! That's a blatant lie intended to support the headline he wanted and the agenda he was pushing!
The analysts had all put their expectations out there in the preceding week. . . and none were changed in the 48 hours leading up to the CC. The only thing that changed was the actual numbers were released by Apple showing another drop similar to Microsoft's and the numbers showing a record quarter did NOT support the desire of some traders to have a large drop in stock price! THAT had to be manufactured to order, so out came the headlines about "disappointments" when they did not even have time to talk to anyone at all. We're talking split seconds after the release here, Cold, no time for reactions to be polled and certainly no time for those reactions to be collated and written into an article.
These results were pre-determined and the articles were pre-written, just waiting for numbers to be plugged in, regardless of what those numbers were! They did not care what the truth was. Just add something to whatever the real numbers are for the "whisper numbers" and change your Street Numbers, and voilá, you have a miss!