The latter. There is nothing inherently bad about the passive voice. What is bad is hiding agency so that actions that are taken for the benefit of some (usuall

The latter. There is nothing inherently bad about the passive voice. What is bad is hiding agency so that actions that are taken for the benefit of some (usually rich or powerful) party are made to appear as the inevitable result of some external force. This tends to be easier in the passive voice, but grammatical structure is just a proxy here. Both “many workers were made redundant by the crisis” (passive) and “the crisis forced many workers out of employment” (active) hide the same information that “the rich cut their losses in the crisis by firing many workers” doesn’t.