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With every crypto collapse there seems to be an associated failure by the media to do any real digging. The same thing happened with Theranos where, with a few

With every crypto collapse there seems to be an associated failure by the media to do any real digging. The same thing happened with Theranos where, with a few exceptions, the media fawned over Elizabeth Holmes. It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs or they've always been this bad and I'm just getting older. There are plenty of earlier scams and bubbles (Enron, dot-com bubble) that slipped under the radar until thing went to shit, so I suspect the latter.

brookst 4y ago
“The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families. Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time. So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” is the answer, but it’s not entirely fair. Kind of like saying the cooks at McDonald’s have always been this bad; in fact it has never been their job to do world-class work.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > “The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families. Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I'd rather get paid like a tobacco lobbyist (or a FAANG developer) than a journalist. Our society has clearly shown us what it values.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    So the onus on reporters to ferret out fraud has the same moral weight as tobacco lobbyists? Except they make $35k/year, get fired every 6 months as their newsrooms undergo layoffs due to lack of clicks, and get sued for investigating anyone powerful enough to matter? Can't imagine why more people don't sign up for that.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Let's say the onus is on reporters to not take money in exchange for glowing coverage. Having a mortgage to pay is no excuse. If you can't be an honest reporter, don't report at all. I think that's a reasonable standard to hold them to. If you can't hack it as an honest reporter, then go get a job in retail or something. Anybody who took money from these people is not a victim.
      - mikeyouse 4y ago
        Is there any evidence at all that any of these reporters were taking money vs. just writing up company press releases as news? And more generally, how do you square this stance with the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too biased against tech companies?
        MichaelCollins 4y ago
        > Is there any evidence at all that any of these reporters were taking money vs. just writing up company press releases as news? Yes. Being discussed now on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593234 > And more generally, how do you square this stance with the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too biased against tech companies? Cynically, they give negative coverage by default to encourage "charitable giving". When the org starts "donating" money to journalists, the tone of the coverage flips.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    The duty not to harm is far stronger than the duty to help.
  - brookst 4y ago
    > Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay. It's not a "defense", it's just reality. When it snows, do you say that sounds like the "triple point defense" of frozen water? People are by and large fallible. I am. And we're wired to prioritize our immediate family over nebulous ideas like The World Must Know The Truth. I am full of nothing but admiration if you are the rare exception who is doing only the most principled of things, with complete confidence that everyone you work for is upright, and that you have optimized your labor to produce the most good for the world in general, not just you and yours. But I honestly don't blame those "Yuppie Nuremberg" people, and if you see shallow news reporting as the moral equivalent of lobbying for tobacco, I can't really disagree. I just don't have the energy to pass moral judgment on everyone, so I'm content with understanding the phenomenon.
- ok123456 4y ago
  It wasn't just 'The Morning Call.' It came from the top from the elite, international, consensus making publications like The New York Times and the Washington Post. These are the papers of record that have the resources to still do real journalism. We're harangued by them how 'democracy dies in darkness' every time we click one of their links, and yet they chose to give all these guileless grifters flattering coverage more often than not.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Doesn't Fox News make tons of money? Do you think they could capitalize on this failure of what you describe as the papers of record and start doing investigative journalism into financial and tech businesses?
    - ok123456 4y ago
      Fox News is primarily a cable news network that republishes some of their work as articles. Television isn't really a medium that lends itself to long form investigative journalism. Why would they bother with it when what they're doing is way more profitable? They also have a reputation for being the partisan press. They'd have to completely rebrand to get into a less lucrative area.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        I'm told that all press is the partisan press of one side or the other, but it seems that there is little to no investigative reporting done by the conservative media - I wonder if it's an opportunity.
        leereeves 4y ago
        Unless you actually watch conservative media, you won't know about their investigative reporting, because it will rarely be mentioned in Democrat media. And if it is mentioned, it is dismissed as misinformation, like Hunter Biden's laptop.
- MrPatan 4y ago
  > “The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families. It's even worse. 50 years ago that's still what they were, but they had the "power" of defining reality. Politicians, millionaires, and other actually powerful people had to suck up to them or with the narrative-shapers against them they would have real problems. But that reality is breaking (if not totally broken). Social media, feed algorythms, recomendation engines, etc, are taking those narrative-shaping powers from them. So they get less respect.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time. Correct answer. People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish. Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The business being covered will issue a press release and it gets rewritten into articles. The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything about whether X is true or not.
  - banannaise 4y ago
    This has become noticeably more true as newsrooms are cut to the bone. Content volume over content quality, because volume is what gets the ad dollars.
  - ChainOfFools 4y ago
    I wonder if there's a viable market for a news outlet which has as its distinguishing core principle the guarantee that it will never use any material from press releases (or equivalently unsolicited, self-interested messaging) as unqualified sources, except for narrow cases when no other source was available. And in such cases it is accompanied by an unambiguous indication (really unambiguous, like a different color font for any portions of the article text directly and solely derived from such sources) that the information presented therein should be trusted on the same level as motivated hearsay from a single source, because that's what it is. But of course this would be expensive to operate, difficult to insulate from corruption and compromise, and unlikely to be popular with advertisers, whose objectives constitute the epitome of conflicted interest with such an outlet's stated core principle.
    - brookst 4y ago
      I don't think that model is compatible with news, where one of the value props is being fast. As you shade over from news to analysis, there are outlets like that. The Economist comes to mind; I don't think I've ever felt that their content was written from press releases. But it's also at least a day, usually a week, later than the actual news. There's probably a project management style triangle here: fast, accurate, and, um. Some third thing. Pick two.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Dominos would be my counterpoint: their pizza was just bad and they could do better. And they did. I think it’s entirely possible that an industry with low competition and high nepotism could just be doing their jobs poorly. Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?
  - chris11 4y ago
    > Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN? How is Rogan an an example of good journalism? He doesn't do background research or push back on guests.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective. They went from abysmal to merely bad. Which is fine at that price point and value prop.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      > Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective. They're not trying to be gourmet food, they're trying to be fast food. They were very bad by even that low standard, and they became better by that standard. I'm still not a fan, but to give credit where credit is due, they did improve.
      - brookst 4y ago
        Oh, 100% agreed there. But in a a larger conversation about "the media", Dominos is analogous to a large, mass-market, low cost outlet, not the media in general. It's entirely possible that TMZ or People Magazine had similar improvements that still keep them below the radar of someone serious about the product. So yeah, some credit, that's fair. But I think the lesson is that good management recognizes when quality is falling off the bottom of the bottom rung, and makes adjustments to get back on that bottom rung.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      That’s exactly my point: We can both recognize the limits of mass market news and think that, eg, CNN is delivering a product below that standard.
- vba616 4y ago
  >So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” Vass you dere, Charlie? [1] Misinformation/disinformation may, I suppose, have always been pretty much this bad, but the writing quality and intelligence in the mainstream media was not. "Journalism" today reads like an assignment written by a near-illiterate freshman engineering student in the compulsory English class, by the standards of the mid-90s. At best. And I think the reason is obvious - modern advertising technology proved that decent writing adds essentially zero value and forced everybody to accept it. So the people with liberal arts degrees are not wrong to hate techies. But once, even techies wrote better. We used to live in a world where elites guessed at what ordinary people wanted, and once the data-driven creed took over, it turned out they were mostly wrong. But optimization taken too far is evil. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pearl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pearl
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I think this is an odd take, given that it was the WSJ that broke the Theranos story and CoinDesk that broke the FTX story. Yes, true investigative reporting is rare (and expensive), but good work is still being done. For the media at large, given the volume of stuff you can read, much of it is plain "story-telling" or "narratives", and I do think the media is more likely to go with things that fit the narrative of the day than look at things with a critical eye. With Theranos, the media absolutely wanted to highlight a "female Steve Jobs", and Holmes used that to her advantage. Similarly, with SBF, given all the smarmy characters in crypto, he fit the narrative of "the good guy", "the next JP Morgan" coming to save the financial system for good.
- BoardsOfCanada 4y ago
  > Yes, true investigative reporting is rare (and expensive), but good work is still being done. Still, it's weird to have to read about this at poker.org first instead of any "respected" news source.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    I read about Friedberg's ties to the poker scandal in other sources last week. It's not exactly a "scoop" given that it's all a matter of public record and has been so for a long time. There was an editorial on CoinGeek in February casting doubt on SBF and pointing out the poker scandal: https://coingeek.com/ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-isnt-who-you-think-he-is/ https://coingeek.com/ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-isnt-who-you-...
    - BoardsOfCanada 4y ago
      Thanks for the link. This makes the WaPo & co puff pieces even more baffling.
boplicity 4y ago
> It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs It's not that "the media" has gotten worse at their jobs. Rather, there simply a lot less funding for reporters. The hit in funding has become much worse in local reporting -- especially local newspapers. However, if this is viewed as a training ground for the few large national/international news organizations, it's easy to see how this has a profound impact for even the large and well funded publications. There's simply much less reporting happening than their used to be, and it's a real problem. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroom-employment-has-fallen-26-since-2008/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroo... https://www.statista.com/statistics/626459/number-employees-newspaper-industry/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20just%20104%2C290%20people%20were%20employed%20in,from%2075%20thousand%20to%20less%20than%2030%20thousand https://www.statista.com/statistics/626459/number-employees-....
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  The first statistic you link is a newsroom statistic. This cut makes sense, because newspaper now get their news from big agencies. Newsrooms are completely different from investigative digging into stuff.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    But who collects the stories for the agencies - it used to be the local reporters who are the ones gone. This is the point of the statistic I am in UK and look at my local papers - the number of stories is massively down and the report numbers are much smaller. One reporter now for several London boroughs when there used to be several for one. Who is looking at local government now?
    - cguess 4y ago
      No one, and (though I'm not sure this is true in the UK as well, though I imagine it is) it's pretty much 100% private equity's fault. They bought up every local paper they could, saddled them with the debt (how that's a thing that's allowed in accounting I will never understand), and then claimed the Internet killed them. Yes, news orgs could have adapted faster, but most privately held papers were in the black. Only when the debts and insane growth expectations were added were they dying. Private equity is ruining modern democratic institutions.
0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
I think it is worth noting that Theranos went after people who investigated them. Used the enormous war chest and high profile backers to crush anyone who challenged the official narrative. How many nascent stories get killed because a broke reporter feels threatened?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  How many "journalists" wrote glowing puff pieces about Holmes and Theranos, when they could have simply written about other companies and people instead? Quite a few as I recall.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    News begets more news. I am not going to fault a reporter for getting in on the current zeitgeist. Unless you are comically bad at crime, bad actors will maintain some level of misdirection to conceal their malfeasance. There are only so many hours in a day, there is not time to do a deep dive report on everything that comes across the desk (most of which would match the official narrative). Theranos took years of concentrated effort to expose, with a large amount of risk (real or implied) to those involved.
HWR_14 4y ago
At least with Theranos, the was the media excuse of "new technologist isn't sharing the secrets of her device yet, but she showed enough to get big-names as investors and #37 on the Fortune list with as much revenue as MSFT is signed on to the tech to make it seem believable". With Enron, they were very very good at obfuscating their scam. But it was the WSJ affiliate that was the first mover on Enron being fishy. A major short seller saw that article and shorted the stock, then turned a tip into another reporter. That reporter then pretty much started its downfall. It was, possibly, the best example of the media being the guardians against a scam since the internet started.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Enron was unlike Theranos, in that Enron was originally a legitimate company while Theranos was a scam from the beginning. Enron was a company that sold natural gas, a real product, that became a scam as they used increasingly dodgy accounting practices to push their stock ever higher. Theranos on the other hand never had a real product, and before Theranos even started Holmes was informed by experts (particularly Phyllis Gardner) that it would never work. In the early days of Enron, an investigative journalist would have found a real gas trading company. But at no point in the history of Theranos would an investigative journalist worth their salt have found a real company.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    All these are true. But I don't get how that relates to what I said. Although, in the early days, a journalist wouldn't have found the gas trading. While Enron traded oil early on, they pretty much built the gas trading industry at the same time they were becoming more scammy.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
You need to have massive balls to go after billionaires and their army of lawyers. And the public doesn't help with their hero worship of tech douchebags.
cokeandpepsi 4y ago
It's not the media's fault these people commit crimes
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  It's the media's fault if they cannot be bothered to Google for two minutes that the chief lawyer at Alameda/FTX happens to be involved in a big poker scandal which... defrauded players. Especially when there were tweets as old as 2018 at the very least describing the very scam Alameda/FTX/SBF was pulling. @bitfinex'ed, a Twitter account which exposes tether for the scam it is since maybe a decade (and tether shall eventually fall), has been posting proof of all the wrongdoings. Including the ties between Alameda an Deltec (tether's bank in the Bahamas) since the very start of the scam. It's also the media's fault that they re copy/pasting everywhere that it's "leveraged trades gone wrong, sending SBF in a death spiral". That's not the story at all yet that's what these scummy media are publishing. The story is that the goal was, from day one, to not only defraud people/investors but also to do a regulatory capture of the crypto exchanges market by greasing politicians and working hand in hand with officials and ex- officials who all knew each other. If there were still investigative journalists around, there's material for quite a story. But it's better to present SBF as an altruistic woke kid who, sadly, was sent into a death spiral after a few bad leveraged trades.
  - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    You are missing the fact that we are dealing with an audience that WANTS TO BE FOOLED. Going against the narrative is brave but it doesn't pay the bills. Besides would it even matter? Does anyone on r/cryptocurrency even care what the MSM writes?
    - Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
      Aren't there a whole lot more people who are wondering what this crypto is and whether they should invest in it?
eternalban 4y ago
> slipped under the radar No, sorry, that is their job description. But since we're using radar as analogy, let me introduce to your new friend, IFF (Identify, Friend or Foe).
- r00fus 4y ago
  I think the radar analogy is flawed at best w/r/t the press. Part of the problem is that the press is owned/regulated by the people in the very institutions that fund the scammers.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    i'm somewhat fond of my iff contribution that addresses what you just said :}
mountainb 4y ago
Journalists who do puff profiles on business and political figures don't do any investigating. Investigative journalists who investigate on their own initiative are rare. Most just ride on the coat-tails of plaintiff lawyers, prosecutors, and public scandals as in this case. It's not really clear if newspapers suffer reputational harm from puff pieces that are later repudiated.
xhkkffbf 4y ago
People on this site routinely post links to evade paywalls. They celebrate ad blockers. But now many of the same people are wondering why "the media" didn't stop a tech fraud? You get what you pay for.
bmitc 4y ago
It’s not just the media. The investors are the primary ones to blame here, in my opinion. They literally gave hundreds of millions a of dollars to a company with a compliance officer with a history of financial fraud and scams and then touted the CEO as a boy wonder. The fact that they invested lended a lot of credence, for better or worse, to FTX.
camgunz 4y ago
At least Matt Levine called FTX a Ponzi scheme to SBF's face [0], to which SBF had no real rebuttal (he tried to make a borrowing argument... but leveraging your Ponzi gains is also classic Ponzi). It's stunning to me that that interview didn't crash FTX by itself, and it indicates that the industry (fintech, VCs, crypto) is engaged in a huge pump and dump. It's legitimately criminal. [0]: https://archive.ph/fGLat#selection-3973.7-3973.12 https://archive.ph/fGLat#selection-3973.7-3973.12 (27:13)
opportune 4y ago
What is the incremental revenue or profit per hour worked for a serious hard hitting investigative piece, vs other crap that is much cheaper to make (like regurgitating press releases)? Not to mention the fact that a lot of investigative leads likely either don’t pan out, are not newsworthy, or ruffle feathers better left unruffled (news media relies on connections and access for leads on stories, and their customers are advertisers, ie large corporations). There is not much of a market for investigative journalism. IMO tort law or class-action suits could fill that niche too if the incentives were more aligned (gotta be a lawyer to make anything off a class action) and the playing field were more even - arbitration clause says what? So lacking an incentive for either of those the next best thing is short selling, which also sucks because it’s time-based, risky, requires capital, and isn’t relevant when something doesn’t have a direct link to a tradable security

brookst 4y ago

“The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families. Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time. So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” is the answer, but it’s not entirely fair. Kind of like saying the cooks at McDonald’s have always been this bad; in fact it has never been their job to do world-class work.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
> “The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families. Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I'd rather get paid like a tobacco lobbyist (or a FAANG developer) than a journalist. Our society has clearly shown us what it values.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  So the onus on reporters to ferret out fraud has the same moral weight as tobacco lobbyists? Except they make $35k/year, get fired every 6 months as their newsrooms undergo layoffs due to lack of clicks, and get sued for investigating anyone powerful enough to matter? Can't imagine why more people don't sign up for that.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Let's say the onus is on reporters to not take money in exchange for glowing coverage. Having a mortgage to pay is no excuse. If you can't be an honest reporter, don't report at all. I think that's a reasonable standard to hold them to. If you can't hack it as an honest reporter, then go get a job in retail or something. Anybody who took money from these people is not a victim.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      Is there any evidence at all that any of these reporters were taking money vs. just writing up company press releases as news? And more generally, how do you square this stance with the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too biased against tech companies?
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        > Is there any evidence at all that any of these reporters were taking money vs. just writing up company press releases as news? Yes. Being discussed now on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593234 > And more generally, how do you square this stance with the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too biased against tech companies? Cynically, they give negative coverage by default to encourage "charitable giving". When the org starts "donating" money to journalists, the tone of the coverage flips.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  The duty not to harm is far stronger than the duty to help.
- brookst 4y ago
  > Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay. It's not a "defense", it's just reality. When it snows, do you say that sounds like the "triple point defense" of frozen water? People are by and large fallible. I am. And we're wired to prioritize our immediate family over nebulous ideas like The World Must Know The Truth. I am full of nothing but admiration if you are the rare exception who is doing only the most principled of things, with complete confidence that everyone you work for is upright, and that you have optimized your labor to produce the most good for the world in general, not just you and yours. But I honestly don't blame those "Yuppie Nuremberg" people, and if you see shallow news reporting as the moral equivalent of lobbying for tobacco, I can't really disagree. I just don't have the energy to pass moral judgment on everyone, so I'm content with understanding the phenomenon.
ok123456 4y ago
It wasn't just 'The Morning Call.' It came from the top from the elite, international, consensus making publications like The New York Times and the Washington Post. These are the papers of record that have the resources to still do real journalism. We're harangued by them how 'democracy dies in darkness' every time we click one of their links, and yet they chose to give all these guileless grifters flattering coverage more often than not.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Doesn't Fox News make tons of money? Do you think they could capitalize on this failure of what you describe as the papers of record and start doing investigative journalism into financial and tech businesses?
  - ok123456 4y ago
    Fox News is primarily a cable news network that republishes some of their work as articles. Television isn't really a medium that lends itself to long form investigative journalism. Why would they bother with it when what they're doing is way more profitable? They also have a reputation for being the partisan press. They'd have to completely rebrand to get into a less lucrative area.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I'm told that all press is the partisan press of one side or the other, but it seems that there is little to no investigative reporting done by the conservative media - I wonder if it's an opportunity.
      - leereeves 4y ago
        Unless you actually watch conservative media, you won't know about their investigative reporting, because it will rarely be mentioned in Democrat media. And if it is mentioned, it is dismissed as misinformation, like Hunter Biden's laptop.
MrPatan 4y ago
> “The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families. It's even worse. 50 years ago that's still what they were, but they had the "power" of defining reality. Politicians, millionaires, and other actually powerful people had to suck up to them or with the narrative-shapers against them they would have real problems. But that reality is breaking (if not totally broken). Social media, feed algorythms, recomendation engines, etc, are taking those narrative-shaping powers from them. So they get less respect.
pjc50 4y ago
> Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time. Correct answer. People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish. Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The business being covered will issue a press release and it gets rewritten into articles. The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything about whether X is true or not.
- banannaise 4y ago
  This has become noticeably more true as newsrooms are cut to the bone. Content volume over content quality, because volume is what gets the ad dollars.
- ChainOfFools 4y ago
  I wonder if there's a viable market for a news outlet which has as its distinguishing core principle the guarantee that it will never use any material from press releases (or equivalently unsolicited, self-interested messaging) as unqualified sources, except for narrow cases when no other source was available. And in such cases it is accompanied by an unambiguous indication (really unambiguous, like a different color font for any portions of the article text directly and solely derived from such sources) that the information presented therein should be trusted on the same level as motivated hearsay from a single source, because that's what it is. But of course this would be expensive to operate, difficult to insulate from corruption and compromise, and unlikely to be popular with advertisers, whose objectives constitute the epitome of conflicted interest with such an outlet's stated core principle.
  - brookst 4y ago
    I don't think that model is compatible with news, where one of the value props is being fast. As you shade over from news to analysis, there are outlets like that. The Economist comes to mind; I don't think I've ever felt that their content was written from press releases. But it's also at least a day, usually a week, later than the actual news. There's probably a project management style triangle here: fast, accurate, and, um. Some third thing. Pick two.
zmgsabst 4y ago
Dominos would be my counterpoint: their pizza was just bad and they could do better. And they did. I think it’s entirely possible that an industry with low competition and high nepotism could just be doing their jobs poorly. Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?
- chris11 4y ago
  > Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN? How is Rogan an an example of good journalism? He doesn't do background research or push back on guests.
- brookst 4y ago
  Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective. They went from abysmal to merely bad. Which is fine at that price point and value prop.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective. They're not trying to be gourmet food, they're trying to be fast food. They were very bad by even that low standard, and they became better by that standard. I'm still not a fan, but to give credit where credit is due, they did improve.
    - brookst 4y ago
      Oh, 100% agreed there. But in a a larger conversation about "the media", Dominos is analogous to a large, mass-market, low cost outlet, not the media in general. It's entirely possible that TMZ or People Magazine had similar improvements that still keep them below the radar of someone serious about the product. So yeah, some credit, that's fair. But I think the lesson is that good management recognizes when quality is falling off the bottom of the bottom rung, and makes adjustments to get back on that bottom rung.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    That’s exactly my point: We can both recognize the limits of mass market news and think that, eg, CNN is delivering a product below that standard.
vba616 4y ago
>So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” Vass you dere, Charlie? [1] Misinformation/disinformation may, I suppose, have always been pretty much this bad, but the writing quality and intelligence in the mainstream media was not. "Journalism" today reads like an assignment written by a near-illiterate freshman engineering student in the compulsory English class, by the standards of the mid-90s. At best. And I think the reason is obvious - modern advertising technology proved that decent writing adds essentially zero value and forced everybody to accept it. So the people with liberal arts degrees are not wrong to hate techies. But once, even techies wrote better. We used to live in a world where elites guessed at what ordinary people wanted, and once the data-driven creed took over, it turned out they were mostly wrong. But optimization taken too far is evil. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pearl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pearl

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I think this is an odd take, given that it was the WSJ that broke the Theranos story and CoinDesk that broke the FTX story. Yes, true investigative reporting is rare (and expensive), but good work is still being done. For the media at large, given the volume of stuff you can read, much of it is plain "story-telling" or "narratives", and I do think the media is more likely to go with things that fit the narrative of the day than look at things with a critical eye. With Theranos, the media absolutely wanted to highlight a "female Steve Jobs", and Holmes used that to her advantage. Similarly, with SBF, given all the smarmy characters in crypto, he fit the narrative of "the good guy", "the next JP Morgan" coming to save the financial system for good.

BoardsOfCanada 4y ago
> Yes, true investigative reporting is rare (and expensive), but good work is still being done. Still, it's weird to have to read about this at poker.org first instead of any "respected" news source.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  I read about Friedberg's ties to the poker scandal in other sources last week. It's not exactly a "scoop" given that it's all a matter of public record and has been so for a long time. There was an editorial on CoinGeek in February casting doubt on SBF and pointing out the poker scandal: https://coingeek.com/ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-isnt-who-you-think-he-is/ https://coingeek.com/ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-isnt-who-you-...
  - BoardsOfCanada 4y ago
    Thanks for the link. This makes the WaPo & co puff pieces even more baffling.

boplicity 4y ago

> It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs It's not that "the media" has gotten worse at their jobs. Rather, there simply a lot less funding for reporters. The hit in funding has become much worse in local reporting -- especially local newspapers. However, if this is viewed as a training ground for the few large national/international news organizations, it's easy to see how this has a profound impact for even the large and well funded publications. There's simply much less reporting happening than their used to be, and it's a real problem. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroom-employment-has-fallen-26-since-2008/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroo... https://www.statista.com/statistics/626459/number-employees-newspaper-industry/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20just%20104%2C290%20people%20were%20employed%20in,from%2075%20thousand%20to%20less%20than%2030%20thousand https://www.statista.com/statistics/626459/number-employees-....

mccorrinall 4y ago
The first statistic you link is a newsroom statistic. This cut makes sense, because newspaper now get their news from big agencies. Newsrooms are completely different from investigative digging into stuff.
- deleted 4y ago
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- pasc1878 4y ago
  But who collects the stories for the agencies - it used to be the local reporters who are the ones gone. This is the point of the statistic I am in UK and look at my local papers - the number of stories is massively down and the report numbers are much smaller. One reporter now for several London boroughs when there used to be several for one. Who is looking at local government now?
  - cguess 4y ago
    No one, and (though I'm not sure this is true in the UK as well, though I imagine it is) it's pretty much 100% private equity's fault. They bought up every local paper they could, saddled them with the debt (how that's a thing that's allowed in accounting I will never understand), and then claimed the Internet killed them. Yes, news orgs could have adapted faster, but most privately held papers were in the black. Only when the debts and insane growth expectations were added were they dying. Private equity is ruining modern democratic institutions.

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago

I think it is worth noting that Theranos went after people who investigated them. Used the enormous war chest and high profile backers to crush anyone who challenged the official narrative. How many nascent stories get killed because a broke reporter feels threatened?

MichaelCollins 4y ago
How many "journalists" wrote glowing puff pieces about Holmes and Theranos, when they could have simply written about other companies and people instead? Quite a few as I recall.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  News begets more news. I am not going to fault a reporter for getting in on the current zeitgeist. Unless you are comically bad at crime, bad actors will maintain some level of misdirection to conceal their malfeasance. There are only so many hours in a day, there is not time to do a deep dive report on everything that comes across the desk (most of which would match the official narrative). Theranos took years of concentrated effort to expose, with a large amount of risk (real or implied) to those involved.

HWR_14 4y ago

At least with Theranos, the was the media excuse of "new technologist isn't sharing the secrets of her device yet, but she showed enough to get big-names as investors and #37 on the Fortune list with as much revenue as MSFT is signed on to the tech to make it seem believable". With Enron, they were very very good at obfuscating their scam. But it was the WSJ affiliate that was the first mover on Enron being fishy. A major short seller saw that article and shorted the stock, then turned a tip into another reporter. That reporter then pretty much started its downfall. It was, possibly, the best example of the media being the guardians against a scam since the internet started.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
Enron was unlike Theranos, in that Enron was originally a legitimate company while Theranos was a scam from the beginning. Enron was a company that sold natural gas, a real product, that became a scam as they used increasingly dodgy accounting practices to push their stock ever higher. Theranos on the other hand never had a real product, and before Theranos even started Holmes was informed by experts (particularly Phyllis Gardner) that it would never work. In the early days of Enron, an investigative journalist would have found a real gas trading company. But at no point in the history of Theranos would an investigative journalist worth their salt have found a real company.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  All these are true. But I don't get how that relates to what I said. Although, in the early days, a journalist wouldn't have found the gas trading. While Enron traded oil early on, they pretty much built the gas trading industry at the same time they were becoming more scammy.

WeylandYutani 4y ago

You need to have massive balls to go after billionaires and their army of lawyers. And the public doesn't help with their hero worship of tech douchebags.

cokeandpepsi 4y ago

It's not the media's fault these people commit crimes

TacticalCoder 4y ago
It's the media's fault if they cannot be bothered to Google for two minutes that the chief lawyer at Alameda/FTX happens to be involved in a big poker scandal which... defrauded players. Especially when there were tweets as old as 2018 at the very least describing the very scam Alameda/FTX/SBF was pulling. @bitfinex'ed, a Twitter account which exposes tether for the scam it is since maybe a decade (and tether shall eventually fall), has been posting proof of all the wrongdoings. Including the ties between Alameda an Deltec (tether's bank in the Bahamas) since the very start of the scam. It's also the media's fault that they re copy/pasting everywhere that it's "leveraged trades gone wrong, sending SBF in a death spiral". That's not the story at all yet that's what these scummy media are publishing. The story is that the goal was, from day one, to not only defraud people/investors but also to do a regulatory capture of the crypto exchanges market by greasing politicians and working hand in hand with officials and ex- officials who all knew each other. If there were still investigative journalists around, there's material for quite a story. But it's better to present SBF as an altruistic woke kid who, sadly, was sent into a death spiral after a few bad leveraged trades.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  You are missing the fact that we are dealing with an audience that WANTS TO BE FOOLED. Going against the narrative is brave but it doesn't pay the bills. Besides would it even matter? Does anyone on r/cryptocurrency even care what the MSM writes?
  - Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
    Aren't there a whole lot more people who are wondering what this crypto is and whether they should invest in it?

eternalban 4y ago

> slipped under the radar No, sorry, that is their job description. But since we're using radar as analogy, let me introduce to your new friend, IFF (Identify, Friend or Foe).

r00fus 4y ago
I think the radar analogy is flawed at best w/r/t the press. Part of the problem is that the press is owned/regulated by the people in the very institutions that fund the scammers.
- eternalban 4y ago
  i'm somewhat fond of my iff contribution that addresses what you just said :}

mountainb 4y ago

Journalists who do puff profiles on business and political figures don't do any investigating. Investigative journalists who investigate on their own initiative are rare. Most just ride on the coat-tails of plaintiff lawyers, prosecutors, and public scandals as in this case. It's not really clear if newspapers suffer reputational harm from puff pieces that are later repudiated.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

People on this site routinely post links to evade paywalls. They celebrate ad blockers. But now many of the same people are wondering why "the media" didn't stop a tech fraud? You get what you pay for.

bmitc 4y ago

It’s not just the media. The investors are the primary ones to blame here, in my opinion. They literally gave hundreds of millions a of dollars to a company with a compliance officer with a history of financial fraud and scams and then touted the CEO as a boy wonder. The fact that they invested lended a lot of credence, for better or worse, to FTX.

camgunz 4y ago

At least Matt Levine called FTX a Ponzi scheme to SBF's face [0], to which SBF had no real rebuttal (he tried to make a borrowing argument... but leveraging your Ponzi gains is also classic Ponzi). It's stunning to me that that interview didn't crash FTX by itself, and it indicates that the industry (fintech, VCs, crypto) is engaged in a huge pump and dump. It's legitimately criminal. [0]: https://archive.ph/fGLat#selection-3973.7-3973.12 https://archive.ph/fGLat#selection-3973.7-3973.12 (27:13)

opportune 4y ago

What is the incremental revenue or profit per hour worked for a serious hard hitting investigative piece, vs other crap that is much cheaper to make (like regurgitating press releases)? Not to mention the fact that a lot of investigative leads likely either don’t pan out, are not newsworthy, or ruffle feathers better left unruffled (news media relies on connections and access for leads on stories, and their customers are advertisers, ie large corporations). There is not much of a market for investigative journalism. IMO tort law or class-action suits could fill that niche too if the incentives were more aligned (gotta be a lawyer to make anything off a class action) and the playing field were more even - arbitration clause says what? So lacking an incentive for either of those the next best thing is short selling, which also sucks because it’s time-based, risky, requires capital, and isn’t relevant when something doesn’t have a direct link to a tradable security