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This is just a stupid and absurd article. Yes, if you want to you can go around and cherry pick articles and opinion pieces that are flattering to crypto and po

This is just a stupid and absurd article. Yes, if you want to you can go around and cherry pick articles and opinion pieces that are flattering to crypto and point out they turned out to be wrong in retrospect, but that's what a free press is. You are going to have people with different opinions saying different things, and sooner of later some of them will be wrong, and some will be right and we'll all be better off for having heard the arguments. But to try and pretend there hasn't been media critical of crypto is just deliberately ignoring the facts. How could we have seen this coming? Maybe listen to the Bloomberg podcast where SBF genuinely just outright states they're creating ponzi schemes back in April. But what did you want? Bloomberg to storm the offices of FTX and drag SBF off in cuffs? The core of what happened at FTX was that SBF ran an unregulated exchange- that's a matter for the government and regulators. Not the press. Ocassionally talented investigative reporters uncover a fraud- and often it'll be the most impressive story of their lifetimes. But it's not a reasonable standard to blame them for every one that blows up before they catch it.

tim333 4y ago
It touches on a general phenomena in asset booms though, whether housing, crypto, stocks or whatever. The general pattern is: Asset goes up in a normal manner Agents, exchanges etc make money They then buy ads in media and journalists write "Asset is hot now" articles Public reads them piles in, everything shoots up And then eventually once they've run out of new buyers it all crashes It's worth bearing in mind as an investor. After the crash you'll get "It's all over for <asset>" articles followed by no articles when everyone is fed up which is probably the time to buy.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
> You are going to have people with different opinions saying different things, and sooner of later some of them will be wrong That’s a rather dismissive attitude towards the craft of journalism. Imagine the same applies to medicine. Someone pays a doctor to let your mother die and you’d be saying “well sometimes patients die, we can’t go cherry-picking those cases and pretend it matters” The major problem around crypto reporting wasn’t that some reporters got it wrong. It’s that some reporters got major funding from crypto bros and then happened to write extremely naive and flattering articles about crypto bringing in gullible masses who now lost their money when the FTX Ponzi went bust. It’s not an attack on the free press to point out that writing sugarcoated lies about financial investments because you stand to earn is a scam.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  The job of journalism isn't only to report provable facts, it's to also report on what people are doing and why. It's not the NYT's job to do a deep economic analysis of crypto and come up with an editorial position on it. They interview the people involved in order to give you insight into what's going on in the industry. Is it going to be balanced? No because they're literally trying to show you what the advocates for the industry are saying, and they trust you to be literate enough to understand that when they publish an interview with SBF they are presenting what SBF wants to represent to the world and you should take it with the knowledge of what source it comes from.

tim333 4y ago

It touches on a general phenomena in asset booms though, whether housing, crypto, stocks or whatever. The general pattern is: Asset goes up in a normal manner Agents, exchanges etc make money They then buy ads in media and journalists write "Asset is hot now" articles Public reads them piles in, everything shoots up And then eventually once they've run out of new buyers it all crashes It's worth bearing in mind as an investor. After the crash you'll get "It's all over for <asset>" articles followed by no articles when everyone is fed up which is probably the time to buy.

isitmadeofglass 4y ago

> You are going to have people with different opinions saying different things, and sooner of later some of them will be wrong That’s a rather dismissive attitude towards the craft of journalism. Imagine the same applies to medicine. Someone pays a doctor to let your mother die and you’d be saying “well sometimes patients die, we can’t go cherry-picking those cases and pretend it matters” The major problem around crypto reporting wasn’t that some reporters got it wrong. It’s that some reporters got major funding from crypto bros and then happened to write extremely naive and flattering articles about crypto bringing in gullible masses who now lost their money when the FTX Ponzi went bust. It’s not an attack on the free press to point out that writing sugarcoated lies about financial investments because you stand to earn is a scam.

SilverBirch 4y ago
The job of journalism isn't only to report provable facts, it's to also report on what people are doing and why. It's not the NYT's job to do a deep economic analysis of crypto and come up with an editorial position on it. They interview the people involved in order to give you insight into what's going on in the industry. Is it going to be balanced? No because they're literally trying to show you what the advocates for the industry are saying, and they trust you to be literate enough to understand that when they publish an interview with SBF they are presenting what SBF wants to represent to the world and you should take it with the knowledge of what source it comes from.