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I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this (other than Matt Levine, his coverage has been flawless). Is it because SBF gave a

I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this (other than Matt Levine, his coverage has been flawless). Is it because SBF gave a bunch of money to politicians? Is it because FTX got investment dollars from prominent VCs? Is it because journalists do not understand crypto, like, at all? Is it because he bamboozled journalists by talking so much about Effective Altruism? Nobody, literally nobody, said Bernie Madoff was "suffering from a solvency crisis." They said he lied and stole money. And yet SBF's alleged crimes are quite similar in nature, but he's portrayed as suffering from market conditions beyond his control. So was Madoff. If Madoff got lucky and his portfolio doubled in a year, then he too would have been able to make customers whole. But even if that happened, he still lied and stole, just like SBF.

havella 4y ago
“ If Madoff got lucky and his portfolio doubled in a year, then he too would have been able to make customers whole.” Maddoff didn’t have any portfolio since the late 80’s. So no trading, all fake records. Redemptions of principal and made up profits were paid with other customer funds.
richbell 4y ago
It doesn't hurt that he's greased a lot of palms and his family is well-connected. His mother runs a large secretive Democratic PAC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33681750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33681750
- colpabar 4y ago
- toss1 4y ago
  She also wrote about "moving past blame" for things that go "terribly wrong". From "Sam Bankman-Fried's mom once wrote an essay about fixing problems rather than assigning blame when 'something goes terribly wrong'" Nov 20, 2022 [0] >> She has written pieces for the Boston Review, a quarterly political and literary magazine, arguing that attributing "personal blame" in times of crisis had "ruined criminal justice and economic policy," suggesting it was "time to move past blame." >> "The fact that we have gotten so little in return for our blame mongering at least opens up the possibility that people would be receptive to a new approach," she wrote in 2013. >> "The next time something goes terribly wrong, suppose that instead of immediately asking who is to blame, we were to ask: How can we fix this problem?" Seems a bit of a convenient philosophy for a fraudster . . . [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-frieds-mom-wrote-essay-questioning-blame-problems-2022-11?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-frieds-mom-wrote...
  - qotgalaxy 4y ago
  - pr0zac 4y ago
    This is literally just blameless incident response/postmorteming as practiced by google (https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/ https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/) and a bunch of other tech orgs as well as in industries like aviation and healthcare. Its a well established and supported method for approaching problem solving. Like yeah I can see why it seems a bit ironic in this context but shes not expressing anything nefarious here.
    - tru3_power 4y ago
      Exactly. If you take this approach to the FTX incident, you’ll see quickly that the RCA points to SBF being a fraudster.
    - AdamN 4y ago
      It's also the idea in many safety engineering orgs around how to mechanistically prevent something from happening again even though someone still might try to do the same thing again. In other words, blaming people for mistakes or fraud won't fix the problem since people make mistakes and commit fraud so it will simply happen again. Organizations and governments need to block those mistakes and fraudulent actors from being able to have the impact again that they had previously and we're trying to avoid. That doesn't mean the person at fault can't also be blamed and punished as a warning to others (i.e. one more mechanism to prevent recurrence).
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    The problem is what happens when you apply this philosophy to yourself. It might help if you’re too hard on yourself. But if you’re egotist (like many founders), it can be used to justify all sorts of wrongdoing. “I’m getting away with it - that’s a problem with the system not me.”
- heisenbit 4y ago
  SBF claims to be the Republicans third biggest donor so clearly the paid both sides: https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-says-hes-the-republicans-third-biggest-donor-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-says-hes-t... According to dome other report (Economist?) it was slightly more on the R than D side in any case it was lots on both sides. Crypto lobbying intends to weaken or avoids regulatory oversight. The so called Crypto Four in Congress were two D and tho R.
- constantcrying 4y ago
  He claims to have donated to both sides. His democratic donatations were quite public, his claimed republican donations hidden. The reason he gave for this behaviour was to appeal to the media who dislike republican donations. The subtext is of course that he was perfectly willing to pay both sides.
nradov 4y ago
I mean sure SBF stole, but what he stole was basically the modern equivalent of Monopoly Money. So unlike with the Madoff scam, it's tough to feel any sympathy for SBF's "victims" here since 100% of them were greedy grifters who were voluntarily participating in an obvious pump-and-dump scam. Hopefully SBF will eventually go to prison for wire fraud or something but the impact of his crimes was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
- dmix 4y ago
  You think Sequoia, Ontario Teachers Pension Fund, and a ton of other legitimate investors were "participating in an obvious pump-and-dump scam"? I get its criminal what SBF did and this is as bad as negligence gets in business but everyone is treating this like some overt Madoff like scam that was obvious to everyone in-the-know. The details of how SBF himself was engaging in the scam is not even yet set in stone, besides some real estate deals and an obvious lack of corporate controls/conflict of interest, so accusing others of also being a part of it seeems pretty brash and far too early. Although I get the emotional outrage angle of none of the power players calling it out sooner or asking tough questions. But that's slightly different than participating in a scam.
  - kweingar 4y ago
    Big investors like Sequoia should absolutely have asked tougher questions. They deserve to be scrutinized for this. It isn’t emotional outrage, it’s asking people to do basic due diligence.
    - dmix 4y ago
      Accusing people of participating in a pump-and-dump scheme is the same as asking people to do due dilligence? I don't know, that's sounds a lot like emotional internet outrage. That's the only thing I'm critiquing here. FUD doesn't help us stop this in the future. Actually accusing them of the things they did is how you get them to fix that mistake in the future. Accusing them of being overt scammers, before we have any actual evidence of that, is how you get completely ignored as being hysterical.
99_00 4y ago
Bias, misinformation and deception are the norm. Not the exception.
hula_lula 4y ago
Maybe a naive answer but I feel like its confirmation bias + inability to penetrate how tokens work + convoluted storytelling by SBF
louloulou 4y ago
I would say it's because he "donated" a bunch of money directly to said media organizations. Also, probably taking cues from the self-serving VC blow jobs: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...
SilasX 4y ago
>Nobody, literally nobody, said Bernie Madoff was "suffering from a solvency crisis." They said he lied and stole money. And yet SBF's alleged crimes are quite similar in nature, It's even worse that that: they give SBF a free pass on referring to FTX's issues as being a liquidity problem, which implies his venture was solvent, but just needed more time to extract the value of its investments, even though that too is obviously false, and no amount of time would let him convert FTT etc to value he claimed in his books. Edit: My earlier comment on abuse of the concept of "liquidity": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539326
totalZero 4y ago
My sense is that Matt Levine writes about Sam Bankman-Fried with an unusual amount of empathy considering that he is a professional journalist.
- cjpb 4y ago
  Professional journalist, yes, that's definitely it.
arthurofbabylon 4y ago
Anytime I read a story by big publications about a topic I’m an expert in, I recalibrate my expectations around accuracy and effectiveness in coverage of big publications. It’s astonishing how much nuance is lost in translation - both from the subject matter to the journalist, and again from the journalist’s reporting to the public. This is not a bald criticism or renunciation of journalism from big publications - I simply mean to provide some understanding and clarity around how journalism so often misses the mark. Even though it misses the mark, journalistic coverage is incredibly valuable and a far better approach than darkness. (People might think of journalism as turning the lights on - more accurately journalism is like shining a flashlight into a dark place.) In this case, it is very odd that much of the coverage has not been centered on fraud. I genuinely don’t understand why.
- richbell 4y ago
  > Anytime I read a story by big publications about a topic I’m an expert in, I recalibrate my expectations around accuracy and effectiveness in coverage of big publications. Reminds me of Gell-Mann Amnesia. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
- scarecrowbob 4y ago
  The way you stated this feeling remids me of Gell Mann Amnesia. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
  - 4y ago
majormajor 4y ago
Combination of all of them? After all, you say yourself, one of the most informed journalists on the space is doing an excellent job. The mainstream definitely doesn't understand crypto. (Hell, SBF himself paid for TV ads telling them they didn't have to!) Madoff had easier precedences to compare to and validate for themselves vs trying to figure out if the various crypto-sphere tweets and blog posts "proving" fraud are actually proof and such. The FTX story, if half the stuff I've seen linked on HN is too believe, also has a believability hurdle to the uninformed of being UNBELIEVABLY STUPID. "They did almost literally no accounting at all and transparently bought houses with company funds" yet they also raised crazy $$$ from so-called reputable investors? Surely that can't be true!!
- nwiswell 4y ago
  There's an interesting implication here, which is that if SBF is enough of a charismatic con to make otherwise sophisticated investors toss money around blind, wouldn't he also be able to work similar magic on otherwise sophisticated journalists?
  - MoreBetterMess 4y ago
    Maybe those sympathetic journalists just share SBF's particular ethnic and privileged background?
    - MallocVoidstar 4y ago
      "The Jews are the problem"?
scott_s 4y ago
I have difficulty with your premise, because I’ve read many pieces across many news organizations about how bad the fraud at FTX and Alameda was, and how much of a villain SBF is.
ghshephard 4y ago
Everything will change if there is an indictment, arrest, charges. Remember - Bernie Madoff confessed, and was charged by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/2009/nyfo031009.htm https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/200...
cjpb 4y ago
fundad 4y ago
It’s because he hasn’t been charged
- SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
  I don’t get how so many smart people here don’t understand this. It is not the job of the media to accuse people of having committed crimes, and it is dangerous for most people to do so. Defamation is a real thing. Publicly accuse someone of a crime they did not commit, and they have a legitimate civil cause of action against you. If you can get people to go on the record with their own accusations, great, but those people, too, would be exposing themselves to potential liability. If SBF is charged, the media will be all over it, and the coverage will be based on official records and statements. That is how news coverage of crime works. It is precisely because SBF has not been charged that the information needed to substantiate a news story tying him to criminal activity is unavailable.
  - anonymousiam 4y ago
    If what you say is true, how do you explain daily (for years) dribble from CNN about Trump's "collusion" and how he was going to be in jail very soon?
    - SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
      I don’t know what you are referring to.
      - grateful_spirit 4y ago
        https://youtu.be/MdHtAzFNwjE https://youtu.be/MdHtAzFNwjE The walls are closing in
        lordfrito 4y ago
        This was great thanks... Also there's this [1], which just boggles my mind. I can't make sense of this level of centralized message control and dissemination. It's straight out of 1984. It's hard to believe "the media" (whoever "they" are) has an agenda... it's tinfoil hat stuff.. Usually I write it off as emergent behavior of collective groups of humans trying to make $$$ from clicks, standard selfish behavior + time, leading to a race towards the bottom that looks like this. But watching those clip segments it's pretty clear there's a story/narrative being pitched by someone with the leverage to do so. Is this propaganda? What is propaganda? How can I recognize it? Is everything propaganda? Has "the media" been captured and become a tool of whatever "system" is controlling things? This is the kind of stuff Jean Baudrillard was writing about. Sometimes we get journalism other times we get whatever that this stuff is. I don't have a problem with journalists sticking to the facts, SBF hasn't been charged, so lets not lynch him just yet. But hopefully he's being investigated (they usually don't announce when they are investigating someone, as it puts them on notice). Overall I think this is a direct result the 1996 Telecommunications Act which eliminated the rules on the number of radio stations a company could own (which also was one of the most lobbied bills in history). In hindsight this was a big mistake, and set things up for the kind of centralized messaging we see. There was hope that internet "streams" would help reset things, but with FAANG we're back to a small group of companies controlling what you see and hear. Distrust of the media is at an all time high because of this kind of stuff. It's hard to put your finger on, but your gut says something is very wrong. No wonder so many people go down the tinfoil hat rabbit hole. They're simply trying to make sense of the world they're now living in. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
bulkprotocol 4y ago
>I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this "It's a big club and you ain't in it"
stickfigure 4y ago
Just in case you aren't self-aware: On one hand you are lauding Matt Levine's coverage (he has been very clear not to accuse SBF of fraud yet); on the other hand you seem to be angry that other publications aren't accusing SBF of fraud.
sudormrfslash 4y ago
>> I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this 1. SBF, Caroline, SBF Parents all know all the right people and run in the same circles as the editors/owners of the top publications 2. A lot of other people come down along with SBF, so they dont want to pull the thread. For example, if the FTX money was indeed stolen, then did Dems get stolen-cash-contributions? For example, who else has deeded ownership over the 300M of laundered cash homes in The Bahamas? I think a lot of people want this to go away and they are all friends with the same NYTimes exec circle 3. No one wants to be called anti-semitic, so people are treading very, very carefully around this, even at the expense of justice. No one wants to end up like Kyrie Irving https://www.nytimes.com/article/kyrie-irving-antisemitic.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/kyrie-irving-antisemitic.htm... having to donate 1/2M$ for even touching this
root_axis 4y ago
I don't think it's because he donated money, they already have the money so they're now more incentivized to be critical of him in order to distance themselves from his wrongdoing. > Is it because journalists do not understand crypto, like, at all? I think this is a part of it, even most cryptocurrency enthusiasts don't understand it (a statement that most enthusiasts would concede, just not about themselves), but I think a more influential component is that people just don't care. There have been so many scams like these over the years that everyone already understands cryptocurrency is mostly scams and people are somewhat resigned to the state of things; it's cryptocurrency outrage fatigue. From the media's perspective, the story is far more provocative if they entertain SBF's meandering chaos rather than file it away as just another cryptocurrency scam. > Nobody, literally nobody, said Bernie Madoff was "suffering from a solvency crisis." They said he lied and stole money. I think that's just a product of the era we live in, "suffering a solvency crisis" is the type of euphemism you see all the time in the cryptocurrency world.
- hnfong 4y ago
  > they already have the money so they're now more incentivized to be critical of him in order to distance themselves from his wrongdoing They're incentivized to not look as if they're willing to backstab donors the moment they fall from grace. Otherwise nobody (or at least no unscrupulously rich person) will donate money to them for political support in the future.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  > I think that's just a product of the era we live in, "suffering a solvency crisis" is the type of euphemism you see all the time in the cryptocurrency world. No usually you see "rugged"
bnralt 4y ago
I took a look at some of the media coverage and found that people are spinning it as being much more friendly to Sam than it actually is. For instance, the linked to article portrays Matt Yglesias' article like this: > Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, court chronicler of the neoliberal status quo, seemed to whitewash his own entanglements by crediting Bankman-Fried’s money with helping Democrats in the 2020 elections – sidestepping the likelihood that the money was effectively embezzled. Here are some excerpts from Yglesias' article[1]: > But the truth appears to be much worse than reckless, even as it’s still not fully clear exactly how much worse (did he and his circle lose the money? did they pocket it?), and for those of us who defended him against some of his critics, a reckoning is due. ** > By betraying his clients — I don’t know whether he “defrauded” or whatever else in a legal sense, but he certainly betrayed them — SBF is leaving many of his causes worse off than they would have been if he’d never invested in them. ** > I did warn that SBF supporting good causes didn’t mean that we should assume his crypto agenda is benign — sincere belief that your wealth benefits humanity can be dangerous...I did not, of course, seriously consider the possibility that he would just steal his clients’ money. And given what we now know, you have to be suspicious about the downstream spending as well. All the official and unofficial EA material emphasizes the importance of integrity and does not encourage people to run scams or break faith with others. But I do think the situation poses some questions that the community as a whole will need to reckon with. Honestly, the effort to paint this as a failure of the mainstream media seems to cover the lionization of Sam Bankman-Fried by many in the crypto community. For instance, Coindesk itself wrote numerous articles painting Sam Bankman-Fried in a positive light. And these were directed at people trying to invest in crypto, unlike Yglesias' article. [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-ftx-implosion https://www.slowboring.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-ftx-implos...
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  A Coindesk journalist was the one who first broke the story, that's how the public became aware of it in the first place. Only a few days ago Vox published that bizarre interview, basically giving Bankman-Fried yet another platform to spread more lies. The investors in FTX were mainly not crypto people but venture capital firms, newbies and even the often cited public pension fund. As someone who's been in the space since the early Bitcoin days, I don't know a single actual crypto person who was a fan of the likes of SBF, CZ etc even before FTX imploded. It's firms such as Sequoia Capital and Softbank (seriously, they're always in when cash can be burned) that lost millions in FTX, not actual crypto natives for the most part. There is an interview with SBF out there where he quite literally calls the defi tokens he traded a "ponzi". Of course none of the expert investors did due diligence because they were blinded by the bull market hype, with fat dollar signs in their eyes. Now that their "investment" has disappeared the mainstream has made out the culprit as well. Not the scammer, not the gullible tradfi traders, not a system that relied entirely on trust without verification or regulation - no, it's crypto that was the problem of course. If only there were a way that exchanges could be reliably audited. Maybe some kind of decentralized ledger that can't be controlled and falsified by a single dishonest party.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
I think the media's contrarian bias has a lot to do with it. Nobody wants to share the 10th version of the same story about SBF being a fraud on their social media. However, if you write a contrarian "Maybe SBF was a good guy" article then it's going to spread like wildfire across social media. The same thing happened after Elizabeth Holmes' fraud was revealed. There were a lot of articles claiming that she was actually the victim, or that the industry was to blame, or that everyone was doing the same thing with their startups. None of those aged well, but they drove clicks at the time.
rkho 4y ago
> I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this I've lost hope of Hanlon's Razor at this point. It's painfully transparent how purposeful this has been at the media level, and I've come to believe that there's a very large group of voices who are perfectly fine with what's going on because the fallout "hurt the right people" in their eyes.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  So you’re ditching an epistemological rule of thumb for the 21st century’s favorite understanding instead: it’s a shadowy conspiracy!
  - achenet 4y ago
    or maybe just he paid them off with the stolen cash?
  - rkho 4y ago
    I believe it's imperative to be conscious of the fact that any rule of thumb can become a conventional wisdom trap given the right circumstances. This very much feels like one of them.
90d 4y ago
Keep looking and you will start noticing trends about these groundbreaking stories which get such terrible coverage.
mc32 4y ago
Perhaps connected family pulling a lot of strings and asking for one-time favors in a coordinated fashion. It almost reminds me of how mr Weinstein was able to deflect from his sexual crimes through connections to power and his own intimidation. He was able to stave of investigation into his crimes for decades. Regular Joes would have had no such perverted ability. If the perp had been a persona non-grata, you'd bet this would have been all over the place --pitchforks and torches in-hand.
lr4444lr 4y ago
IIRC, Madoff was literally creating fake statements for customers and not buying securities he claimed he was for his clients. Not saying what SBF did is thus not criminal, but I don't think investigators have that kind of smoking gun yet.
onetimeusename 4y ago
I was surprised Andrew Ross-Sorkin let him speak for the dealbook interview today[1] (You can see a lot of the interview clips on yt now). He did ask some tough questions but SBF was allowed to say whatever he wanted in response and was given space to speak without pushback. Maybe Sorkin wasn't prepared for what SBF answered but then why have him on? I don't think the interview should have happened at all for that reason. I guess we shouldn't assume guilt but we should avoid allowing someone to run PR for themselves also. The audience even laughed along with Sorkin and in reply to some comments SBF made. It was strange given what happened and even Sorkin read out a letter of someone who lost a lot of money but they're joking. This is Andrew Ross-Sorkin who is supposed to be a pretty respected journalist or at least I thought. This isn't a mistake, and I don't think they're stupid either. SBF seems to know how to appeal to journalists pretty well. What the motives of the journalists are is more complicated. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9hPQ_FZw7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9hPQ_FZw7E
- anonymousiam 4y ago
  I was fully expecting SBF to be arrested if he showed up in-person to this event. I wonder why he is still a free man...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    The wheels of justice move slowly for financial crimes. I would be very surprised to see any arrest this soon.
JamesBarney 4y ago
> Is it because he bamboozled journalists by talking so much about Effective Altruism? I don't this it's this one because EA has gotten 10x the negative coverage SBF has.
trashface 4y ago
Some journalists could be betting on crypto as their main (early?) retirement plan and don't want to see it go down in flames.
deleted 4y ago
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helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Not everything is black or white. It’s not the case that there are either good guys or crooks. Often fraud is committed by people that start off doing well or have good intentions but screw up or the market goes against them. They then borrow (steal) just for a short while to make things right and make the same mistakes and commit more fraud. I think a lot of people haven’t decided when SBF became the crook and what his intentions were. As we don’t have all the information and he hasn’t gone to court, isn’t that healthy?
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Are you high? This is literally the medias job: telling the proles that the reason they lost all their money in the housing collapse, the stock market collapse, the crypto collapse, is all a terrible , terrible accident and let’s laugh at these silly buffoons with their silly hair. No dear prole, this surely wasn’t yet another well orchestrated financial heat pump to move money from poor people to rich people. Everyone knows money trickles down!!! Ha ha ha ha ha!
marsven_422 4y ago
They were laundering money for the elite.
watwut 4y ago
Are mainstream media hiding his frauds? Cause the articles that I read in mainstream media were pretty much all calling it a fraud.
usrusr 4y ago
Picking the wrong goalposts: instead of asking "was it a crime" those downplaying ask "is it possible that he did not understand that it was a crime", as if that made a difference of tipping point scale. Is it possible that he did not understand? Certainly. And given the amount of self-respect depending on him not understanding perhaps even likely. Self-delusion is a powerful force. But it's the wrong question to ask of course. On the other hand I haven't seen any media downplaying, here in Germany it's all haughty "Americans being Americans again" ("let's not talk about Wirecard for a few minutes, can we?") and what I read through the hn filter isn't downplaying either. Perhaps what you are perceiving is a subset of media motivated by the crypto angle?
- achenet 4y ago
  Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. The argument "I'm sorry, I didn't know rape/murder was illegal" does not have _any_ value in a court of law.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    It's not, but for people desperately hoping for crypto to recover, "your savings disappeared because of that crypto-bro's you trusted ignorance" is a less bad spin than "your savings disappeared because of that crypto-bro's you trusted malice"
MrPatan 4y ago
Of course it's because he is connected, is on "the same team" and gave them all money. What else is there to understand? Isn't that enough of an explanation?
louthy 4y ago
My impression with crypto is that once money is in token form, there's an expectation that it can just vanish into thin air. Like it can just evaporate. There seems to be a cognitive breakdown that forgets money doesn't get created or destroyed, it is moved from one party to another. My sense is that this cognitive bias is playing out here. "Obviously your money could just disappear, it's crypto, that's what happens. Why look into this?". Once the brain is trained to know this is how it is, it stops asking why it's happening. That's just what happens.
jquery 4y ago
IMO, it’s because crypto still has an aura around it and journalists hesitate to call crypto a fraud. Nothing FTX was doing is any different than what’s going on in tether, yet that still has defenders. Virtually all crypto is a ponzi, but covering crypto like that as a journalist would’ve earned you nothing but scorn for the longest time. Give this scandal some time to percolate. I think the scale of the failure/criminality here is still under appreciated by journalists. Also helps that SBF is still in his 20s. He’s getting more benefit of the doubt than he would otherwise. Whether that offers any legal protection remains to be seen…
vhold 4y ago
It's "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." all over the place. FTX’s Unraveling Is Latest Blow to Softening Ad Market : https://www.wsj.com/articles/ftxs-unraveling-is-latest-blow-to-softening-ad-market-11668681001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ftxs-unraveling-is-latest-blow-... ( https://archive.ph/GogZu https://archive.ph/GogZu )
troad 4y ago
I don't really understand this narrative, that the media are going soft on FTX or SBF. The NYT did do one soft-ball interview, to their discredit, but that was well before we knew the full extent of the wrongdoing and they've been pretty clear-headed since (https://archive.ph/AxB6G https://archive.ph/AxB6G). Bloomberg has been very clear (Matt Levine, as you note, has been pretty scathing, despite being a former fan of SBF). Where is this media that is trying to white-wash FTX?
IAmGraydon 4y ago
Most likely IMO is the media is brushing it under the rug because he donated very large amounts to the left.
- toqy 4y ago
  Does that usually happen? People escaping media scrutiny by donating large amounts to the left? Are there any news outlets outside of the US that wouldn’t be affected by these insidious US leftist institutions that should be reporting on it?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - esparrohack 4y ago
    Oh yeah it happens all the time. But if you notice, keep quiet, or you’ll get labeled a lunatic.
- electrondood 4y ago
  There's the myth of the "left-wing media" again.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    Myth? If so, what do you consider most of mainstream media to be? It is easy to highlight Fox News as right-wing, but how would you classify MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, etc.? I have a feeling most people would respond that journalists are largely on the left ideologically and sympathetically, if not wholeheartedly progressive.
    - toqy 4y ago
      There's plenty of non-left news/media orgs. WSJ, Washington Examiner, New York Post, National Review, Daily Mail, Newsweek, Washington Times. I don't think most of those would be considered fringe media.
cpursley 4y ago
> I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizations https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizat...
DebtDeflation 4y ago
> Is it because journalists do not understand crypto, like, at all? No, I think it's because they understand it well enough to know that if they call what FTX was doing a scam (which it was) then the entire house of cards will collapse because all of the other big crypto exchanges/lenders/yield farms/funds are doing the exact same thing. SBF laid it all out to Matt Levine on Odd Lots back in April. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...
Ntrails 4y ago
> other than Matt Levine, his coverage has been flawless Yet the takeaway from Matt Levine is consistently that they're fucking idiots, not fraudsters. That nobody bothered to count the money. They didn't transfer customer funds to Alameda, but instead used Alameda bank account for customer deposits because FTX didn't have one. Then they didn't bother to do any accounting to notice the money was disappearing. ML paints them as more likely to be morons than hucksters knowingly perpetrating a fraud? Or, I've misread all of his recent columns.
barfingclouds 4y ago
Yeah I listened to a podcast about it and they were seriously clueless. (Wall Street journal.) They basically said people got cold feet and de invested. They didn’t even get to the part where it was a Ponzi scheme

havella 4y ago

“ If Madoff got lucky and his portfolio doubled in a year, then he too would have been able to make customers whole.” Maddoff didn’t have any portfolio since the late 80’s. So no trading, all fake records. Redemptions of principal and made up profits were paid with other customer funds.

richbell 4y ago

It doesn't hurt that he's greased a lot of palms and his family is well-connected. His mother runs a large secretive Democratic PAC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33681750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33681750

colpabar 4y ago
toss1 4y ago
She also wrote about "moving past blame" for things that go "terribly wrong". From "Sam Bankman-Fried's mom once wrote an essay about fixing problems rather than assigning blame when 'something goes terribly wrong'" Nov 20, 2022 [0] >> She has written pieces for the Boston Review, a quarterly political and literary magazine, arguing that attributing "personal blame" in times of crisis had "ruined criminal justice and economic policy," suggesting it was "time to move past blame." >> "The fact that we have gotten so little in return for our blame mongering at least opens up the possibility that people would be receptive to a new approach," she wrote in 2013. >> "The next time something goes terribly wrong, suppose that instead of immediately asking who is to blame, we were to ask: How can we fix this problem?" Seems a bit of a convenient philosophy for a fraudster . . . [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-frieds-mom-wrote-essay-questioning-blame-problems-2022-11?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-frieds-mom-wrote...
- qotgalaxy 4y ago
- pr0zac 4y ago
  This is literally just blameless incident response/postmorteming as practiced by google (https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/ https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/) and a bunch of other tech orgs as well as in industries like aviation and healthcare. Its a well established and supported method for approaching problem solving. Like yeah I can see why it seems a bit ironic in this context but shes not expressing anything nefarious here.
  - tru3_power 4y ago
    Exactly. If you take this approach to the FTX incident, you’ll see quickly that the RCA points to SBF being a fraudster.
  - AdamN 4y ago
    It's also the idea in many safety engineering orgs around how to mechanistically prevent something from happening again even though someone still might try to do the same thing again. In other words, blaming people for mistakes or fraud won't fix the problem since people make mistakes and commit fraud so it will simply happen again. Organizations and governments need to block those mistakes and fraudulent actors from being able to have the impact again that they had previously and we're trying to avoid. That doesn't mean the person at fault can't also be blamed and punished as a warning to others (i.e. one more mechanism to prevent recurrence).
- pyuser583 4y ago
  The problem is what happens when you apply this philosophy to yourself. It might help if you’re too hard on yourself. But if you’re egotist (like many founders), it can be used to justify all sorts of wrongdoing. “I’m getting away with it - that’s a problem with the system not me.”
heisenbit 4y ago
SBF claims to be the Republicans third biggest donor so clearly the paid both sides: https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-says-hes-the-republicans-third-biggest-donor-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-says-hes-t... According to dome other report (Economist?) it was slightly more on the R than D side in any case it was lots on both sides. Crypto lobbying intends to weaken or avoids regulatory oversight. The so called Crypto Four in Congress were two D and tho R.
constantcrying 4y ago
He claims to have donated to both sides. His democratic donatations were quite public, his claimed republican donations hidden. The reason he gave for this behaviour was to appeal to the media who dislike republican donations. The subtext is of course that he was perfectly willing to pay both sides.

nradov 4y ago

I mean sure SBF stole, but what he stole was basically the modern equivalent of Monopoly Money. So unlike with the Madoff scam, it's tough to feel any sympathy for SBF's "victims" here since 100% of them were greedy grifters who were voluntarily participating in an obvious pump-and-dump scam. Hopefully SBF will eventually go to prison for wire fraud or something but the impact of his crimes was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

dmix 4y ago
You think Sequoia, Ontario Teachers Pension Fund, and a ton of other legitimate investors were "participating in an obvious pump-and-dump scam"? I get its criminal what SBF did and this is as bad as negligence gets in business but everyone is treating this like some overt Madoff like scam that was obvious to everyone in-the-know. The details of how SBF himself was engaging in the scam is not even yet set in stone, besides some real estate deals and an obvious lack of corporate controls/conflict of interest, so accusing others of also being a part of it seeems pretty brash and far too early. Although I get the emotional outrage angle of none of the power players calling it out sooner or asking tough questions. But that's slightly different than participating in a scam.
- kweingar 4y ago
  Big investors like Sequoia should absolutely have asked tougher questions. They deserve to be scrutinized for this. It isn’t emotional outrage, it’s asking people to do basic due diligence.
  - dmix 4y ago
    Accusing people of participating in a pump-and-dump scheme is the same as asking people to do due dilligence? I don't know, that's sounds a lot like emotional internet outrage. That's the only thing I'm critiquing here. FUD doesn't help us stop this in the future. Actually accusing them of the things they did is how you get them to fix that mistake in the future. Accusing them of being overt scammers, before we have any actual evidence of that, is how you get completely ignored as being hysterical.

99_00 4y ago

Bias, misinformation and deception are the norm. Not the exception.

hula_lula 4y ago

Maybe a naive answer but I feel like its confirmation bias + inability to penetrate how tokens work + convoluted storytelling by SBF

louloulou 4y ago

I would say it's because he "donated" a bunch of money directly to said media organizations. Also, probably taking cues from the self-serving VC blow jobs: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...

SilasX 4y ago

>Nobody, literally nobody, said Bernie Madoff was "suffering from a solvency crisis." They said he lied and stole money. And yet SBF's alleged crimes are quite similar in nature, It's even worse that that: they give SBF a free pass on referring to FTX's issues as being a liquidity problem, which implies his venture was solvent, but just needed more time to extract the value of its investments, even though that too is obviously false, and no amount of time would let him convert FTT etc to value he claimed in his books. Edit: My earlier comment on abuse of the concept of "liquidity": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539326

totalZero 4y ago

My sense is that Matt Levine writes about Sam Bankman-Fried with an unusual amount of empathy considering that he is a professional journalist.

cjpb 4y ago
Professional journalist, yes, that's definitely it.

arthurofbabylon 4y ago

Anytime I read a story by big publications about a topic I’m an expert in, I recalibrate my expectations around accuracy and effectiveness in coverage of big publications. It’s astonishing how much nuance is lost in translation - both from the subject matter to the journalist, and again from the journalist’s reporting to the public. This is not a bald criticism or renunciation of journalism from big publications - I simply mean to provide some understanding and clarity around how journalism so often misses the mark. Even though it misses the mark, journalistic coverage is incredibly valuable and a far better approach than darkness. (People might think of journalism as turning the lights on - more accurately journalism is like shining a flashlight into a dark place.) In this case, it is very odd that much of the coverage has not been centered on fraud. I genuinely don’t understand why.

richbell 4y ago
> Anytime I read a story by big publications about a topic I’m an expert in, I recalibrate my expectations around accuracy and effectiveness in coverage of big publications. Reminds me of Gell-Mann Amnesia. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
scarecrowbob 4y ago
The way you stated this feeling remids me of Gell Mann Amnesia. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
- 4y ago

majormajor 4y ago

Combination of all of them? After all, you say yourself, one of the most informed journalists on the space is doing an excellent job. The mainstream definitely doesn't understand crypto. (Hell, SBF himself paid for TV ads telling them they didn't have to!) Madoff had easier precedences to compare to and validate for themselves vs trying to figure out if the various crypto-sphere tweets and blog posts "proving" fraud are actually proof and such. The FTX story, if half the stuff I've seen linked on HN is too believe, also has a believability hurdle to the uninformed of being UNBELIEVABLY STUPID. "They did almost literally no accounting at all and transparently bought houses with company funds" yet they also raised crazy $$$ from so-called reputable investors? Surely that can't be true!!

nwiswell 4y ago
There's an interesting implication here, which is that if SBF is enough of a charismatic con to make otherwise sophisticated investors toss money around blind, wouldn't he also be able to work similar magic on otherwise sophisticated journalists?
- MoreBetterMess 4y ago
  Maybe those sympathetic journalists just share SBF's particular ethnic and privileged background?
  - MallocVoidstar 4y ago
    "The Jews are the problem"?

scott_s 4y ago

I have difficulty with your premise, because I’ve read many pieces across many news organizations about how bad the fraud at FTX and Alameda was, and how much of a villain SBF is.

ghshephard 4y ago

Everything will change if there is an indictment, arrest, charges. Remember - Bernie Madoff confessed, and was charged by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/2009/nyfo031009.htm https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/200...

cjpb 4y ago

fundad 4y ago

It’s because he hasn’t been charged

SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
I don’t get how so many smart people here don’t understand this. It is not the job of the media to accuse people of having committed crimes, and it is dangerous for most people to do so. Defamation is a real thing. Publicly accuse someone of a crime they did not commit, and they have a legitimate civil cause of action against you. If you can get people to go on the record with their own accusations, great, but those people, too, would be exposing themselves to potential liability. If SBF is charged, the media will be all over it, and the coverage will be based on official records and statements. That is how news coverage of crime works. It is precisely because SBF has not been charged that the information needed to substantiate a news story tying him to criminal activity is unavailable.
- anonymousiam 4y ago
  If what you say is true, how do you explain daily (for years) dribble from CNN about Trump's "collusion" and how he was going to be in jail very soon?
  - SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
    I don’t know what you are referring to.
    - grateful_spirit 4y ago
      https://youtu.be/MdHtAzFNwjE https://youtu.be/MdHtAzFNwjE The walls are closing in
      - lordfrito 4y ago
        This was great thanks... Also there's this [1], which just boggles my mind. I can't make sense of this level of centralized message control and dissemination. It's straight out of 1984. It's hard to believe "the media" (whoever "they" are) has an agenda... it's tinfoil hat stuff.. Usually I write it off as emergent behavior of collective groups of humans trying to make $$$ from clicks, standard selfish behavior + time, leading to a race towards the bottom that looks like this. But watching those clip segments it's pretty clear there's a story/narrative being pitched by someone with the leverage to do so. Is this propaganda? What is propaganda? How can I recognize it? Is everything propaganda? Has "the media" been captured and become a tool of whatever "system" is controlling things? This is the kind of stuff Jean Baudrillard was writing about. Sometimes we get journalism other times we get whatever that this stuff is. I don't have a problem with journalists sticking to the facts, SBF hasn't been charged, so lets not lynch him just yet. But hopefully he's being investigated (they usually don't announce when they are investigating someone, as it puts them on notice). Overall I think this is a direct result the 1996 Telecommunications Act which eliminated the rules on the number of radio stations a company could own (which also was one of the most lobbied bills in history). In hindsight this was a big mistake, and set things up for the kind of centralized messaging we see. There was hope that internet "streams" would help reset things, but with FAANG we're back to a small group of companies controlling what you see and hear. Distrust of the media is at an all time high because of this kind of stuff. It's hard to put your finger on, but your gut says something is very wrong. No wonder so many people go down the tinfoil hat rabbit hole. They're simply trying to make sense of the world they're now living in. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI

bulkprotocol 4y ago

>I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this "It's a big club and you ain't in it"

stickfigure 4y ago

Just in case you aren't self-aware: On one hand you are lauding Matt Levine's coverage (he has been very clear not to accuse SBF of fraud yet); on the other hand you seem to be angry that other publications aren't accusing SBF of fraud.

sudormrfslash 4y ago

>> I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this 1. SBF, Caroline, SBF Parents all know all the right people and run in the same circles as the editors/owners of the top publications 2. A lot of other people come down along with SBF, so they dont want to pull the thread. For example, if the FTX money was indeed stolen, then did Dems get stolen-cash-contributions? For example, who else has deeded ownership over the 300M of laundered cash homes in The Bahamas? I think a lot of people want this to go away and they are all friends with the same NYTimes exec circle 3. No one wants to be called anti-semitic, so people are treading very, very carefully around this, even at the expense of justice. No one wants to end up like Kyrie Irving https://www.nytimes.com/article/kyrie-irving-antisemitic.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/kyrie-irving-antisemitic.htm... having to donate 1/2M$ for even touching this

root_axis 4y ago

I don't think it's because he donated money, they already have the money so they're now more incentivized to be critical of him in order to distance themselves from his wrongdoing. > Is it because journalists do not understand crypto, like, at all? I think this is a part of it, even most cryptocurrency enthusiasts don't understand it (a statement that most enthusiasts would concede, just not about themselves), but I think a more influential component is that people just don't care. There have been so many scams like these over the years that everyone already understands cryptocurrency is mostly scams and people are somewhat resigned to the state of things; it's cryptocurrency outrage fatigue. From the media's perspective, the story is far more provocative if they entertain SBF's meandering chaos rather than file it away as just another cryptocurrency scam. > Nobody, literally nobody, said Bernie Madoff was "suffering from a solvency crisis." They said he lied and stole money. I think that's just a product of the era we live in, "suffering a solvency crisis" is the type of euphemism you see all the time in the cryptocurrency world.

hnfong 4y ago
> they already have the money so they're now more incentivized to be critical of him in order to distance themselves from his wrongdoing They're incentivized to not look as if they're willing to backstab donors the moment they fall from grace. Otherwise nobody (or at least no unscrupulously rich person) will donate money to them for political support in the future.
anonymoushn 4y ago
> I think that's just a product of the era we live in, "suffering a solvency crisis" is the type of euphemism you see all the time in the cryptocurrency world. No usually you see "rugged"

bnralt 4y ago

I took a look at some of the media coverage and found that people are spinning it as being much more friendly to Sam than it actually is. For instance, the linked to article portrays Matt Yglesias' article like this: > Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, court chronicler of the neoliberal status quo, seemed to whitewash his own entanglements by crediting Bankman-Fried’s money with helping Democrats in the 2020 elections – sidestepping the likelihood that the money was effectively embezzled. Here are some excerpts from Yglesias' article[1]: > But the truth appears to be much worse than reckless, even as it’s still not fully clear exactly how much worse (did he and his circle lose the money? did they pocket it?), and for those of us who defended him against some of his critics, a reckoning is due. ** > By betraying his clients — I don’t know whether he “defrauded” or whatever else in a legal sense, but he certainly betrayed them — SBF is leaving many of his causes worse off than they would have been if he’d never invested in them. ** > I did warn that SBF supporting good causes didn’t mean that we should assume his crypto agenda is benign — sincere belief that your wealth benefits humanity can be dangerous...I did not, of course, seriously consider the possibility that he would just steal his clients’ money. And given what we now know, you have to be suspicious about the downstream spending as well. All the official and unofficial EA material emphasizes the importance of integrity and does not encourage people to run scams or break faith with others. But I do think the situation poses some questions that the community as a whole will need to reckon with. Honestly, the effort to paint this as a failure of the mainstream media seems to cover the lionization of Sam Bankman-Fried by many in the crypto community. For instance, Coindesk itself wrote numerous articles painting Sam Bankman-Fried in a positive light. And these were directed at people trying to invest in crypto, unlike Yglesias' article. [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-ftx-implosion https://www.slowboring.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-ftx-implos...

trompetenaccoun 4y ago
A Coindesk journalist was the one who first broke the story, that's how the public became aware of it in the first place. Only a few days ago Vox published that bizarre interview, basically giving Bankman-Fried yet another platform to spread more lies. The investors in FTX were mainly not crypto people but venture capital firms, newbies and even the often cited public pension fund. As someone who's been in the space since the early Bitcoin days, I don't know a single actual crypto person who was a fan of the likes of SBF, CZ etc even before FTX imploded. It's firms such as Sequoia Capital and Softbank (seriously, they're always in when cash can be burned) that lost millions in FTX, not actual crypto natives for the most part. There is an interview with SBF out there where he quite literally calls the defi tokens he traded a "ponzi". Of course none of the expert investors did due diligence because they were blinded by the bull market hype, with fat dollar signs in their eyes. Now that their "investment" has disappeared the mainstream has made out the culprit as well. Not the scammer, not the gullible tradfi traders, not a system that relied entirely on trust without verification or regulation - no, it's crypto that was the problem of course. If only there were a way that exchanges could be reliably audited. Maybe some kind of decentralized ledger that can't be controlled and falsified by a single dishonest party.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

I think the media's contrarian bias has a lot to do with it. Nobody wants to share the 10th version of the same story about SBF being a fraud on their social media. However, if you write a contrarian "Maybe SBF was a good guy" article then it's going to spread like wildfire across social media. The same thing happened after Elizabeth Holmes' fraud was revealed. There were a lot of articles claiming that she was actually the victim, or that the industry was to blame, or that everyone was doing the same thing with their startups. None of those aged well, but they drove clicks at the time.

rkho 4y ago

> I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this I've lost hope of Hanlon's Razor at this point. It's painfully transparent how purposeful this has been at the media level, and I've come to believe that there's a very large group of voices who are perfectly fine with what's going on because the fallout "hurt the right people" in their eyes.

williamcotton 4y ago
So you’re ditching an epistemological rule of thumb for the 21st century’s favorite understanding instead: it’s a shadowy conspiracy!
- achenet 4y ago
  or maybe just he paid them off with the stolen cash?
- rkho 4y ago
  I believe it's imperative to be conscious of the fact that any rule of thumb can become a conventional wisdom trap given the right circumstances. This very much feels like one of them.

90d 4y ago

Keep looking and you will start noticing trends about these groundbreaking stories which get such terrible coverage.

mc32 4y ago

Perhaps connected family pulling a lot of strings and asking for one-time favors in a coordinated fashion. It almost reminds me of how mr Weinstein was able to deflect from his sexual crimes through connections to power and his own intimidation. He was able to stave of investigation into his crimes for decades. Regular Joes would have had no such perverted ability. If the perp had been a persona non-grata, you'd bet this would have been all over the place --pitchforks and torches in-hand.

lr4444lr 4y ago

IIRC, Madoff was literally creating fake statements for customers and not buying securities he claimed he was for his clients. Not saying what SBF did is thus not criminal, but I don't think investigators have that kind of smoking gun yet.

onetimeusename 4y ago

I was surprised Andrew Ross-Sorkin let him speak for the dealbook interview today[1] (You can see a lot of the interview clips on yt now). He did ask some tough questions but SBF was allowed to say whatever he wanted in response and was given space to speak without pushback. Maybe Sorkin wasn't prepared for what SBF answered but then why have him on? I don't think the interview should have happened at all for that reason. I guess we shouldn't assume guilt but we should avoid allowing someone to run PR for themselves also. The audience even laughed along with Sorkin and in reply to some comments SBF made. It was strange given what happened and even Sorkin read out a letter of someone who lost a lot of money but they're joking. This is Andrew Ross-Sorkin who is supposed to be a pretty respected journalist or at least I thought. This isn't a mistake, and I don't think they're stupid either. SBF seems to know how to appeal to journalists pretty well. What the motives of the journalists are is more complicated. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9hPQ_FZw7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9hPQ_FZw7E

anonymousiam 4y ago
I was fully expecting SBF to be arrested if he showed up in-person to this event. I wonder why he is still a free man...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 4y ago
  The wheels of justice move slowly for financial crimes. I would be very surprised to see any arrest this soon.

JamesBarney 4y ago

> Is it because he bamboozled journalists by talking so much about Effective Altruism? I don't this it's this one because EA has gotten 10x the negative coverage SBF has.

trashface 4y ago

Some journalists could be betting on crypto as their main (early?) retirement plan and don't want to see it go down in flames.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

Not everything is black or white. It’s not the case that there are either good guys or crooks. Often fraud is committed by people that start off doing well or have good intentions but screw up or the market goes against them. They then borrow (steal) just for a short while to make things right and make the same mistakes and commit more fraud. I think a lot of people haven’t decided when SBF became the crook and what his intentions were. As we don’t have all the information and he hasn’t gone to court, isn’t that healthy?

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

Are you high? This is literally the medias job: telling the proles that the reason they lost all their money in the housing collapse, the stock market collapse, the crypto collapse, is all a terrible , terrible accident and let’s laugh at these silly buffoons with their silly hair. No dear prole, this surely wasn’t yet another well orchestrated financial heat pump to move money from poor people to rich people. Everyone knows money trickles down!!! Ha ha ha ha ha!

marsven_422 4y ago

They were laundering money for the elite.

watwut 4y ago

Are mainstream media hiding his frauds? Cause the articles that I read in mainstream media were pretty much all calling it a fraud.

usrusr 4y ago

Picking the wrong goalposts: instead of asking "was it a crime" those downplaying ask "is it possible that he did not understand that it was a crime", as if that made a difference of tipping point scale. Is it possible that he did not understand? Certainly. And given the amount of self-respect depending on him not understanding perhaps even likely. Self-delusion is a powerful force. But it's the wrong question to ask of course. On the other hand I haven't seen any media downplaying, here in Germany it's all haughty "Americans being Americans again" ("let's not talk about Wirecard for a few minutes, can we?") and what I read through the hn filter isn't downplaying either. Perhaps what you are perceiving is a subset of media motivated by the crypto angle?

achenet 4y ago
Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. The argument "I'm sorry, I didn't know rape/murder was illegal" does not have _any_ value in a court of law.
- usrusr 4y ago
  It's not, but for people desperately hoping for crypto to recover, "your savings disappeared because of that crypto-bro's you trusted ignorance" is a less bad spin than "your savings disappeared because of that crypto-bro's you trusted malice"

MrPatan 4y ago

Of course it's because he is connected, is on "the same team" and gave them all money. What else is there to understand? Isn't that enough of an explanation?

louthy 4y ago

My impression with crypto is that once money is in token form, there's an expectation that it can just vanish into thin air. Like it can just evaporate. There seems to be a cognitive breakdown that forgets money doesn't get created or destroyed, it is moved from one party to another. My sense is that this cognitive bias is playing out here. "Obviously your money could just disappear, it's crypto, that's what happens. Why look into this?". Once the brain is trained to know this is how it is, it stops asking why it's happening. That's just what happens.

jquery 4y ago

IMO, it’s because crypto still has an aura around it and journalists hesitate to call crypto a fraud. Nothing FTX was doing is any different than what’s going on in tether, yet that still has defenders. Virtually all crypto is a ponzi, but covering crypto like that as a journalist would’ve earned you nothing but scorn for the longest time. Give this scandal some time to percolate. I think the scale of the failure/criminality here is still under appreciated by journalists. Also helps that SBF is still in his 20s. He’s getting more benefit of the doubt than he would otherwise. Whether that offers any legal protection remains to be seen…

vhold 4y ago

It's "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." all over the place. FTX’s Unraveling Is Latest Blow to Softening Ad Market : https://www.wsj.com/articles/ftxs-unraveling-is-latest-blow-to-softening-ad-market-11668681001 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ftxs-unraveling-is-latest-blow-... ( https://archive.ph/GogZu https://archive.ph/GogZu )

troad 4y ago

I don't really understand this narrative, that the media are going soft on FTX or SBF. The NYT did do one soft-ball interview, to their discredit, but that was well before we knew the full extent of the wrongdoing and they've been pretty clear-headed since (https://archive.ph/AxB6G https://archive.ph/AxB6G). Bloomberg has been very clear (Matt Levine, as you note, has been pretty scathing, despite being a former fan of SBF). Where is this media that is trying to white-wash FTX?

IAmGraydon 4y ago

Most likely IMO is the media is brushing it under the rug because he donated very large amounts to the left.

toqy 4y ago
Does that usually happen? People escaping media scrutiny by donating large amounts to the left? Are there any news outlets outside of the US that wouldn’t be affected by these insidious US leftist institutions that should be reporting on it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- esparrohack 4y ago
  Oh yeah it happens all the time. But if you notice, keep quiet, or you’ll get labeled a lunatic.
electrondood 4y ago
There's the myth of the "left-wing media" again.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Myth? If so, what do you consider most of mainstream media to be? It is easy to highlight Fox News as right-wing, but how would you classify MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, etc.? I have a feeling most people would respond that journalists are largely on the left ideologically and sympathetically, if not wholeheartedly progressive.
  - toqy 4y ago
    There's plenty of non-left news/media orgs. WSJ, Washington Examiner, New York Post, National Review, Daily Mail, Newsweek, Washington Times. I don't think most of those would be considered fringe media.

cpursley 4y ago

> I can't figure out why the media is doing such a terrible job covering this https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizations https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizat...

DebtDeflation 4y ago

> Is it because journalists do not understand crypto, like, at all? No, I think it's because they understand it well enough to know that if they call what FTX was doing a scam (which it was) then the entire house of cards will collapse because all of the other big crypto exchanges/lenders/yield farms/funds are doing the exact same thing. SBF laid it all out to Matt Levine on Odd Lots back in April. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...

Ntrails 4y ago

> other than Matt Levine, his coverage has been flawless Yet the takeaway from Matt Levine is consistently that they're fucking idiots, not fraudsters. That nobody bothered to count the money. They didn't transfer customer funds to Alameda, but instead used Alameda bank account for customer deposits because FTX didn't have one. Then they didn't bother to do any accounting to notice the money was disappearing. ML paints them as more likely to be morons than hucksters knowingly perpetrating a fraud? Or, I've misread all of his recent columns.

barfingclouds 4y ago

Yeah I listened to a podcast about it and they were seriously clueless. (Wall Street journal.) They basically said people got cold feet and de invested. They didn’t even get to the part where it was a Ponzi scheme