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At first I was reeled in and started to see a different perspective on a pretty controversial story and then right towards the end, BAM! Nicole (author of the a

At first I was reeled in and started to see a different perspective on a pretty controversial story and then right towards the end, BAM! Nicole (author of the article) hits us with this important nugget: I will admit that I am friends with Emil. We were both White House Fellows serving in different departments during the first year of the Obama administration where we both quit our jobs to take civil service positions to improve our country. You would think someone commenting on such an important and controversial story in tech like this would fully disclose that she is in-fact friends with Emil and worked with him right at the beginning of the article? Seems like a big conflict of interest here and changes the tone from "see this from another perspective" to "I am defending my friend, so everything I write is going to be heavily biased" I feel as though even Nicole's account is sensationalist in itself. This line right here: At that point, I wanted to grab Emil. I kind of knew what Ben was up to. - A journalist asking questions at an event for journalists? Who would have thought such a thing would happen? Nicole then goes on to confirm what the previous lines of text confirmed that this is an emotional and personal response defending her friend: I am upset that Ben sensationalized what happened at that dinner. I am not trying to say that the original story by Ben wasn't sensationalist, but it wasn't a fabricated lie either. Emil said what he said, this article even confirms that. I have no issue with Nicole rallying to the defense of a friend, I would do the same, but I would at least disclose the fact before, not after.

mcphage 12y ago
> You would think someone commenting on such an important and controversial story in tech like this would fully disclose that she is in-fact friends with Emil and worked with him? But isn't the only reason you know those facts because she did disclose them? Like, right there in that line you quoted?
- DigitalSea 12y ago
  No. The article would have held more credibility in my eyes if she was upfront about the fact there was a conflict of interest before continuing on with the article. Heck, even an article on the likes of Techcrunch with even a remote tinge of conflict of interest is disclosed in the first paragraph before you get into the article contents. I legitimately feel misled, I was to feel as though I was reading an impartial account of what happened that night only to be told at the end that the account was from a friend nonetheless. Lets be honest, in most cases, a friend will always defend another friend regardless of the context or the situation. It is rare that a friend will throw another under the bus, especially in a situation like this. This is why everything Nicole says is hearsay because she could easily be exaggerating what she thought she heard all for the sake of defending her friend. We do not even know for certain if Nicole heard anything to do with what happened, we were offered no new bits of information we did not already have.
  - dkrich 12y ago
    Interesting that you are seemingly willing to take several second-hand accounts and interpretations of what his comments were and the context in which they were made from sources nowhere near the room, yet are okay assuming that what she wrote is merely "hearsay" or "exaggerated" despite her claim that she was sitting next to them during the conversation. I don't, by the way, find this to be a coincident. It seems perfectly logical that you would sit near people you know at a dinner party.
dkrich 12y ago
Seems like a big conflict of interest here and changes the tone from "see this from another perspective" to "I am defending my friend, so everything I write is going to be heavily biased" Why? She is probably one of three or four people on the planet qualified to speak to what actually happened there. The idea that she should recuse herself from publicly posting an account of what she saw first-hand just because she's friends with the subject of the controversy doesn't hold water in my opinion. In fact, since pretty much every article that has come out (all by people who were not themselves in attendance) has had the goal of making attacks against the company and its executives, perhaps a friend of an executive who can offer a personal insight into what happened is the best person of all to write an account of what really happened. It seems that the public at large is more than happy to be spoon-fed facts from Pando Daily, Gawker, and BuzzFeed who carelessly level poorly-researched personal attacks heavily-weighted with personal opinions and biases passed off as "journalism" without actually asking themselves the simple question- "What has my own personal experience been?" I for one like Uber and Lyft, and use both regularly. Never have I or anybody I know experienced any serious problem after having used them several hundred times, despite the constant onslaught of accusations that females are at risk using it. Compare that to the taxi industry. In fact, just last week, after learning that I needed to pay for my ride with a card for expense reasons, refused to let me out of the cab and tried to drive me to an atm against my will and I had to call the police to make him stop the car. This is a true story. Happened last time I took a cab. Despite the fact that it is a law where I live that cabs MUST take a credit card. I'm certainly not suggesting that it is okay to spy on people with the intent of blackmailing or evening the score (and I suspect most everyone would agree with that). I'm just suggesting that we be fair in our criticism. Blogs have a very real incentive to get the most page views that they can and are more than happy to do so at anybody's expense. I've seen that happen enough to know not to take anything I read on the internet at face-value.
- rosser 12y ago
  Disclosing the friendship up front isn't a recusal. It's simple honesty.
  - dkrich 12y ago
sliverstorm 12y ago
It was like four-and-a-half paragraphs. The author didn't "hide" the note about her connection to Emil at the end of a twenty-page snoozefest. Seems like plenty sufficient disclosure to me.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  The proper thing to do is to disclose it right at the start since it obviously colors the whole report.
  - IbJacked 12y ago
    And doing so would obviously color how the report is perceived.
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      Yes. As it should.
    - prakashk 12y ago
      An up-front and prominent disclosure could also color my perception in the author's favor, and I'd be more inclined to give higher credence to author's arguments.
ephemeralgomi 12y ago
> You would think someone commenting on such an important and controversial story in tech like this would fully disclose that she is in-fact friends with Emil and worked with him? She did! You quoted it in your post!
- DigitalSea 12y ago
  Yes Nicole did, right at the end of her article. As I mentioned in another reply, even sites like Techcrunch who are no strangers to half-baked journalism themselves disclose conflicts of interest at the beginning of their articles. It is misleading in my opinion.
  - ephemeralgomi 12y ago
    Okay, so you've backed down from "You'd think she would have disclosed that" to "I would prefer she prefaced the article with that". I'm content.
  - omonra 12y ago
    I think you really are looking to say something critical. As you clearly have nothing substantial to say, your claim 'the disclosure is in the wrong part of the article' is specious. Let's man up and admit that the whole story that's been pushed over last few days is looking like BS.
    - knorby 12y ago
      And all that she's reporting is her own judgements of the incident and a light confirmation that the conversation took place. She confirms almost every detail that the buzzfeed article states, including the suggestion of targeting Sarah Lacy's personal life. They built different narratives of the event, largely colored by the biases of each. The journalist had a bias towards building sensation and the friend had a bias towards downplay. If you don't read news articles expecting the bias of a journalist, then I'm sorry, I don't know what you are doing. But until that ending line in the article, she was a well-placed, mostly unbiased, bystander.
  - 12y ago
ddrmaxgt37 12y ago
ad hominem
colbyh 12y ago
I'm a personal friend of Nicole and it didn't strike me as odd. She doesn't have a dishonest bone in her body, really. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't even register that people might find her prior friendship to be a conflict of interest. Not saying it wouldn't have been helpful up front, but the message is still valid IMO. Understandably I'm a bit biased for the author, but I'm also not the biggest Uber fan so if that helps...
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't even register that people might find her prior friendship to be a conflict of interest. If that were the case she wouldn't have mentioned it at all.
- philsnow 12y ago
  The trouble with the order the article was presented in, is that it buries the lede (the lede here being that the author has a very significant personal bias, which can color the reader's perspective of the rest of the article). The author chose (subconsciously or not, strategically or not) to defer mention of that important fact to the end, by which point many readers will have already given up reading. It is a fact that people pay more attention to the beginning of an article and that a significant proportion of people fall off the end and don't finish.
  - philwelch 12y ago
    It only "buries the lede" for those who are desperate enough to find some reason to discredit it, which is going to be the natural impulse of most torch-and-pitchfork wielding people in this internet mob.
rayiner 12y ago
> Emil said what he said, this article even confirms that. Here's my big problem with all this: nobody defending this guy is saying "no, he didn't say that," or "no, he was joking," or even, "no, it was taken out of context." They're saying, essentially, that he wouldn't have disclosed his internal thought process if he knew it would be made public. I definitely wouldn't want one of my jokes or hypotheticals to be quoted out of context. But what I don't get is staying stuff you actually mean and then getting upset that people call you an asshole for thinking and believing the things you actually think and believe.
- emiliobumachar 12y ago
  From the article: "I heard a mention of a Sarah Lacy and overheard Emil say that he felt terrible that by writing an article, Sarah had actually suggested that people choose less safe alternatives based on a charge of sexism that was really a personal attack on the CEO with no basis in fact. Emil then said that Sarah wouldn't like it if someone wrote false things about her or published an article that was factually wrong because we all have done things in our private lives we are not proud of. There was no anti-feminist sentiment, no attacking families, no attacking children, no anger, no threats against anyone, no action plan. Nothing. It was clear to me that this was all a vague, civilized conversation. I am a woman and I am sensitive to any kind of talk like that. " (my emphasis.) I don't know whether she's telling the truth, but she's definitely saying "no, he didn't say that" to the most grave things he's been accused of saying.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    He's also describing what she overheard to contravene the testimony of someone who was actually a party to the conversation.
downandout 12y ago
>I am not trying to say that the original story by Ben wasn't sensationalist, but it wasn't a fabricated lie either Is it not a fabrication when you take something that was clearly a hypothetical statement and report it as if you overheard it at a strategy meeting? Both Ben and Sarah's stories represented that this wasn't a hypothetical, but rather a plan that would be carried out against Sarah and her children immediately. IMO, that is a fabrication.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  "take something that was clearly a hypothetical statement and report it as if you overheard it at a strategy meeting?" No one has done this.
  - downandout 12y ago
    Except for Sarah and Ben, along with every derivative article and news report published on this since this started.
  - nailer 12y ago
    Title of Buzzfeed article: "Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists" Even Ben's own quotes in that article indicate it wasn't a serious suggestion.
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      Right. What he did not do was present it as if it came from an Uber corporate strategy meeting.
- likeagrownup 12y ago
  Are you related to Uber in any fashion? Because honestly, that's some bullshit that you just wrote write there. Nobody said it like they were at a strategy meeting. It was reported as it was: evidence that Emil is a shitbag who threatens reporters, and works at a company where that sort of thing is considered a fine course of action.
andrep 12y ago
Conflict of interest? What about the desire to break a story (and make your career) vs reporting what actually happened without sensationalising it?

mcphage 12y ago

> You would think someone commenting on such an important and controversial story in tech like this would fully disclose that she is in-fact friends with Emil and worked with him? But isn't the only reason you know those facts because she did disclose them? Like, right there in that line you quoted?

DigitalSea 12y ago
No. The article would have held more credibility in my eyes if she was upfront about the fact there was a conflict of interest before continuing on with the article. Heck, even an article on the likes of Techcrunch with even a remote tinge of conflict of interest is disclosed in the first paragraph before you get into the article contents. I legitimately feel misled, I was to feel as though I was reading an impartial account of what happened that night only to be told at the end that the account was from a friend nonetheless. Lets be honest, in most cases, a friend will always defend another friend regardless of the context or the situation. It is rare that a friend will throw another under the bus, especially in a situation like this. This is why everything Nicole says is hearsay because she could easily be exaggerating what she thought she heard all for the sake of defending her friend. We do not even know for certain if Nicole heard anything to do with what happened, we were offered no new bits of information we did not already have.
- dkrich 12y ago
  Interesting that you are seemingly willing to take several second-hand accounts and interpretations of what his comments were and the context in which they were made from sources nowhere near the room, yet are okay assuming that what she wrote is merely "hearsay" or "exaggerated" despite her claim that she was sitting next to them during the conversation. I don't, by the way, find this to be a coincident. It seems perfectly logical that you would sit near people you know at a dinner party.

dkrich 12y ago

Seems like a big conflict of interest here and changes the tone from "see this from another perspective" to "I am defending my friend, so everything I write is going to be heavily biased" Why? She is probably one of three or four people on the planet qualified to speak to what actually happened there. The idea that she should recuse herself from publicly posting an account of what she saw first-hand just because she's friends with the subject of the controversy doesn't hold water in my opinion. In fact, since pretty much every article that has come out (all by people who were not themselves in attendance) has had the goal of making attacks against the company and its executives, perhaps a friend of an executive who can offer a personal insight into what happened is the best person of all to write an account of what really happened. It seems that the public at large is more than happy to be spoon-fed facts from Pando Daily, Gawker, and BuzzFeed who carelessly level poorly-researched personal attacks heavily-weighted with personal opinions and biases passed off as "journalism" without actually asking themselves the simple question- "What has my own personal experience been?" I for one like Uber and Lyft, and use both regularly. Never have I or anybody I know experienced any serious problem after having used them several hundred times, despite the constant onslaught of accusations that females are at risk using it. Compare that to the taxi industry. In fact, just last week, after learning that I needed to pay for my ride with a card for expense reasons, refused to let me out of the cab and tried to drive me to an atm against my will and I had to call the police to make him stop the car. This is a true story. Happened last time I took a cab. Despite the fact that it is a law where I live that cabs MUST take a credit card. I'm certainly not suggesting that it is okay to spy on people with the intent of blackmailing or evening the score (and I suspect most everyone would agree with that). I'm just suggesting that we be fair in our criticism. Blogs have a very real incentive to get the most page views that they can and are more than happy to do so at anybody's expense. I've seen that happen enough to know not to take anything I read on the internet at face-value.

rosser 12y ago
Disclosing the friendship up front isn't a recusal. It's simple honesty.
- dkrich 12y ago

sliverstorm 12y ago

It was like four-and-a-half paragraphs. The author didn't "hide" the note about her connection to Emil at the end of a twenty-page snoozefest. Seems like plenty sufficient disclosure to me.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
The proper thing to do is to disclose it right at the start since it obviously colors the whole report.
- IbJacked 12y ago
  And doing so would obviously color how the report is perceived.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    Yes. As it should.
  - prakashk 12y ago
    An up-front and prominent disclosure could also color my perception in the author's favor, and I'd be more inclined to give higher credence to author's arguments.

ephemeralgomi 12y ago

> You would think someone commenting on such an important and controversial story in tech like this would fully disclose that she is in-fact friends with Emil and worked with him? She did! You quoted it in your post!

DigitalSea 12y ago
Yes Nicole did, right at the end of her article. As I mentioned in another reply, even sites like Techcrunch who are no strangers to half-baked journalism themselves disclose conflicts of interest at the beginning of their articles. It is misleading in my opinion.
- ephemeralgomi 12y ago
  Okay, so you've backed down from "You'd think she would have disclosed that" to "I would prefer she prefaced the article with that". I'm content.
- omonra 12y ago
  I think you really are looking to say something critical. As you clearly have nothing substantial to say, your claim 'the disclosure is in the wrong part of the article' is specious. Let's man up and admit that the whole story that's been pushed over last few days is looking like BS.
  - knorby 12y ago
    And all that she's reporting is her own judgements of the incident and a light confirmation that the conversation took place. She confirms almost every detail that the buzzfeed article states, including the suggestion of targeting Sarah Lacy's personal life. They built different narratives of the event, largely colored by the biases of each. The journalist had a bias towards building sensation and the friend had a bias towards downplay. If you don't read news articles expecting the bias of a journalist, then I'm sorry, I don't know what you are doing. But until that ending line in the article, she was a well-placed, mostly unbiased, bystander.
- 12y ago

ddrmaxgt37 12y ago

ad hominem

colbyh 12y ago

I'm a personal friend of Nicole and it didn't strike me as odd. She doesn't have a dishonest bone in her body, really. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't even register that people might find her prior friendship to be a conflict of interest. Not saying it wouldn't have been helpful up front, but the message is still valid IMO. Understandably I'm a bit biased for the author, but I'm also not the biggest Uber fan so if that helps...

frostmatthew 12y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't even register that people might find her prior friendship to be a conflict of interest. If that were the case she wouldn't have mentioned it at all.
philsnow 12y ago
The trouble with the order the article was presented in, is that it buries the lede (the lede here being that the author has a very significant personal bias, which can color the reader's perspective of the rest of the article). The author chose (subconsciously or not, strategically or not) to defer mention of that important fact to the end, by which point many readers will have already given up reading. It is a fact that people pay more attention to the beginning of an article and that a significant proportion of people fall off the end and don't finish.
- philwelch 12y ago
  It only "buries the lede" for those who are desperate enough to find some reason to discredit it, which is going to be the natural impulse of most torch-and-pitchfork wielding people in this internet mob.

rayiner 12y ago

> Emil said what he said, this article even confirms that. Here's my big problem with all this: nobody defending this guy is saying "no, he didn't say that," or "no, he was joking," or even, "no, it was taken out of context." They're saying, essentially, that he wouldn't have disclosed his internal thought process if he knew it would be made public. I definitely wouldn't want one of my jokes or hypotheticals to be quoted out of context. But what I don't get is staying stuff you actually mean and then getting upset that people call you an asshole for thinking and believing the things you actually think and believe.

emiliobumachar 12y ago
From the article: "I heard a mention of a Sarah Lacy and overheard Emil say that he felt terrible that by writing an article, Sarah had actually suggested that people choose less safe alternatives based on a charge of sexism that was really a personal attack on the CEO with no basis in fact. Emil then said that Sarah wouldn't like it if someone wrote false things about her or published an article that was factually wrong because we all have done things in our private lives we are not proud of. There was no anti-feminist sentiment, no attacking families, no attacking children, no anger, no threats against anyone, no action plan. Nothing. It was clear to me that this was all a vague, civilized conversation. I am a woman and I am sensitive to any kind of talk like that. " (my emphasis.) I don't know whether she's telling the truth, but she's definitely saying "no, he didn't say that" to the most grave things he's been accused of saying.
- rayiner 12y ago
  He's also describing what she overheard to contravene the testimony of someone who was actually a party to the conversation.

downandout 12y ago

>I am not trying to say that the original story by Ben wasn't sensationalist, but it wasn't a fabricated lie either Is it not a fabrication when you take something that was clearly a hypothetical statement and report it as if you overheard it at a strategy meeting? Both Ben and Sarah's stories represented that this wasn't a hypothetical, but rather a plan that would be carried out against Sarah and her children immediately. IMO, that is a fabrication.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
"take something that was clearly a hypothetical statement and report it as if you overheard it at a strategy meeting?" No one has done this.
- downandout 12y ago
  Except for Sarah and Ben, along with every derivative article and news report published on this since this started.
- nailer 12y ago
  Title of Buzzfeed article: "Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists" Even Ben's own quotes in that article indicate it wasn't a serious suggestion.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    Right. What he did not do was present it as if it came from an Uber corporate strategy meeting.
likeagrownup 12y ago
Are you related to Uber in any fashion? Because honestly, that's some bullshit that you just wrote write there. Nobody said it like they were at a strategy meeting. It was reported as it was: evidence that Emil is a shitbag who threatens reporters, and works at a company where that sort of thing is considered a fine course of action.

andrep 12y ago

Conflict of interest? What about the desire to break a story (and make your career) vs reporting what actually happened without sensationalising it?