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.
Can’t agree more. I generally forgive journalists who simply reporting on a story and get it very wrong because they usually report all kind of stories and it’s unreasonable to expect good grip on all the topics.
On the other hand, when a journalist follows a story, they must have good high level understanding. Shockingly, youtubers have much better grip on the situation.
The traditional media seems to be losing the plot in this FTX and presenting SBF in strangely positive light, almost as if it is a human interest story.
> I generally forgive journalists who simply reporting on a story and get it very wrong because they usually report all kind of stories and it’s unreasonable to expect good grip on all the topics.
I generally don't. A journalists job is to report the news, if they don't feel confident in a given domain then they can sit the story out.
To give you an analog, I work on infrastructure, but I don't work on things like AWS policies every day. It generally takes me longer to craft up the right way to restrict a given resource due to that. If I left an S3 bucket open to the public "on accident" I'd expect ramifications from my employer.
That's to say, the onus is on the doer of the work. Now, if news outlets are just telling journalists to give it the old college try on domains they don't know, that's another subject.
Reporters are low paid people who are expected to pump large amounts of content very quickly. They also need to report it in a way that other people with no domain knowledge will find it interesting and feel like understand the story. If they can’t do that, someone else will do and get all the views.
It’s not an excuse for the low quality, just an expected outcome IMHO.
Nope. A journalist job is to make clicks. That’s how their job is evaluated: how many click did the story bring.
That’s all. That’s f**ing all.
Every news outlet office now has a giant screen with the list of the stories and the number of clicks. "Journalists" are expected to competed on that metric and that metric alone.
It blew my mind every time to realize that, even in tech, people are still naïve enough to not see that. Just change the word "journalist" by "click farmers" and, suddenly, everything makes sense. (Television has "audience" instead of "clicks" but the reasoning is similar)
The problem is that bad, irresponsible, and / or wrong journalism still makes money. Newspapers rarely face consequences for their shoddy publications.
That's not totally true. For instance I blocked USA Today on my Apple News stream because of the low quality of journalism and clickbait titles. The problem is that this has minimal impact but more importantly, USA Today probably doesn't even get a report letting them know that end users are doing this and probably get paid anyway so they are blissfully unaware.
I've found several USAToday fact checks, notably on COVID, by them given an air of authority using citations full of tangential (or worse, wrong) experts..
While such tangential citations were used, at most it basically discredited the article but not necessarily fully refute the topic.
"A journalists job is to report the news, if they don't feel confident in a given domain then they can sit the story out."
That may have been the case in the past, but "journalism" has radically changed within the past decade. Today it's more about telling the story that the media conglomerates want the public to hear, than about honest reporting.
Public distrust of the media is at an all-time high, and growing.
Is it really the case that a decade ago journalism was not telling the story that media conglomerates wanted the public to hear? Or did that just seem to diverge from what you personally wanted to hear about a decade ago?
I mean, I feel this. I watched George Bush get mocked and made fun of on the news for having a stutter almost every day. I also watched them do daily reports on the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. When Obama took over they stopped reporting deaths and some organizations cheered him on while others broadcast viscerally racist shit.
So, to answer your question: it's both. It's bullshit I don't want to hear and what a grip of powerful people probably want me to hear.
In theory maybe, in practice, journalists are simply Instagram influencers with fancy degrees. They make content to draw eyeballs for an organization that sells ads.
In many cases, yes. But what baffles me is the terrible coverage of the crypto world, even from serious journalists. Stories like the Mango Markets exploit would get plenty of clicks and wouldn't take that long to write ("9-figure crypto bank theft may not even be illegal"). So why are they ignored? And why are so many publications portraying SBF like a misunderstood philanthropist when you could arguably get more clicks reporting on the many fraud accusations?
This isn't about "getting it wrong". This is about the use of a certain kind of language like "The company fell". No, "SBF and his chums lost and stole a lot of money". It's exactly like the "Crowd hit by a van" type of language instead of "Terrorist kills 10".
It's about libel lawsuits. They stay factual rather than share the interpretation of knowledgeable insiders. That's why it's "alleged terrorist" even if it's obvious to everyone.
BTW be careful with expecting the media to spoon feed the narratives you want rather than laying out facts and editorializing them to let you decide. That's how you avoid some bias.
The point is that, in some cases where the writer or org may or may not have an interest in protecting, we don't even get "alleged terrorist" or "alleged fraud". It's all passive-voice companies that go bust and things that happen.
Now go look at some other examples where the writer or org has an interest in attacking and you will find, not only no shortage of "alleged"s but also a good dose of extra eyebrow-wriggling, winking and nudging there to suggest whatever number of other crimes can possibly be invented.
While I get your frustration not to see media organizations not reporting exactly like you want, it just won't change. Its still journalists who keep breaking all the stories on SBF. When we see all of Twitter & Youtube use NYT revealed facts to get a better understanding of the fraud I'm not convinced its a huge problem the tone isn't perfect.
Same thing happens early in crises, from the Russian massacres of civilians in Ukraine to Trump's Mar-a-Lago files we get some forms of facts but its the readers who have to draw some to all of the conclusion.
I'm shocked at how many articles about the FTX collapse still refer to SBF as some sort of philanthropist. You don't need to call him a scammer, but could you at least stop pretending he's a net positive on the world?
It's not about getting it reported exactly like I want.
Don't you think it is an interesting question to ask yourself, "why they report it like that?".
"Avoiding libel" doesn't cut it, there's other ways of avoiding libel that don't look like a love letter.
Why? Why is it in the reporter's interest to protect this guy? That is the interesting question. I don't need to guess at why reporting on Ukraine or Trump is the way it is, it's pretty clear.
Reporting that “this is the worst mismanaged company I’ve seen” from the enron guy doesn’t seem like a love letter to me.
Are you looking for opinion or journalism? Ethical journalists aren’t going to say “this is a ponzi scheme and this guy stole money” because that’s not what any primary source is saying. It’s clear that’s what’s happened to anyone reading the articles written.
First takes on shady accounting practices, details on co-living of executives, some of the troubles with the parents and more information on his warrant and arrest. But they didn't say "fraud" so many people were happy to never read the articles and criticize while also just reading what their favorite crypto influencers took away from reading the NYT reporting.
> In this case, it is very odd that much of the coverage has not been centred on fraud. I genuinely don’t understand why.
Its because news is for entertainment purpose not knowledge acquisition from the journalists perspective and secondly because powerful players are involved.
This guy donated 40 million dollars to the ruling political party and has parents with connections. Why would you write a truthful article outlining the grand fraud that took place when you only have something to loose by doing so?
SBF, but if "dark money" isn't concrete enough for you then the other co-CEO, Ryan Salame, donated about $22M openly to Republicans, and in the senate race SBF donated $66.7k to Republicans vs $49.2k to Democrats.
Not that it matters to the point that I was making but I wouldn't consider SBF a reliable source of the truth.
Remember this was the guy who said "FTX is fine. Assets are fine" and "We don't invest client assets (even in treasuries)".
I don't doubt that he did donate some money to the non ruling party but to quote what he is saying as truth or try and attribute a donation by an associated party to him is disingenuous.
“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)
Think about all the places you've ever worked, all the organizations you've been part of, where you know how the sausage is actually made, and how that differs from the way the organization portrays itself.
Now think about all the other organizations in the world, whose internal workings you're not privy to.
While your criticism is valid it's pretty generic and is focused not on this particular issue, but the media as a whole. I don't think that's the correct thing to be talking about right now. It may even distract from the actual conversation about FTX.
If you have a pipe break in your home, I assume you don't hire an everything guy to sort of fix it(I promise he's really good and enthusiastic and he's doing the best he can).
You hire a fcking plumber.
Why can't top publications be held to this standard?
I think we naturally give reporters and publications more credit than they deserve. We like to think they are experts or want to expose the the truth. In reality, they might be idiots who landed a job. Or they are just getting paid to do something like most corporate employees and do the bare minimum and don’t really give a crap about what they are doing. If we don’t hold them to a higher standard, then what they produce makes perfect sense.
There are some amazing journalists out there and I’m sure they are just as disappointed in the mediocre content their peers produce.
I think you misunderstand what journalists do. Journalists are not supposed to be experts in the subjects they cover. They are not telling you the story based on their personal knowledge or beliefs — those are opinion pieces.
Journalists are expected to source information from experts and from people who are in positions to know, and to attribute the information they publish to their sources.
I am not saying that every journalist or publication does a good job of seeking the truth. Only that the job of a reporter does not require being an expert at anything other than - hopefully - information gathering and reporting.
This is how the news gets fooled again and again. They believe an “expert” who came to them with an agenda. It’s often willful as long as the narrative fits their own
That is why the old adagium one source is no source is valid.
Look up how Rian van Rijbroek fooled a popular news show in The Netherlands. If they had invited one more random expert in the field, that person would've grilled her.
To be fair, journalists are meant to also use their own knowledge and judgement to assess the relative validity of sources and frame the story in a way that communicates the truth as they see it (as opposed to just uncritically reflecting whatever their sources told them)
> 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.
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.