that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?!
Yglesias actually said:
And the press should try to normalize coverage of the tech industry as just another business sector.
Which would include investigative coverage when appropriate.
Or the most expensive restaurant in NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/dining/pete-wells-per-se-...
He's really honestly describing himself with this take.
His actual articles are perfectly straightforward, sincere, and usually on some topic like "Boston subway stations should cost less to build".
Nobody is "suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens."
I think investigative journalism should be fair, but I don't think someone investigating Alphabet has to present the good that the company does - that's the job of Alphabet's PR department. Fair journalism does not leave out relevant context but doesn't speak to unrelated "good" contributions.
Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.
Generally I think that's a problem with modern society, everyone thinks the biggest "problem" that needs fixing is each other and wastes their "civic improvement" energy on fighting to change rules back and forth. Step away from it all for 6 months and it will look small and childish.
GP already covered that:
> Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.
Although in this case, the NYT wasn't doing "investigative journalism", Matt is talking about a literal actual editorial mandate to write negative stories.
https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
I think the one I remember is when they wrote a story about LinkedIn doing unauthorized human experiments on the newsfeed, by which they meant A/B tests.
In addition XYZ corp sold Iran social media tracking software allowing the government to ruthlessly execute the traitors that dare say negative things about the glorious leader
We offer XYZ the leaders in tech award" --NYT
Um, yea, have HR departments that tell everyone how damned good they are already. You could fill encyclopedias with the output every year. Meanwhile they aren't going to tell you how they do 50 bajillion means of tracking your wife to determine if she's pregnant in order to serve an ad to her first before their competitors (and offer the data to the state if requested).
Cool companies were praised to heaven and admired, Thermos, Tesla, Uber, Google, Facebook you name it. Correction was necessary.
It's the investors themselves that added to the hype regardless of the press releases.
In an ideal world maybe investors would have done more DD, but there is a lot of money out there. Many investors likely did turn them down, since their funders didn’t include many traditional SV VCs.
It was ultimately the WSJ that broke the story. Even if investors find something during DD, they have strong incentives (libel law) not to share it.
Kyoto Fusioneering has realized that there is lots of money to be made selling parts for phony demos to fusion startups.
BTW there will not be any Mars colony in this century. Or Tesla office-robot.
That's because he's being very charitable to what is happening. In fact, under the guise of aggressively investigative coverage, the media is constantly propagating false memes about the industry. Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants.
India is a massive country, with some of the most diverse range of cultures and people. The fact that most FAANG CEOs are Indians should speak volumes.
Negative stereotyping hurts everyone, only by acceptance and embrace our differences can we move forward.
It's funny, on producing that interpretation my first thought was 'He must be high caste'. Now that's a negative stereotype!
Those are two related but also completely different things. Just because immigrants work at these companies doesn't mean they have a large impact on the overall culture, especially not the outward facing culture, and they certainly aren't dominating it. If anything those groups are underrepresented in culturally influential positions.
Is the position of CEO not "culturally influential"?
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
Edit: I finally read the context again. Yes the top guy is a member of a minority group, and of course he will have some cultural influence. But people will disagree whether the minority group is _at the right level of influence_.
The argument was that investigating "tech bro" culture is frivolous because the tech industry is made up of immigrants and that is simply not true. It's still very much a prevailing culture. Heck, this entire discussions stems from "what is Elon Musk going to do (next)?" after replacing the CEO of Indian descent.
I wouldn't say the same thing about hardware. But that also isn't nearly as influential and also not a hot topic either.
I thought weapon and pharmaceutical industries beat the tech.
Nowhere near as powerful as media. Wealthy sure.
Sure there's people on social media saying things, but the stuff that's an echo of the NYT sounds right and true, the stuff that's against it sounds low-brow and coarse.
The largest US companies by market cap considered “Information Technology” nowadays are Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Visa and Mastercard.
That this very basic failure of reading comprehension has been voted to the top is both sad and surprising.
That's what happens when liberal arts people think they're too delicate to understand anything more nuanced than US political thing of the day.
> tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?
I don't see how you can read his quote and come up with yours. Absolute strawman
Industries more powerful:
-Finance -Banking -Defense -Oil&Gas
...
>Tech executives and investors mostly did not like this change, for understandable reasons. And I mostly agree with them on the merits.
The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?
That's nonsense. Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US. Large tech companies have huge impacts on politics and news. Suggesting that tech should not be subject to investigative coverage is hard to understand. It seems like one of the most important subjects of that coverage today.
You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue.