I have completely lost any sense of trust in major media institutions after this. Seemingly every outlet accept a ton of money from this guy, and in turn wrote very favorable articles about him. To me, there are two possibilities. Either all these outlets didn't do a minute of digging into where all his money came from, or they knew it was all a scam and took it anyway. So it was either a complete and total journalistic failure, or they were complicit in the fraud.

The mainstream media does not deserve the benefit of a doubt anymore. From this point forward, I am going to assume that anything published by the NYT, the post, the WSJ, any of them, is either purposefully misleading or just a bold-faced lie.

Does anyone have any good reasons why this is illogical? I really do not see a reason why we should think any of these people are trustworthy.

I've also seen the argument that this is just "run of the mill journalism", in that it's totally normal for an outlet to run puff pieces if they get paid to do so. But doesn't that completely undermine the integrity and trustworthiness of the outlet writing the pieces? If any rich guy can just buy positive press without any scrutiny, why should we give them our trust?

Journalism is supposed to be about digging up dirt on the rich and powerful so that us peons can get mad when they do bad stuff and make sure our government to punish them. This scandal is so massive because it involves journalists and government actors working together to make sure that didn't happen with SBF. How is anyone supposed to trust any of these people ever again?