I think the issue was there was no pressing follow up to his evasive replies. e.g Sorkin's interview. He was basically allowed to get away with "I didn't knowingly do it."
And if you don't confront them, maybe they'll say even more? It's like the military quote: "never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake."
But If you look at the written coverage at NYT about this, you will realize that in this case it is the former and not the latter. Yes one can argue that it might have been a plan to make him comfortable to talk at the interview - but yeah :).
May be it is too subtle for me.
In effect Sorkin et al interviews has MADE the fraud case for the government. The lies are evidence there was intent to defraud.
I think it was the response to coffeezilla questions that might have him in a bind not the other mainstream journalists.
And sometimes they don't confront them because the media are shills.
> I declined, which obviously in retrospect was the right choice. I told him that I like my Substack just fine and make plenty of money, though he was happy to offer more. But I also told him that given the extent to which we agree on a lot of important issues, I thought it was a lot more valuable to these causes for me to maintain credibility by not accepting any of his money.
Meanwhile the CEO of The Block received a $43M "loan" from SBF[1].
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/podcasts/the-breakdown-with-nlw/sbf...
For the last few months, any time something bad happens with FTX, there are dozens of people who show up complaining that the media went easy on SBF. They most often use the word "puff" or the phrase "puff piece," as if the comments were all written by the same bot farm.
Then when someone calls them out on it, they're suddenly silent. Which makes me agree with you that this is people trying to deflect from the greed at the root of this, trying to portray themselves as victims, and if the big media had just given them some warning, they wouldn't have lost billions of dollars.
It's naive to think that affinity is not influencing, if not driving, the way that journalists regard and write about their subjects.
I went through a few examples people brought up of journalists supposedly treating Bankman-Fried kindly the other day[1]. When I read what journalists were actually saying, they were quite negative about Bankman-Fried (saying he was "betraying his clients" or saying FTX "didn’t crumble due to bad luck, but what now appears to be unsustainable layers of deception").
The crypto community seems to be trying really hard to deflect from the fallout of yet another major crypto scam, and spinning whatever they can to make this seem like this is the fault of establishment non-crypto folks. Remember that just a few days ago people were claiming that Bankman-Fried hadn't been charged because he had paid off U.S. politicians.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33811681