I too cannot believe it. Even the most diehard nonparticipating 20-year-old League-of-Legends-addicted coding-bootcamped hustlebro HN reader could fathom how being a senior journalist in the country's maybe #1 and #3 news institutions is like, a big deal.

Since it sounds like the other commenters are really confused about why it matters whose kid he is: like if you were just a regular person, you might be ejected from Stanford for pursuing something like this against a far lesser faculty member.

Imagine having first hand evidence of your PI doing fraud, which lots of people do by definition, and that is rightly seen as career suicide. Like even the postdoc in the story, who has the evidence, hasn't come clean! He can't just like, stop living the way this student can.

The students who relayed Marc Hauser's fraud to Harvard never went public with their identities. They don't get to win Polk Awards at all. They're not regarded as investigative journalists. This also prevents us from seeing what happened. I can tell you from my experience at least some of those students joined Hauser's prestigious lab for a medical school recommendation, which obviously didn't happen.

Nevermind research. Think about all the kids at e.g. private schools, younger kids, directly harmed by teachers molesting them, and you know, the kids are the ones who leave, not the teachers, for many decades and many institutions.

So it definitely mattered to be the son of some big deal people in New York.

That said, of all the things to deploy your nepobabiness on, this is a pretty good one, isn't it? Investigative journalism of the finest degree. I don't personally think that a Polk award determines the merit of the investigation; nor does even the publication, clearly. Anyone, everywhere, can be not only be an investigative journalist, but indeed a great investigative journalist. It is a legitimately great story of bringing this guy, who has clearly dodged bullets for a decade, to task.