Journalist's job isn't to master a field they cover (although this can help a lot), but to know what questions to ask to whom. Lack of skepticism and fact checking is, indeed, sins of the profession, but that's it.
This requires knowing what you're talking about because, as OP alluded to, everyone is hyping everything, including acedemics and CEOs. In that enviroment, how does a jouranlist know who to talk to and what questions to ask? The only way in today's climate is to learn the subject, something which returns lower (perhaps negative) ROI vs posting clickbait hype content. "New startup claims quantom tech could crack your bank account password in just 3 seconds" will do better and requires less knowlege and effort than an a real investigation.
> The only way in today's climate is to learn the subject,
Somewhat, sure, but they aren't going to become an expert.
They are reporters. Journalists. They report what people do and say. They present their findings. Hopefully they find people that are willing to cast doubt on a subject, which in the case of crypto, they did. You had many articles from journalists reporting back on problems with crypto.
We pretend like FTX was something that was well known and well established, yet I didn't hear much about it here prior to everything collapsing. And suddenly, all these armchair experts come out the woodwork, apparently well aware of all the problems with FTX but apparently never spoke up once and didn't think it was news worthy. The experts are out there, but apparently none how how to talk to reporters.
> "New startup claims quantom tech could crack your bank account password in just 3 seconds" will do better and requires less knowlege and effort than an a real investigation.
Let's ignore all the "real investigations" that happen.
They’re job is to ask the right people the right questions.
Logically I’d you’re covering some topic a reporter should seek out contrarian opinions. Not because they’re right, but because they provide another perspective.
They don’t even do that. Some article about crypto will just talk to crypto companies and fans.
But I suspect the real reason is article like “Some people like crypto and others don’t” doesn’t sell ad space.
> Journalist's job isn't to master a field they cover (although this can help a lot), but to know what questions to ask to whom.
The modern corporate journalist's job is to know who and what to ask so propaganda can be constructed according to the wishes of the corporate-political complex.
This person paid fealty to the regime, ergo the job of journalists was to pump the scam and silence questions and concerns until the ruling class is not left holding the bag. Whereas if a billionaire fails to do those things, then the job is to find negative things to print and minimize the positive.
> Lack of skepticism and fact checking is, indeed, sins of the profession, but that's it.
On the contrary it is the very core of the profession, and it's how it's always been. The idea of the professional journalist as an impartial and unbiased truth seeker and reporter of news is itself propaganda.
Some do a great job, like Matt Levine at Bloomberg or Felix Salmon. Just because of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect doesn't mean incompetent journalists should get a free pass, or manifestly corrupt pseudo-journalists like Paul Krugman as shown in the article when he was simultaneously taking money from Enron and lauding them.
> 1. What did I do? In early 1999 I was asked to serve on a panel that offered Enron executives briefings on economic and political issues. As far as I knew at the time, they genuinely wanted to learn something. I resigned from that board in the fall of 1999, when I accepted an offer to write for the New York Times.
It's funny to post such a clear falsehood when talking about Gell-Mann amnesia.
I think your comment is fantastic, and it made me think of a curiosity:
Matt Levine is an excellent journalist because he's not a journalist historically, writes about a topic he knows in depth, but Krugman supposedly also writes about what he knows, but is just plain (as you cited) corrupt to a disgusting extent.
You see the huge problem we from journalism have when even in a place like HN people can't discern between reporting and opinion on the news. Levine is terrific, but he isn't a reporter. His job as columnist is to give context and his opinion on subjects he's an expert on, not to report events.
Most people can't tell the differences between a reporter and an editor or a columnist. They are, like the parent commenter, ignorants on this matter. And yet they complain vigorously about something they don't even comprehend. It's fascinating if not terrifying.
On the one hand, Matt Levine writes interesting and insightful articles and I feel I learn from reading them. On the other hand, Levine also had multiple contacts with FTX and SBF including lengthy interviews and he seems to not have detected the FTX fraud early. It also seems like the fraud was, in retrospect, pretty obvious, SBF acknowledged to Levine that he ran a Ponzi scheme in an interview - and that was kind of it. Depositors were depositing their FTX money directly to Alameda's bank account and nobody noticed. In some sense it seems like nobody was actually doing investigative journalism.
Well, I think FTX and Alameda (specifically SBF) certainly realized where the money was coming from. How could anyone, much less a trading firm, be unaware of an extra 8 billion dollars in their accounts?
As for journalists - I'm not sure how exactly they would have known to discover this point. It seems obvious after the fact, but who would think to check "Let me make sure deposits actually go to the business I think they do"? Instead, what I mean here is that there were incredibly obvious signs of wrongdoing and I would expect that a critical and competent investigator would discover at least one such sign, write about it and be motivated to find more. That seems not to have happened which makes me think nobody was actually investigating a new startup with billions of dollars in an area rife with fraud - which seems like a pretty big condemnation for the class of people whose job is to investigate and analyze companies in that industry.
