The mid-tier blog (probably?) doesn't depend on revenue from it for their living. Professional journalists these days often do, and are teetering on the edge of solvency as-is. And so they're a lot more vulnerable to their corporate contacts telling them, don't publish that story or slip us the name of the whistleblower, or else you'll be blackballed from our PR department. Your job will be toast, since we're your only real source, and there's 50 other journalists and publications in line to replace you.
> The mid-tier blog (probably?) doesn't depend on revenue from it for their living.
The page is absolutely filled with ads. Clearly it's a revenue source, not a labor of love.
Also your ideas about the media industry somehow being compliantly beholden to the interests of Boeing (a company less than a tenth the size of Google or Apple) seems a bit silly. This would be a huge scoop and a big win for any paper that got the story. That they don't have it speaks broadly to this blog's story being spun.
The "View from the Wing" site that is the main link here has a relatively modest number of ads once I turn off my ad blocker. Not that much compared to many "proper" news sources. They do seem a little click-baity, and are loaded with tracking scripts, but I doubt they're making enough money for even one person to make a living. I wouldn't trust them that much, but they're not the actual source anyways, they're just republishing a comment from another page.
The linked page that the comment that is the source of all this is actually on is "Leeham News and Analysis", which looks like a professional-quality aerospace news site. I don't see any ads or tracker scripts on them at all. The author and the bulk of the commenters sound pretty professional and knowledgeable. It looks like they sell subscriptions at substantial cost, which explains a lot. That's enough for me to presume they're much more trustworthy about the aviation industry than any legacy media source.
When was the last time the legacy media did a real investigative report about something that wasn't super hip or somebody had a grudge against already? You may not necessarily agree, but I think it's at least reasonable that an actual whistleblower like this wouldn't bother with them. Or maybe they already did, and got ignored, because they thought the article would cost too much to put together and not get enough clicks to bother. On Leeham's site, the author did ask the commenter to contact them - perhaps something will come from that, or maybe not.
