Hit pieces vs. puff pieces
A little media criticism and thoughts on the framing of articles
In early March of 2020, the New York Times put out an article titled, “As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity.” The piece detailed a mundane trip Bernie Sanders took to the then-Soviet Union in 1988 and attempted to frame Sanders as a communist stooge and Soviet-propagandist. One of the top “Reader Picks” in the comments on the article came from a man named Mike in Texas and reads as follows:
The framing of this story is all the “establishment” Sanders complains about could want. While I do not want Sanders to be president, his apparently sincere efforts to reach out to the government of a Soviet leader Margaret Thatcher famously said she could do business with does not seem to me to be a bad thing—especially when one considers Sanders’ motive: ‘lIt is my strong belief that if our planet is going to survive, and if we are going to be able to convert the hundreds of billions of dollars that both the United States and the Soviet Union are now wasting on weapons of destruction into areas of productive human development, there is going to have to be a significant increase in citizen-to-citizen contact,” Mr. Sanders wrote.‘“ Come on, establishment. Pick apart Sanders’ current policies, not his sincere efforts to do his bit to prevent nuclear war.
This comment illustrates how someone who was not even necessarily sympathetic to Sanders can see the issues with the framing of the article. Was it a “hit-piece?” … I don’t know. What is clear is that newspapers have agendas — I don’t blame the author of this piece any more than I blame whoever (probably multiple people) at the Times (and maybe outside of the Times…) asked for a story like this to be written.
I’m not of the completely cynical mindset that the Times is simply an outlet for Democrat party propaganda. I mean, sure, definitely sometimes the Times engages in questionable narratives but I don’t find it any more surprising than when the Wall St. Journal or the National Review does something similar involving Republicans. That’s just reality of ideological tilts at major publications. Was the intention behind the piece about Sanders nefarious? Again, I really don’t know. In some ways, I suppose the article itself did a good job of not going full-on hit piece by offering a chance for comment by members of Sanders’ staff… But one could easily argue the framing was clearly intended to hurt Sanders with a bad-faith portrayal of his outreach and diplomacy efforts with the Soviet Union.
This leads me to a piece the Times put out Monday evening that essentially amounted to a profile of Mr. Bankman-Fried (SBF) (who I wrote about a week ago) and how he is personally dealing with the collapse of FTX. Much has transpired since I last wrote about the situation and if you read the article the New York Times put out… I’m not sure you would understand just how much damage SBF has caused and also how much trouble he might be in.
The question I have been debating amongst friends is… was this a puff piece? To me, it’s not a puff piece in the same sense that article on Sanders wasn’t a hit piece. On Twitter, many have pointed out that the author of this article (David Yaffe-Bellany) also wrote a negative piece about a rival crypto exchange named Kraken (and Coinbase to a lesser extent) over the summer. The Kraken CEO himself even complained about this:
All of these criticisms come down to a simple and debatable issue: framing. As much as it would be nice to blame the Times’ coverage on Democrats pushing their agenda behind the scenes, the reality is probably more complicated. As was common in the Trump era, people will bend certain principles because they feel they must to fight off a greater evil. I do think this is a real issue on the reporting level of many national newspapers and large online outlets currently.
On the editorial and management level, there is obviously a desire for certain stories to be framed a certain way — SBF as someone who made some giant mistakes or Sanders as a Soviet stooge — and I do wonder how much the journalists themselves question this. Ryan Mac, another tech reporter at the Times that also happened to cowrite the story about Kraken with Yaffe-Bellany, chimed in with some thoughts:
I actually think Mac makes many valid points here. Of course, this will not be the last article the Times writes about SBF and FTX but is it the most significant in shaping the narrative? I don’t know. Probably not. But definitely, currently it has made “Crypto Twitter” (CT) extremely upset.
While I don’t necessarily agree with the characterization that this was only a puff piece, I do think there was already a predetermined narrative here. I think SBF and the Times had some sort of agreement as a condition for the interview. Whether it was implicit or explicit is largely irrelevant because the result was the same: almost all readers knowledgeable of the situation found the framing to be extremely inappropriate. I mean, the author himself said he spoke to SBF for over an hour… Given his tweet… I’m not sure how there aren’t some better direct from SBF quotes in the piece.
Talking about SBF getting sleep, playing video games, and shit-posting on Twitter while countless users across the world have had their money on FTX stolen from them by a criminal CEO and his team is simply non-journalistic and tasteless framing.
But if we take away the many irrelevant quotes directly from SBF, there was plenty of newsworthy material in the piece — including tidbits about Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison admitting to her crimes in front of her staff and implicating SBF along with two others:
Meanwhile, at a meeting with Alameda employees on Wednesday, Ms. Ellison explained what had caused the collapse, according to a person familiar with the matter. Her voice shaking, she apologized, saying she had let the group down. Over recent months, she said, Alameda had taken out loans and used the money to make venture capital investments, among other expenditures.
Around the time the crypto market crashed this spring, Ms. Ellison explained, lenders moved to recall those loans, the person familiar with the meeting said. But the funds that Alameda had spent were no longer easily available, so the company used FTX customer funds to make the payments. Besides her and Mr. Bankman-Fried, she said, two other people knew about the arrangement: Mr. Singh and Mr. Wang.
What is described here is very obviously criminal, yet the word or even implication is never outlined in the piece. No comparison to Bernie Madoff… Nada.
So would SBF would have conducted this interview if he didn’t feel the Times would hold back on the way he is framed in it? Probably not. And that’s the issue… that’s why so many feel it is a puff piece… And that’s why it’s hard to tell them they are wrong.
To me, this is the inverse of the Sanders’ piece — an agenda being pushed by the subject (SBF) versus the subject being accused of an agenda (Sanders). I do think the Times will have no choice but to reckon with their current coverage of SBF moving forward simply because his criminal acts are undeniable.
As Mac said, “there’s so much more to come.”