Discussion
this is like saying "but as a lawyer, you worked for a murderer" yeah dude, that's the job, that's how PR works. you take paying clients and some of them probably suck, but the check clears.
plus, you can criticize Ed Zitron for all kinds of things, but what he is saying here is objectively true.
Ed Zitron is not a trained journalist, so he's not particularly good at it. i think his finance speculation is... a little wild. but i think he has an instinct for what's going on, and he's being a dick about it in the way that trained journalists can't, or won't. there are things journalists and analysts talk about with each other in private and then later when a scandalous thing happens, they are like "oh everybody knew, we just couldn't say for sure." people like Ed just blurt it out.
traditional journalism is bound by a set of norms and by the same kind of herd mentality as everyone else. you face **overwhelming** pressure not to say something mean about wealthy/powerful people, even if it's true, unless everyone else is saying it, or unless you can really 100% nail down every single claim, which is expensive and time-consuming. and i imagine this is especially true in finance, where you depend on access for your reporting.
meanwhile, tech CEOs enjoy the liar's dividend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_dividend
Sam Altman can just do a big splashy announcement that (for example) OpenAI partnering with Jony Ive to make a device and it's all over the news for weeks and then it just... disappears??? journalists won't say "that was a whole bunch of bullshit" even though it's obviously part of a long-running grift, because they have to PROVE it, and they can't.
the value of people like Ed (and i think the reason people follow him even though he gets out over his skis sometimes) is he can just say the thing we can all fucking see is happening. he can just describe it for what it looks like, because he is not, actually, beholden to AI companies, or to all the investment banks that are going to feast on their IPOs later this year.
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