[sremani]

Martin Shkreli has a pretty active YouTube channel with pretty solid stuff about Finance, Investing and Organic Chemistry. Of course, his live sessions are a bit tedious but can be insightful. Based on the videos, I found him intelligent and fairly geeky. The media portrayal did not do him justice, I guess that is the case with pretty much every one.

[dmix]

Martin purposely feeds into the image the media created for him as this greedy capitalist big-pharma monster.

You can see him do it sarcastically on Twitter and see how effective it works.

It's a common tactic these days to exploit the tendency for the news to breathlessly cover insignificant/minor actions of fringe people and blow them up into these exaggerated caricatures of powerful people that need to be stopped/fired/shut down/etc.

When it reality the entire 'power' of these 'monsters' is due to their subsequent notoriety in the media. This is how they gained their following and how they grow it.

If they were ignored they would go back to being nobodies.

The same thing is happening to many people the media calls 'alt-right' and (actual) white supremacists. They're useful idiots for lazy journalists and motivated political groups looking for exaggerated adversaries from which they can rescue the world from.

The media hands them power, which makes them seem powerful and influential. Then a small group of people willing to ignore the 'bad' stuff being said about them, or they actually research it and see it was all blown out of proportion, then joins their cause - people who would otherwise have never heard of them.

The wonderful side effect of outrage culture is that it fuels the things they are outraged about and in many ways becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's far deeper implications to insisting the media takes a balanced and reasoned approach to their coverage than simply having class.

[antisthenes]

What can be done to make sure the incentives don't align?

Right now the fringe groups get what they want through "any publicity = good publicity" and low effort journos get what they want through stirring up fake outrage and getting more views by writing exaggerated clickbait about these fringe groups.

Thus they both keep doing what they're doing, which poisons the public debate (by making fringe groups seem more significant than they are, sometimes to the point of drowning out the more reasonable voices)

[dmix]

The only hope is that the people on the both sides see the flaws in both of their failed strategies.

In the current form that means that

a) the left realizes their obsession with outrage culture have taken fringe, nobody, groups like the 'alt-right' and made them powerful, when they otherwise wouldn't have been. While also making Trump look like an oppressed underdog speaking the 'truth' against a barage of largely overblown exageration and fear mongering. As well as having empowered a number of unhelpful leftist groups in their own ranks who only further alienate their cause amongst the centrists whom they desperately need.

b) the right realizes they will need to see beyond emotional gratification of having fringe groups like Trump and 'alt-right' gain new found power at the left's expense and look for the actual ROI these groups bring. People who gain power through controversy are only good at controversy, smart rational people are needed if you want good productive output.

[AlexandrB]

> Based on the videos, I found him intelligent and fairly geeky.

And if Hitler had a Youtube channel, some might describe him as "visionary" and "a great orator". The problem is none of his Youtube stardom mitigates Shkreli's actions which have demonstrably made the world worse - at the very least by increasing healthcare costs in a country that's already paying for some of the most expensive healthcare in the world.

[rtpg]

His excel stuff is pretty fun to watch.

That said, he's still a pretty typical 4chan-type when he talks of anything of social significance (politics and the like).

I'd say the media portrayal is totally apt. You don't get excused for being a dick because you have a good MOOC.

[thrownblown]

I would counter that with his message to the Ghostface regarding his purchase of the Wu-Tang one off album, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin.