[smsm42]

Reading this article, I've had a nagging feeling - ok, the founder may have presented a wrong picture, but isn't it the task of tech journalists to call them on that? I am sure some would always be fooled, but how comes pretty much all of them, according to the article, were fooled? And not by some ingenious heist that takes a genius to unravel, but by buying a device from another company, showing it to journalists and telling them "we invented this new awesome thing" and nobody is the wiser? Where's the added value in journalists then, are they reduced now to repackaging press-releases and writing "oh, we've got fooled again" postmortems? OK, let's say they don't have the expertise. A lot of people do. Did they ask those people and report what they are thinking? How comes then I am reading both "any person with med test background should have seen it" and "nobody was seeing it"? If a thing like this happened with some software system, there would be a place for deep redesign of monitoring and evaluation systems, that should have prevented such failure. Yet it happens again and again with reporting and as far as I can see no work is done to fix it.

[mhermher]

Agreed. Honestly, you could visit some of the old HN threads and at least see a ton of skepticism. If HN commenters can find reasons for suspicion, then how could a journalist not? Isn't that their job? Or are they just PR mouthpieces. How is it that I can go to forums like HN and get more information on this company than in the articles of prestigious publications?

[FireBeyond]

How much ability to do this is possible short of subpoena though?

Theranos history is littered with staged demos (not being described as such), deception (running tests with other manufacturer machines), and outright lies.

For all the upbeat press release regurgitation (of which there was a lot, absolutely), there's limits to investigative journalism of those who _were_ skeptical.

[smsm42]

Well, interviewing a bunch of specialists saying "this contradicts all I know about medical diagnostics for this and this reason" - like we see happening here - and then asking the Theranos reps "could you please explain what these experts are missing here, in detail" would be a good start. Of course, Theranos could bullshit their way out of it, but distinguishing bullshit answers from substantial answers is usually much easier and more accessible to non-specialists than figuring out if the whole thing is bullshit from zero.