[ForrestN]

He's not saying that they shouldn't be subject to coverage "with an investigative lens." He's talking about the adversarial, negative tone of the coverage, relating to the tech industry primarily as full of bad actors rather than a power center worthy of investigation that also does some good things, say. I don't think Yglesias would say we shouldn't investigate these companies, but rather that we should paint a more wholistic picture about both the good and bad contributions of these companies that better matches reality.

[_zgx0]

He correctly identifies a fundamental difference between business/consumer reporting, which is often fawning regurgitations of PR materials made with limited due diligence and investigative reporting. I stand by my comment, it seems to me that he is saying the change from business/consumer to investigative was unwelcome and he agrees with that reaction.

I think investigative journalism should be fair, but I don't think someone investigating Alphabet has to present the good that the company does - that's the job of Alphabet's PR department. Fair journalism does not leave out relevant context but doesn't speak to unrelated "good" contributions.

Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.

[astrange]

I don't think journalism is actually useful if the journalist is pure negative all the time; if you can't tell the difference between a journalist and a teenager with oppositional defiant disorder, why believe the story? And to investigate, they actually need good sources, but tech people who would be the sources aren't going to talk to an unfriendly uninformed reporter.

Although in this case, the NYT wasn't doing "investigative journalism", Matt is talking about a literal actual editorial mandate to write negative stories.

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

I think the one I remember is when they wrote a story about LinkedIn doing unauthorized human experiments on the newsfeed, by which they meant A/B tests.

[JamesianP]

Personally when I look at the tech section I want to hear what's new in technology (I guess you'd call this marketing), not politics and gossip about what some rich meathead said. Put politics in the politics section, and the gossip in the tabloids.

[pixl97]

That boat sailed a long time ago. And while yes, there is a lot of interesting tech news out there, we've had tech companies become the largest corporations on the planet gobbling up every bit of information on every person, well it gets political really quick.

[JamesianP]

Information technology companies have a lot of information you say? And I guess you mean a long time ago measured in months. These are soap operas to hook a million or so like-minded people, not real news. Certainly not going to change the minds they want to change.

Generally I think that's a problem with modern society, everyone thinks the biggest "problem" that needs fixing is each other and wastes their "civic improvement" energy on fighting to change rules back and forth. Step away from it all for 6 months and it will look small and childish.

[bigfudge]

Step away from it for 6 years and I think it will look incredibly unnerving to anyone concerned with healthy public discourse, or who values a shared sense of community.

[ALittleLight]

Shouldn't good investigative journalism just tell you what's true regardless of whether it makes the subject look good or bad? I don't mean that every story must convey the totality of the subject, but the body of reporting should try to resemble the subject - some good, some bad.

[Kbelicius]

> Shouldn't good investigative journalism just tell you what's true regardless of whether it makes the subject look good or bad?

GP already covered that:

> Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.

[pixl97]

"XYZ corporation donated thousands of dollars to needy children this year as an example of an exemplary tech company.

In addition XYZ corp sold Iran social media tracking software allowing the government to ruthlessly execute the traitors that dare say negative things about the glorious leader

We offer XYZ the leaders in tech award" --NYT

Um, yea, have HR departments that tell everyone how damned good they are already. You could fill encyclopedias with the output every year. Meanwhile they aren't going to tell you how they do 50 bajillion means of tracking your wife to determine if she's pregnant in order to serve an ad to her first before their competitors (and offer the data to the state if requested).

[watwut]

It is OK to use adversarial tone. Journalists do not have to limit themselves to fawning admiration. And before there was criticism, there was surplus of fawning admiration.

Cool companies were praised to heaven and admired, Thermos, Tesla, Uber, Google, Facebook you name it. Correction was necessary.