[blacksmith_tb]

Yes and no, it's important to have critical reporting, but imagine say that all reporting on medicine could only be critical, no articles about breakthroughs in cancer treatment or curing disease, all malpractice and ballooning costs. That wouldn't be wrong, but it'd be incomplete?

[aussiesnack]

No. "Critical" (in the defensible sense) reporting of breakthroughs would involve checking of the science behind the breakthrough, probing the ethics and finances, etc. Ideally this should always be how tech journalism is conducted, otherwise it actually isn't journalism at all, it's just PR or trade writing. With fast news cycles this may not be practical for every single column cm, but it must be the default.

"Critical" in the pop sense (making a worthiness judgement) is not altogether avoidable, but it should be marginal in journalism. This is what Opinion is for.

What Yglesias & Piper are saying, in effect, is that the NYT made a top-down directive that tech coverage should be negatively-slanted Opinion.

[mehlmao]

I'm sure if Facebook cured cancer that would get them favorable coverage. Right now their products decrease quality of life, not increase it.

[snovv_crash]

They're doing awesome things for VR hardware but all people can seem to see there is that it isn't making money.

[lscdlscd]

They're also defining, in the public's imagination, the primary use case of VR to be corporate meeting space. That's bad for VR and bad for society.

[parineum]

I wouldn't really argue about that now, personally, but I know a lot of people who are still on Facebook for whom have compelling reasons to stay and I think that was much more true in the past.

That said, Meta isn't the only tech company. Twitter, for example, a place journalists love for the direct-to-consumer style reporting.