One of the dumbest things about this is how it utterly misunderstands media in general, but particularly the history of media and how newspapers worked pre-Internet. Lotta tech people in this thread demonstrating that they never read any of these fabled "print newspapers." https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1278342160023056384

This is also a side effect of tech journalism being "soft" for so long, in a way that lends itself to players in the tech ecosystem not being able to distinguish between journalism and PR. For a long time, a lot of tech coverage was PR masquerading as journalism.

The more powerful the tech industry became, the more real journalists entered the fray, and their job is not to support (much less cheerlead) the industry; it's to cover it. And covering it by necessity means there will be a lot of negative stories.

And a lot of powerful people in tech resent that, partly because they buy their own 'changing the world' BS, even when they're making dumb entertainment apps that just leech people's attention for money.

They think their intentions should offset some of the scrutiny. And they think they're entitled to shape their own stories in major outlets because for a long time, they could.

Also: red flags should go up anytime anyone in the valley uses the word "ethics." I can count on one hand the number CEOs I know who actually understand journalistic ethics and are aligned with them. Most don't understand them, and if they did, wouldn't align.

For comparison: I've covered Wall Street too, and to put it bluntly, no one on Wall Street harbors the illusion that they're making the world a better place by inventing synthetic CDOs or underwriting IPOs.

There's also a Rich PeopleTM dynamic you can see in some of these threads: successful tech people not understanding that in "hard" news, it's the journo's job to hold powerful people accountable, thinking it's some kind of personal antagonism. Who are YOU to hold me accountable?

Which misunderstands what that means. Journos don't hold powerful people accountable as some kind of personal moral authority. They're not mini-popes. Accountability happens by virtue of bringing information to light.

Which means things like exposing what's happening behind the scenes at powerful tech companies. Writing about bad behavior from CEOs when it happens. Increasing transparency generally.

Incidentally, the more opaque the industry, the more you need journalism to uncover these things. And the valley is built to a large degree on protecting info, so this is a naturally antagonistic process.

And lastly, there's a worship of innovation for its own sake that is cultural, ubiquitous, and sacred throughout the tech industry. You can justify any kind of depravity or malfeasance as long as you're doing something exciting and innovative.

I wrote a column about Elon Musk's repeated law breaking and the overwhelming response from his valley fans was, so what, he's an innovator! https://www.gq.com/story/elon-musk-many-provocations

If you're a successful founder, you have to hurt a lot of people in a very public way before you experience anything akin to accountability from the industry itself. Look at Mark Zuckerberg.

Nothing FB has done to remedy the damage they've done to democracy and to individual people has happened because people in the industry had enough. The pressure has always been external. And a lot of it driven by information that was exposed in news outlets.