100% agree. What she should have done was not cancel the feature, but write what actually happened--right after it happened, not now, when Theranos has already been outed as a fraud and she's just another one jumping on the bandwagon.
You essentially can't publish it if it a. Falls too far outside what the public will readily believe and b. Is not adequately backed up with verifiable hard facts.
Speculation that they intentionally pulled the fire alarm would have been considered mudslinging and yellow journalism at the time the research was done. It's print-worthy now because we now know that Theranos did so much dishonest crap that pulling the fire alarm is not unbelievable and is such small potatoes in the grand scheme of things that it isn't even mudslinging. It's a nit.
As you say, at that point, it would have just been mudslinging with no factual basis. In retrospect, an editor should possibly have put the resources into an investigative story--but who knows if the fact would actually have come out much earlier than they actually did. And there are lots of potential stories about things that smell wrong, some of which amount to something significant and many that don't--or at least stay under every radar.
Yes.
Sure, you're just describing another symptom of the same disease.
It all fits together quite nicely in hindsight when stuffed with a bunch of vague accusations and synthesis about motives, but I would have agreed with any editor axing the story at the time.
For the record, I assume her suspicions about people getting cagey, and maybe even the fire alarm, are quite right. But once again, hindsight.
"The actual services Theranos appears to be providing to patients does not match the services Theranos claims to provide in its PR statements." That seems like (a) useful information to other potential Theranos patients, and (b) exactly the sort of information that "investigative journalism" is supposed to be providing to the public.
The fact that the journalist didn't see any may well be cause to go back and try to find evidence, but a lack of evidence isn't a story in itself.
I'd point out, too, that if the journalist believed at the time that it was an outright lie, I seriously doubt that she would have dropped it - it's too big a story. More likely she had some misgivings which have been amplified in the wake of the recent news.
Yes--much, much less often than their PR led people to expect. Also, they were actually getting much less information from a single finger prick than their PR was claiming. That's why they were having to do full venipuncture blood draws for tests that their PR led many people to believe would only require a finger prick.
> The fact that the journalist didn't see any may well be cause to go back and try to find evidence
Which she didn't.
> if the journalist believed at the time that it was an outright lie, I seriously doubt that she would have dropped it - it's too big a story. More likely she had some misgivings
Which she should have followed up at the time, if she were really an investigative journalist.
I've read a couple of articles just today that don't seem to check out in some minor way. I can think of one widely-reported story off the top of my head that appears to be grossly misrepresentative of fact if not false. An investigative journalist probably has dozens. Choices need to be made.
The fact that this wasn't pursued for months strongly suggests that none of this evidence was nearly as compelling as it's now being painted.
I'm not sure I understand. "Choices need to be made" about what? About which grossly misrepresentative stories to actually publish? Or about which ones to check out first, as opposed to just publishing?
In short, what you're describing just looks like more symptoms of the same underlying disease.
Why do you imagine this is her choice? If you want to write a new feature to add voice control to an app, and your boss says no, we don't want that, do you go ahead and do it??
Quite likely it wasn't. But that just means there are two things wrong with journalism, not one. Not only does this journalist not show any sign of recognizing that the information she is providing now should have been provided much earlier, but, if your suspicion is correct, even if she had recognized it, her boss would have overruled her.
I mean, what was she supposed to have written. Obviously you want her to have written about Theranos being a fraud, but she didn't have that story. All she had was a fire alarm and an inability to find anyone getting finger prick tests.
She couldn't prove fraud. She just had a hunch that things were wrong. She had no leads on a fraud story, and she had to get articles out that her employer could actually publish.
You're asking too much here.
No, I want people who call themselves investigative journalists to actually investigate. That means following things up instead of dropping them just because they don't think (or their editor doesn't think) it will lead to a headline that's click-baity enough.
> She just had a hunch that things were wrong.
Which she did nothing at all to follow up. But that's exactly the sort of thing investigative journalists are supposed to follow up. That's their job.