Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Reporters can't be this dumb.

>I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story...

I don't know much about technology journalism, but I would think that no one who is a technology reporter would make a miss like that. And even if he/she did make a miss like that, wouldn't an editor or someone higher up call that out pretty much right away?

I can't see why this story would have been put out as is without further investigation? Maybe some independent verification? I suppose there remains a slim possibility that the overarching theme of the story is true, and the reporters are simply spectacularly inept. There is also the possibility that the story is false and Bloomberg itself is spectacularly inept. Other possibilities are too terrible to contemplate. They run the gamut from simple propaganda, which is terrible, but would not be unexpected... all the way to out and out graft. ie - Some influential guy was short Apple.

> Reporters can't be this dumb.

Have you ever actually dealt with reporters before? From my time in science I can attest that yes, reporters very much are this dumb at times. That's the issue with anyone who's too much of a generalist.

Bloomberg is also one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. Their entire business model revolves around providing accurate financial information. We happily pay $2k per month per person for it, partly because it is such a trusted source.

Some reporters may be dumb, but if it has the Bloomberg name attached to it, and has far reaching effects in financial markets, you can be pretty confident that this wasn't just the work of some clueless reporter.

Mike Bloomberg himself stands to lose an enormous amount of money due to lost business in China, as a result of this story's publication. Whether the story is accurate or inaccurate, either way Mike is going to lose money on it. The only business-logical thing that Bloomberg could have done with this story is to sit on it. Clearly there are non-business motivations for this publication. The possibilities that immediately strike me or that an overriding incentive for this publication was provided by an outside monolithic actor or that an ethical / public interest motivation prevailed.

If the claims are to be believed, the story was 1 year in the making and used 100 separate interviews and it was worked on by a team of journalists.

I can easily imagine ONE journalist getting key facts wrong in a typical story which had to be pumped out before a deadline. I've seen it myself.

BUT this is a very major story by elite journalists with a lot to lose if they screw up. They're not "dumb" but they might have been deceived deliberately.

Whatever the case, I expect a very ugly truth will shake out eventually.

My wife went to a large journalism school, and I met many journalists-in-training.

Their failing isn't that they are dumb per se, but that they confidently believe they understand something when they have only heard the barest details. It's like they are afraid to ever say "I don't know", or question their own understanding of reality.

Being in the cryptocurrency space for half a decade and knowing the technical details regarding things like bitcoin will make it obvious that tech journalism is a glorified version of Forwarded emails your grandparents send you.

Right before that:

>In September when he asked me like, “Okay, hey, we think it looks like a signal amplifier or a coupler. What’s a coupler? What does it look like?”

Am I missing something? What's specifically the criticism about the pictures here, that they aren't literally what the alleged devices look like?

What a lot of it boils down to is that Bloomberg appears to have taken Mr. Fitzpatrick's hypotheses and speculation about the Supermicro implant, and included them in their article as if they were confirmed facts. If this is indeed the case, it calls the entire article into question.

> Reporters can't be this dumb.

What makes you think so

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