They didn’t engage with your criticism. Resist the temptation to extrapolate that to conclusions beyond yourself. The idea that as a profession journalists don’t engage with criticism is so demonstrably false it’s absurd. The entire editorial process is engaging with criticism, and it very often comes from outside the newsroom. On a story of this magnitude, that criticism is invited as a matter of policy before publishing (it’s called red teaming). Quite often, that process leads to rereporting, sometimes by another group.

You seem to have emotionally reacted to criticism of your own work (which is par for journalism) by declaring that journalism doesn’t get it and needs to be “saved” (from who?). I’m concerned by your personification of a bad experience and the malevolence you’re ascribing to an entire profession as a result, while on the way to sticking your fingers in the same pie. You are coming across as an unreliable narrator in several ways. Even beyond that, you’re going up against ProPublica, not Daily Mail, and it’s very clear from your piece (which I read end to end) that you dove into it in bad faith looking for your intended outcome.

It is this comment alone that convinces me you will fail, because you don’t understand why you weren’t engaged and why a lengthy rebuttal to incoming was a waste of your time. You seem to have a chip on your shoulder based on writing about Elon and the Thai thing and not having it go as you’d like which, in the grand scheme of things, matters precisely zero. That you offered money to those journalists as part of that process simply reassures me that you were blocked in their email because that is a fucking stupid thing to do, and I wish that were more apparent to you. You did dumb things by your own account. That almost certainly wasn’t personal — it’s just that money and its involvement in journalism is extremely sensitive for very, very obvious reasons.

Source: Journalist.