Hacker News Reader

Comment by wakemc | Hacker News Reader

"BuzzFeed itself — a financial play as much as Uber is — has key investors who are investors in Uber's main competitor, Lyft. Those investors are, too, investors in PandoDaily. Does this have any bearing at all on the cost of tea in China? I don't know. But I know that little in this world is what it seems."

That's directly from the end of the linked article in Applecore's post. I haven't been following this "scandal" particularly closely, but from what I have read, I haven't seen many people talking about this.

If the identity of the author of the OP article causes you to take said article with a grain of salt, does a financial connection between Lyft and BuzzFeed produce another, similarly sized grain of salt?

View on HN

About as big as the one created by the relationship between Uber and Buzzfeed via Chris Dixon, perhaps slightly bigger, but they sort of balance. edited to add - those two are much smaller grains though. As far as I am aware, the journalist has investments in neither and investors tend to have their fingers in lots of pies.

The bigger conflict of interest, and seemingly the lesser reported connection, is between Buzzfeed and Sidecar. Buzzfeed's Executive Chairman Ken Lehrer (listed second on their team page[1] after CEO Jonah Peretti) was a seed investor in Sidecar[2][3]. He would unequivocally benefit from Uber's downfall. And he seems pretty outraged by this story – he's only tweeted 113 times since 2012, but the last 13 of them have been on this issue.[4]

I have no idea how Buzzfeed works internally, so I don't know if their Exec. Chairman's connections could influence their reporting, but I feel like it's a significant enough conflict that it should have been disclosed.

[1]: http://www.buzzfeed.com/about/team

[2]: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/side-cr

[3]: http://lererhippeau.com/companies/

[4]: https://twitter.com/kenlerer

It seems evident that Emil did suggest setting up a rather Orwellian coalition for responsible journalism that would be nothing of the sort. Even the nicer account details that rather well, amusingly blind to the fact that her version still sounds shady as hell. Now given that this was said to a reporter at dinner, the fact it came to be published represents normality and you do not really need to go digging through the investor list of the news organization involved to see why it got published. If buzzfeed hadn't carried it, someone else would.

edit - remember, this is the half-heard sympathetic version:

"The last comment that I heard was when Emil hypothesized about creating a coalition for responsible journalism. Ben said that would likely fail because companies have no expertise in journalism. Emil flippantly said he could hire professional journalists for $1 million to get the expertise to make sure that they could respond when negative articles come out."

"I heard a mention of a Sarah Lacy and overheard Emil say that he felt terrible that by writing an article, Sarah had actually suggested that people choose less safe alternatives based on a charge of sexism that was really a personal attack on the CEO with no basis in fact. Emil then said that Sarah wouldn't like it if someone wrote false things about her or published an article that was factually wrong because we all have done things in our private lives we are not proud of."

Even this version still sounds much like a plan for a well funded astro-turf operation with an implicit threat to go after journalists, specifically Sarah Lacy, no matter how flippantly, casually or politely it was said.

Given the article, it sounds like he was baited into giving a sound bite that could be taken out of context, by a reporter at an off the record dinner. Given the full context, it sounds like they were discussing how a company COULD deal with reporters who write biased attack pieces (in this context it sounds like the reporter in question wrote an attack piece and didn't disclose a conflict of interest).

That might actually make for an interesting dinner conversation. What could a company do to protect itself from attack pieces written as actual journalism. It's bias masquerading as fact. A possible solution to that might be to investigate that bias and expose it (if someone writes an article for a company who has a major investor also invested in a competitor - maybe the public SHOULD know that, even if it's not disclosed because the writer isn't really a journalist but is pretending to be one on a blog). In fact, that shouldn't be too contentious of a position.

The problem was that 1) the quote makes it seem like the Uber Exec somehow advocated actually doing that (it sounds like he didn't), and 2) It requires knowing the context (that it's with regards to unethical bloggers who write biased attack pieces because of a conflict of interest they don't mention and not applied to ALL journalists). It's a complex point that requires context. The buzzfeed writer intentionally misrepresented that for clicks, but that's what buzzfeed does.

If it takes context to know what was said and you are saying that we do not know the context, how on earth are you making the claim that you know it was intentionally misrepresented, or in fact misrepresented at all?

For one thing, the response from Uber has not given the indication that this story was misrepresented, but rather has reinforced its reliability:

---

"I wanted to apologize to you directly — I am sorry. I was at an event and was venting, but what I said was never intended to describe actions that would ever be undertaken by me or my company toward you or anyone else. I was definitively wrong and I feel terrible about any distress I have caused you. Again, I am sorry."

---

"The remarks attributed to me at a private dinner — borne out of frustration during an informal debate over what I feel is sensationalistic media coverage of the company I am proud to work for — do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company’s views or approach. They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them."

---

There is no indication there that the reporting was false and those quotes are direct from Emil.

It takes context to know that 1) It was an off the record event and 2) that previous attack pieces were levied at his company and a reporter baited him into giving quotes that would sound incendiary without any of the context (i.e. answering the hypothetical question "how could a company stop biased attack articles).

The writer neither acknowledges his own conflict of interest nor does he give any indication that it's an answer to a hypothetical question. The real answer is that the uber exec isn't going to do anything about the attack pieces because they haven't done anything about them.

Good point. There's a lot of money going a lot of different ways in this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/11/20/uber-investor...

I suppose I'm somewhat inclined to discount BuzzFeed's reporting. It's probably not fair of me, but my opinion of them has definitely been dragged down by the general "clickbait-y" property of the site as a whole.

I've never been able to take them seriously as they are called "BuzzFeed", but I take stories as I find them and this one is at least actual reporting of an event, sensationalized or not, rather than just the usual inane supposition glued to random crap scraped from the far flung corners of the web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com