where were the SV / SF / Oak proper journalists on either end of this story actually scrutinizing a $10b monster?Most journalists are not capable of narrating how e.g. a Rails application works. They're equally not capable of walking an interlocutor through e.g. Phase N clinical trials. They rely on people who actually have domain expertise to tell them what the ground state of the world is like. One would hope that a good journalist goes around and checks those representations, but this is not always true.
Every interaction I have ever had with a journalist attempting to use me as a source has decreased my confidence in the profession. I'm on like six organizations' internal lists as "Speaks English and can answer any Japan question." (My qualifications for this: I speak English, have a professional background which suggests bare minimum competence in a field which was once newsworthy regarding Japan, and then was in the NYT in that capacity. "Close enough!")
They've asked me to provide my opinion of everything from e.g. Abe's economic policies to whether the man on the street thought that the Japanese women's soccer team was counteracting the national malaise after the Tokoku earthquakes. When I give them the honest answer, which is that I'm a small software entrepreneur who does not know anything useful about nation-level economics policies and is sufficiently politically apathetic that me knowing that Abe is prime minister actually means that I must be paying more attention than usual in 2015, that does not result in them stopping the interview or taking me off their list.
Journalism is a high-prestige field which, to re-use Michael Creighton's observation, we understand is virtually never right about even the simplest consequential facts about things we actually understand, but we trust it to be accurate with regards to consequential facts about other fields, and this trust endures through every report that we have about journalists being catastrophically wrong. The alternative to trusting journalism is to believe that the New York Times and BuzzFeed hire the substantially same people to do substantially the same work for substantially the same reasons, and that the NYT is prestigious and BuzzFeed is not because the NYT has been BuzzFeeding for centuries.
There is some threshold of evidence that causes us to accept the BuzzFeed hypothesis, right? Right? God help me, I know I sound crazy, but I think I'm there.