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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

Naomi Wu has had poor experiences with western news outlets - Vice news outed her against her will in a piece they wrote on her, and she lives in a country that doesn't have an especially liberal attitude towards homosexuality. So there is understandably some salt on that basis, but also...

In this case plenty of other news outlets have covered her in their articles about Martha: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community

As far as "tech/white/male", you really only have to read the comments people post in any thread about her on Reddit to figure that one out. I can't even imagine what her inbox must look like.

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Especially since for anyone reading the article it's clear why she's (rightfully) annoyed.

> She has only a handful of collars left. "I really am desperate," she says. "That's the most scary thing in my life right now — is not finding anybody that can make those collars."

Naomi does a lot of interesting work and is snubbed quite a lot. She made it quite public that this was happening and yet NPR still snubbed her.

I mean there's also plenty of other options, like the parts didn't fundamentally work and it's easier to just forget about it and write a new article than risk another media blowup by bringing a Twitter personality into a story that's not really about her?

That makes absolutely zero sense, though. She's also not a twitter personality. She's a full-blown engineer with a very popular Youtube channel and following and has done these sorts of things quite often.

That makes absolutely no sense, Wu is in china so some back and forth in order to get the collars to fit correctly is to be expected. Following which you're done because the chinese shop can make the collars to order whenever that's needed.

> bringing a Twitter personality into a story that's not really about her?

Wu was already involved in this. Per her comments she'd already sent packages of collars to be tested and altered / fitted.

Hell, mentioning that there was a volunteer / grassroots effort to produce new collars would have been more honest than the article going "collars where?"

It's a light human interest story, not a comprehensive international assessment of iron lungs parts suppliers or formal inventory and provenance check of Martha's stock.

> It's a light human interest story

It's NPR. There's no excuse for poor sensationalist journalism even from them.

A brief retrospective of iron lungs and the technical difficulties faced by people who still prefer them is among the least sensationalist pieces of writing I can imagine. Where you normally get news that's so sedate by this standard?

She has the right to be annoyed with those that were supposed to deliver and test the collars, not with Martha Lillard or NPR.

From the point of view of M.L., she is maybe one of several that promised to help but could do it (not a fault of Naomi Wu of course, but of those that first contacted her for help and then left things unfinished), so it doesn't surprise me that she was not mentioned.

NPR asserted in their article that help was few and far in between when this wasn't the case. Naomi has certainly gone above and beyond in attempting to help. It should be noted that the difficulty is not in finding help, but in the logistics. It reads very much like a plea to emotion, how NPR worded it.

Did Martha herself not reach out to Naomi? It would seem to make more sense to me than NPR doing so..

That article is from a previous donation years ago. Naomi herself says her recent donation wasn't used[1].

Is NPR obligated to mention all failed attempts to acquire new collars? It seems unlikely they excluded this information because of Naomi's gender or race.

It's great that Naomi donated successfully before and has tried to again, but as you noted she's received plenty of positive media from her donations already.

[1] - "I just could not get anyone to visit her and do final fitting and troubleshooting on the collars I had manufactured for her." - https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/145289590785527398...

"Poor experiences" are not an excuse for bigotry against a group of people based on a combination of their race, sexuality, and gender.

It's amazing to me how people will bend their principles because they admire someone.

Beyond the outlets, I think it's useful to be familiar with this episode: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5046

Dale Dougherty later posted an open letter in apology.

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