It's strange how Anne Wojcicki's company has done more for science than Theranos ever did yet most have never heard of her. Even when you exclude the scandal Elizabeth Holmes got herself into, she was more well known.
It's not strange if you consider that Elizabeth Holmes proactively pursued the media appearances circuit. E.g. talk shows, award ceremonies, etc. Other female CEOs do more actual work and don't have the time for those distractions.
Also, Forbes' calculation of Holmes being worth ~4 billion based on 50% ownership of Theranos drew more media attention. The public fascination with (so-called) "billionaires" feeds the self-reinforcing cycle of more interviews.
In contrast, the media didn't calculate Anne Wojcicki to be a billionaire until recently: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2021/06/17/23andm...
The press assures us they'd be better if we gave them a bunch of money (even begging for government money), but the truth is that it has always been like this.
Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for.
Like pretty much all professions, it's also become far more demanding to be a good journalist or investigative journalist due to how many stories reported on require more specialized knowledge to understand and portray correctly. The bar used to be lower and a journalist could better grasp a situation or understanding. Now, with a lot of technology and science, you pretty much need a pretty deep and well rounded background to properly understand and address issues. The general bar of education has risen, including that of deceitful people, which places even higher demands on journalists to put them in check.
Could dig further into the point but the moral of the story is that the bar is raising to a point where misinformation and disinformation have an edge due to the sheer volume of information, lack of ability for any one person to have enough understanding, and incentives to be deceitful. That means the barrier to entry cost to dig out deceit has often become too high. I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this.
This should be an entire discussion thread. Even scrupulous journalistic outlets have to stay competitive on the business side. And people don’t want facts, they want a story; something to spawn feeling instead of thought.
What happened instead is that the bottom fell out. There are so many newer sources of information today but most of them are very poor so the average quality of news has precipitously dropped. But as it always goes, the good stay good.
I currently pay about $40/month in news and magazines (but borrow Netflix/Hulu/HBO/etc. from friends, lol) and I enjoy the news I get. It’s a range of current events to policy analysis.
I think a bigger change is that previously what people thought of events didn’t honestly matter as much in day to day policy dealings either. People weren’t any more informed back then — they just didn’t even know what was going on, for better and worse.
lol WHAT?
- https://www.motherjones.com/
- https://www.themarshallproject.org/
the problem is that folks like yourself want to sit back and have news come to you as a consumptive activity, and you expect it for free. you have to actively go out and seek valid sources of information -- you can't have your worldview shaped for you.
In the "days of yore" the quality of journalism was higher? Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country".
Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism.
Look at the Pulizer Won by the Boston Globe for 2021, lifesaving investigative journalism that is expensive and difficult- and exactly the sort of thing that the Golden Age would have never dug up.
To paraphrase Mitch Hedburg, sure, they used to. They still do, but they used to, too. But now there are fewer of them.
>Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism.
This strikes me as kind of a crazy claim, but in the grandparent I was bemoaning the decline of functional local journalism. The rot hasn't really, truly hit big newspapers in big cities; the parent's citation of the continued existence of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting kinda doesn't change the realities of the local news, the decline of which is evident, well-studied, and heralds corruption of both democracy and mere finance.[0][1][2]
I've linked blog-level readings, but feel free to scrutinize the links in the Global Anti-Corruption Blog article [0] for more academic analysis on the topic.
Look to groups like Alden Capital [3], which buy up and destroy small-town American news sources. You'll find that those disappearing local papers used to pen most of the original reporting in the US. It's so fucking evident that mainstream institutions like PBS and NPR and even Netflix recognize it -- namely, "The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" [4] on exactly what I'm talking about.
[0] https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-...
[1] https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-les...
[2] https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-o...
LA Times might possibly qualify. Other than that, I'm stumped.
Any city of < 1m population ... yeah, it's dead.
I do dispute the notion expressed by the parent to my reply that there "used to be a thing called "investigative journalism", largely snuffed out now" which I stand by my position is a baffling statement. You can look at the homepage of ProPublica every day and read things that would never have any hope of seeing the light of day 15 or more years ago and are important stories.
And I really do think the fact remains that the ethical standards of the "days of yore" were garbage, modern reporters would break the shit out of news that the good ole boys would let go from the 50's all the way well into the 80's.
"The Press" is also who exposed Theranos (and Holms) as a fraud.
Theranos' big claim was they could do tests on a much smaller amount of blood. Perhaps they didn't end up doing that for Walgreens since they used externally sourced hardware, in which case they were just another test provider and if they tested out OK in ongoing QA, I don't see a problem with that from partner POV, but just from the investor POV who expected a new technology to get an edge over the competition.
IIRC they were using smaller than usual blood samples and feeding them into external testing hardware by watering down to required size. This sounds bad; but if it doesn't show up in QA - then maybe it's a legitimate advancement. If it makes testing less reliable and it doesn't show up in QA - then QA needs to be fixed. If it does show up in QA - Walgreens never should have agreed. If it does show up in QA but Walgreens never noticed - that is a problem to address.
I guess the initial deal was done on salesmanship and promises, so maybe they would have found out sooner or later.
RThey were already "found out" well before the articles were published, it's just that most VC aren't going to go out of their way to tank you, they just decline to invest
You could make a blanket statement like restaurant food isn’t very good, and on average that might be true, but anyone that knows what they’re doing would just laugh at that statement.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/21109...
Mostly true, and sad part if enough do that, then the rest follow.
Kinda also gets down to how many likes a press release gets upon social media and we all know how that is a rose-glassed slant of the full public opinion.
Close family member of Rich And Successful CEO founds successful company is not an interesting story. In fact it is how most people assume it works, if you come from a rich family of course your company is a success. 'Poor' kid pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps and builds company with nothing but grit and brilliance, now that is a story you can sell. Especially if it's a company doing something the 'experts' said couldn't be done.
Undoubtedly Holmes was also good at marketing. That alone is a skill, one that alone admittedly doesn’t make a viable product, but that’s the real explanation for her success.
Who's Holmes? GP has probably been spending too much time on the grey web.
Nah, she just didn't actively put the 10000 hours to pursue publicity. Journalists are lazy
I don't think that's true. Holmes was on the cover of plenty of mainstream magazines and newspapers like Time, Fortune and Glamour.