No, what's laughable is expecting your readership to rely on your characterisation of your relationship with your editor as a guide to the editorial standards of your publication.

The magic at TechCrunch happens because the writers have very little oversight. Instead, the emphasis is placed on hiring the right writers in the first place

Indeed.

Quite often, you never even see what he brings. But it permeates the entire site.

As readers we have a robust yardstick for presuming bias in reporting: financial interest in the subject. It's important that we do have one and writers who claim otherwise should know that they're demanding a serious indulgence. In contrast to Siegler's tantrum: hxxp://allthingsd.com/author/kara/#kara-ethics

Edit: Strange, the 'ethics statement' content block has to be revealed by manual click. The link is in the article tools menu at the top of the page, in faint text.

Edit2: Traced the content from the AJAX loader to here: http://allthingsd.com/index.php?atd_ajax=authorinfo&fiel...