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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Here's the NYT article.[1]

It was an remote interview with Bankman-Fried. The reporter (interviewer?) was David Yaffe-Bellany.[2] He came from Bloomberg.

When, as a reporter for a major paper, do you call a CEO a crook? That's a tough call. Especially when the CEO is in total denial at the time. Especially when such an article will crash what's left of the company. I wonder what discussions took place within the NYT editorial staff.

The interview was on Sunday, Nov. 13. The Binance buyout deal was supposedly happening as of Nov. 8, Binance was making backout noises on Nov 9th, and the deal was dead by Thursday Nov. 10. There was still talk of other deals past that point.

It wasn't clear as of Nov. 14th that there had been out and out theft. The hard info on that came later. Take a close look at who knew what when.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankma...

[2] https://yaffebellany.com/

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> When, as a reporter for a major paper, do you call a CEO a crook? That's a tough call.

No, it’s not. The answer is never — unless that person has been charged with and convicted of a crime.

To do otherwise would expose the reporter to enormous potential civil liability. Defamation is a thing.

Prosecutors charge people with crimes, not reporters.

The bar for defamation in the United States is very high. You have to prove not only that the statement was a lie, but also that the writer either knew that it was false or had reckless disregard for obtaining the truth.

Libel suits happen frequently. All the major papers are quite versed in dealing with them. They rarely lose these cases.

I did A quick google search and can’t even find a libel case the NYT has lost in the last 30+ years. There was one case in 2003 where media outlets reported incorrectly that the times lost a libel case. In fact, they won the case, even though the jury agreed that the facts reported were false, because the plaintiff failed to prove malice (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/05/24/n...).

The reason the NYT wins libel suits is because they have rules about what their journalists are allowed to say, and one of those rules is to make it very clear people only accused/charged with a crime haven't yet been convicted.

The journalist does clearly know that he isn't charged and convicted, and if they did not know that while writing an article about someone's crimes and still printed that assertion, it would qualify as reckless disregard for obtaining truth.

Major papers rarely lose libel cases because they do the obvious thing and avoid publishing libel.

Would calling someone a "crook" even qualify as defamation? That's an opinion I can have about my local grocer because he charges slightly more for a half gallon of milk than Trader Joes does for a gallon. It's still an opinion regardless whether I'm wrong about the price of milk (I haven't checked but according to my buddy who worked at TJs it's a loss leader, so I'm going to recklessly assume the grocer is a crook).

In the US, it would only count as defamation if it were stated as a fact and was untrue, and any reasonable person given the same information would have suspected that it might not be true.

If it's true, there is no defamation. If it was stated as opinion, there is no defamation.

It is clear what crook means in the FTX context

Everyone vaguely informed about this story knows it was a scam. Reporting anything else is untruthful. Why do you defend reporting you know to be untruthful?

Doubt - so many people have been defamed over anything from politics to covid

Seriously?

"Asked whether he was overly dependent on that small group, Mr. Bankman-Fried said his circle of close colleagues numbered about 15."

What a softball! Perfectly calibrated to his mistakes-not-fraud PR push.

In contrast, this Coindesk article is exactly the kind of in-depth, no-nonsense article focused on the relevant facts that people used to expect from the NY Times

Look at the dates of the articles. And look at what Coindesk published on Nov. 12, a day before the NYT interview.[1] Zero indication of fraud in that article.

By Nov. 21, Coindesk is reporting that FTX is being looted, and possibly by an insider. But not that Bankman-Fried is responsible.[2]

Then, on Nov. 22, there's the first bankruptcy hearing. With, finally, disclosures in court of what's been going on.[3] At this point, it finally becomes clear that Bankman-Fried has been been using all those FTX companies as his personal piggy bank.

Hindsight is 20-20.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/11/12/the-epic-collaps...

[2] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/11/21/ftx-exploiter-tr...

[3] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/11/22/lawyers-detail-th...

You have given no explanation for the preposterous line of questioning I pointed out.

Now it's Nov. 30. Has NYT published anything nearly as comprehensive as this article? They have significant resources at their disposal

And today is December 1st and the NYTimes continue to run deflection come puff pieces [1] on SBF. And that is after inviting him as a speaker at their DealBook conference, no less. They continue to unquestioningly repeat his ever-shifting dart throws to try to influence public opinion.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/business/sam-bankman-frie...

From the "puff" TFA:

"Mr. Bankman-Fried, who became a billionaire as FTX soared and was viewed as a wunderkind, faces significant legal trouble. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating FTX’s transfer of funds to Alameda. The chief executive of Alameda, Caroline Ellison, told staff this month that the trading firm had dipped into FTX customer funds to finance its own trading activity, The Times and others have reported.

Mr. Bankman-Fried has since come under heavy criticism. In court filings, FTX’s new chief executive, who is managing the company’s bankruptcy, said he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate control” and listed a series of “unacceptable management practices.”

On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen called FTX’s collapse a “Lehman moment” for the cryptocurrency industry, referring to the bankruptcy of the Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. She indicated that she viewed cryptocurrencies with skepticism..."

The narrative you have does not equate with what is actually in the articles.

What you just quoted is a textbook (if not extreme) example of deflection in its overtness.

- The problem isn't SBF - it's his girlfriend. Sorry, "Caroline Ellison." The article omits their relationship.

- The problem isn't SBF - it was some poor management practices.

- The problem isn't SBF - this is "just" a 'Lehman moment' - legal and authentic, if unethical, actions gone bad.

Conspiracy sees what conspiracy sees. Girlfriend bit and weird behavior was already covered extensively by NYT. He's the CEO with no management practices. Lehman an unmitigated disaster of ethics as you say. I would read this as laying at all at the feet of SBF - which the NYT has done consistently.

Mostly I believe people don't know how to read news vs opinion. Matt Levine can speculate and call him a thief, as he's an opinion journalist. Straight news can have an edge but has to mostly report facts. (edited here to add:) You will notice that each of those paragraphs has quotes, sourced to people. That's called reporting, not deflecting.

Deflecting is a type of reporting. It's one where you focus on anything and everything except the core of the problem in order to try to deflect attention from it. This issue isn't a matter of management practices or ethics, it's a matter of the head of a company engaging in widespread criminal behavior. To frame it as the former is like arguing that Madoff was just a case of "poor accounting practices."

If you'd like to see normal reporting feel free to compare with: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/12/1-billion-to-2-billion-of-ft...

I don't think there is winning this with you, but you are comparing apples to oranges. The TFA mentioned above is "news" because it was reporting on the interview SBF just did, not a recap of the whole thing.

The CNBC article is "news" because it was breaking the news on the back door, transfer of funds, etc. It was new news at the time. Here is CNBCs coverage of the interview where you can compare to NYT apples to apples: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/former-ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-f...

There is a cadence to the news cycle. Not every articles is summative. Some are reporting on latest developments, hot takes, etc.

Pretty wild that the reporting from CoinDesk that led to the downfall of FTX, is causing such an entire market implosion that it may be putting CoinDesk itself out of business.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/24/media/coindesk-scoop-ftx-reli...

https://crypto.news/potential-buyers-circle-around-digital-c...

This story ran on the 12th though: https://www.reuters.com/technology/alameda-ftx-executives-kn...

> It wasn't clear as of Nov. 14th that there had been out and out theft.

The leaked balance sheet on Nov. 12th was as much clarity as I needed. Plainly, it demonstrated that customer assets were not segregated as promised, but were gambled with.

Why do you think a reporter should be deciding who is and who is not a crook? If they adequately report the facts then the reader can be sufficiently informed to make up their own mind.

This assumes the reader knows what is and isn't illegal in every industry

It doesn’t assume that at all. Explaining the known facts relating to legal controversies sounds like reasonable journalism to me. Labelling somebody a crook is a conclusion that the reader may choose to draw from those facts, not one that should be prescribed to them. Have you ever broken the law? You almost certainly have. Does that make you a crook?

I never admitted to stealing over a billion dollars. The criminal himself said he was a criminal that took funds

When did he say that?

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