How out of touch with reality do you need to be to agree to this article?
Surely Su Zhu and Kyle Davis realize that they're the bad guys in this story, right?
Surely Su Zhu and Kyle Davis realize that they're the bad guys in this story, right?
Zhu and Davis see it as an opportunity to "correct the record" and to explain exactly what went wrong and while it may have been technically illegal, they weren't the bad guys. So, they agree. They talk with the journalist, possibly invite him over.
The journalist then collects all that information and all the other information they have, and then write the article they were going to write all along.
There's some degree of social engineering to being a good journalist. You have to try and convince people to talk to you even when it would be against their best interests.
And I imagine it's some degree of hubris on the parts of Zhu and Davis. They probably believe that if they just have the right words put out there, they'd be absolved. What they didn't realize is that they don't control the medium. What they said doesn't matter. Unless they revealed something truly astonishing, the journalist is going to cut out anything that doesn't support their main thesis or anything they feel is just bullshit. Or even frame it in a less complimentary context.
And it's very easy to lulled into we're just having a friendly chit-chat. You'd think these guys would be more media savvy than that. But it's extremely easy in the course of an extended conversation to drop some nuggets you may not have intended to. More than once, I've dropped something that, as soon as it was out of my mouth, I was internally "Crap. That's going to end up in the story, isn't it?"
There are very few journalists--and I know a lot--who I'll be completely transparent with even if we're supposedly on background or even just casually chatting.
Don't talk to journalists unless you have a prepared agenda.