However, I am a bit uncomfortable with the pithy language used. It's possible (likely, even), that the fired editors deserve the pithiness, but it's still a bit weird to read that kind of prose, in a scientific context.
Professional news is usually written without expressing judgement and minimizing opinion.
> fraudsters
It's an allegation.
The author only hurts themself: My impression is that they don't believet the fundamentals of truth and humanity: they are certainly partially wrong, could be very wrong, will never know the complete truth, and their judgment of others is too flawed to rely on. Also it seems they are acting more on their emotions and less on fact and reason.
I certainly apologize for hurting feelings. That was not my intent.
I've just learned (the hard way, of course, because how else do we learn?), that using this kind of terminology, even though we may be feeling quite pithy, gives ammo to those that wish to discount us.
This goes double, in my experience, for any context that prizes objectivity and articulate discussion.
Doing them both together increases the amplitude of the signal at the cost of reducing the integrity of the signal.
If you wonder why the world is informationally too loud and too noisy these days, it's because everyone who does this is turning up the volume to be louder than others who are also, in turn, turning up the volume for the same reasons.
Literally zero need for that; none. And it's that kind of language that calls into question the authors motives. I went from "Excellent reporting here" to "This guy is emotional and not a reliable source of information" in 6 words.
I’ve been using “pithy” as a a rhetorical hook for decades. It’s fairly common.
Then again, I also found it rather funny. I suspect this is because I am a bad person.