For me this was the key moment for Amy Chozick as author of "Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth."
Chozick writes:
"She thinks if she’d spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now."
That Holmes still believes she could transform health care tells us she is nowhere in her recognition of reality, which in turn means the con goes on. And that— 1/2
#journalism #science #nytimes
... should have been the central theme of the story, not the two people she is said to be. As Chozick writes, "she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world."
There's no two people. Just the one Holmes who has yet to meet the reality of what she did— and who she is.
Here's a gift link for the New York Times story. Should be no paywall. Hopefully it will work. 2/2
https://t.co/9a0NyIbXqZ
@Jayslacks @jayrosen_nyu Yeah pretty much the only con artists that "stop" are one of two groups:
a) people doing it for survival, who usually don't want to do it and pick something less harmful to other people when it becomes available
and
b) people who "switch sides" and rat out other scammers/get paid to tell people how they operate
Holmes doesn't seem to be either and giving her a "rehab tour" is a REALLY bad idea IMO
@jayrosen_nyu A few years ago I was gifted Chozick's book about following Hilary around on the campaign. I thought it might be interesting to hear some insights about what she was really like.
I never really got to find out, because I gave up after the first three chapters filled with Chozick's obsessive focus on herself, her dating life, her relationship with the Clinton staffers etc.
Ive never read anyone with less of an understanding of where the focus of a story should be.
@jayrosen_nyu Seems like this is more of the same.
More than any of the specifics in the book, I was struck by just the sheer shallowness of the worldview it contained..
not particularly interested in the substance of politics, the mechanisms of change, processes, policies or movements.
But absolutely fascinated by the lives of, and interactions between, reporters, politicians and political insiders.
It ends up being quite an insight, in an unintentional, indirect way into the mindset of the kind of people who get assigned to do 'profile' type pieces...
the circles they swim in, the things they value, what they find interesting and thus ultimately...what they think the AUDIENCE will find interesting.
@jayrosen_nyu I'm not sure if it matters whether or not Holmes believes it when she talks about working more on the 'inventions'.
It's enough that she says things like that, and it gets her into the biggest publications in the world where she's treated very very nicely.
The “No True Theranos” argument
@jayrosen_nyu This exact type of story needs a tik-tock post-mortem. When exactly did it slip from “decent story idea” to “public relations?”
Was it the inherent from the pitch, was it somehow distorted in the reporting, was it the photo, the editing….
Is it possible that it was earlier? That it never really slipped? I haven't paid much attention to the NYT in recent years, but it seems to me this isn't the first time they've done an inappropriately soft-focus profile of an upper-class white person. It seems very POSIWID to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
Sorry, I was unclear. I'm thinking earlier still. Let me try an analogy from my own field, tech.
Suppose we look at some terrible startup and ask when it slipped from good idea to bad. Founders generally understand the VC game, and so tend to pitch things that VCs like. Moreover, the industry tends to attract people with similar backgrounds and biases to VCs. So often terrible startups never slipped; they may have had a positive spin early on, but their in-the-world terribleness was overdetermined from the get-go.
So when I look for the POSIWID slip there, it's with who became the initial VCs, what their motivation was, and the ideology of the people funding them. The slip wasn't at the pitch, but years ago.
Another factor, I think, is that the Times reporter goes into this assignment highly aware that she wants to produce neither a "puff piece," or a "hit piece." And she is also aware that those terms are the co-possession of the audience. One way to read the final text is as a series of signs saying, "see? no puff piece here," and "to be fair, because this isn't a hit piece, either..."
Unsurprising that Chozick misses this obvious point so badly. Ditto that the NYT purveys such terrible journalism.
Con-people are commonly charming, and Chozick was clearly charmed.
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