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
@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..."
Jay Rosen
Damon Kiesow
William Pietri