The failure there isn't journalistic, but regulatory. Journalists don't have the privilege of looking deeply inside books and how company conducts it's business, but auditors have.
It absolutely is a media failure. It exposed how corrupt some outlets are, in insidious ways. The media built a positive image of SBF and FTX without ever doing serious investigative job because he was giving to the right people... and still, when FTX scam scramble, instead of apologizing the same media continued to be lenient toward the fraudster trying to spin the scammer as some idealist who just made bad bets, when he was already deep into his scam.
> Journalists don't have the privilege of looking deeply inside books and how company conducts it's business, but auditors have.
Many people in Crypto and finance had already figured out FTX business model was some sort of scam, the media and their glowing reviews of SBF weren't interested in hearing them, because SBF was being too generous about donations...
No, but there are cases where they might have taken a closer and more critical look. I haven't followed this story closely, but in the lead-up to the 2008 crash, the press seemed to me unduly easy on the zero-principal mortgage loans.
That's ridiculous. There have been twitter/substance/etc folk long calling out all the shenanigans and diving into the data, figures and relationships that any reasonable journalist would have had an easy time of it.
I don't know why investigative journalism suddenly seems so 'hard' these days, but I'd assume it involves just following the money for the most part...
