The Mainstream Media Deserves Another Reckoning over Sam Bankman-Fried
It's Amazing How Badly They Got FTX (like so much else) Wrong
The next Warren Buffet? LOL!
A while back I wrote a piece noting the following four beliefs Americans had based on ostensibly reputable surveys:
On the eve of the Iraq War, 70% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.
In late 2021, 41% of Democrats (and 26% of Republicans) thought you had a 50% chance or higher of dying from Covid-19 if you caught it. (The correct answer is between 1-5%.)
In 2020, 41% of self-described liberals (and 15% of conservatives) thought the police kill over 1000 unarmed black men each year. (The number in 2019 was 13)
67% of Democrats (and 40% of Republicans) think Russia tampered with the vote tallies of the 2016 election. (This “election denialism” is not even alleged.)
Yet despite Americans have these farcically inaccurate beliefs that were clearly inoculated in them by the mainstream corporate media, the same mainstream corporate media want so warn us of “misinformation” and “fake news” and “conspiracy theories” and then proceed to censor anyone who dare say anything like that off the Internet.
Well….
Mainstream Media BS and SBF
The latest example of the mainstream media getting something disastrously wrong (which, by the way, many in the alterative media saw coming) is Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX debacle.
Indeed, this charlatan seemed to be on every talk show and magazine cover you could find. For example:
And of course he was rubbing shoulders with every famous politician and plutocrat you could find. This New York Times Event is scheduled for a week from now!
Speaking of The New York Times, well they’re still going soft on him. Normally you would try to gaslight your audience into thinking you had this one snuffed out from the beginning. Instead, they wrote a ridiculous puff piece.
Mr. Bankman-Fried did, however, agree with critics in the crypto community who said he had expanded his business interests too quickly across a wide swath of the industry. He said his other commitments had led him to miss signs that FTX was running into trouble.
Oh, did he expand “his business interests too quickly?” Is the the new euphemism for stealing client funds?
Mr. Bankman-Fried’s circle of colleagues was bound by a commitment to effective altruism, a charitable movement that urges adherents to give away their wealth in efficient and logical ways… Mr. Bankman-Fried said he wished “we’d bitten off a lot less.”
Yes, he bit off more of his customers funds then he could replenish with new investors.
“People can say all the mean things they want about me online,” he said. “In the end, what’s going to matter to me is what I’ve done and what I can do.”
He has also found other ways to occupy his time in recent days, playing the video game Storybook Brawl, though less than he usually does, he said. “It helps me unwind a bit,” he said. “It clears my mind.”
Yes, there is truly a mental health crisis amongst scammers running giant Ponzi schemes while stealing their customers funds to buy mansions in the Bahamas. Very tragic indeed. Hopefully video games and meditation can help Sam through these trying times. Thoughts and prayers Mr. Bankman.
Meanwhile, over at The Washington Post…
Yes, democracy dies in darkness just as your money dies in FTX. (WaPo changed the headline not surprisingly.)
Indeed, Sam Bankman-Fried spent something like $40 million on the 2022 congressional races (almost all to Democrats but some to Republicans as well) which earns you a lot of access.
He also cozied up to the mainstream media, which seems to have earned him a lot of praise and puff pieces about his vegan eccentricities and genius for making billions of dollars.
The FTX scam is a lot of things all of them bad; another example of Wall Street malfeasance, a sign of the inherent weakness of cryptocurrencies and another example of how the mainstream media has literally no credibility when it comes to demanding others be shut down for “misinformation.”
Especially when YouTubers like the great Coffeezilla sniffed this guy out back in April:
At what point do we stop blaming the media and start blaming the people giving credability to what the media says?