Closely related to “people are upset about a thing” articles which just regurgitate quotes from random people on social media.

The thing this article does not cover is that the average journalist has no sway. Most readers don't want the opinion of some random person covering a space, so "CEO Said a Thing" is the headline that draws the reader in. Many times the journalist also is not getting paid enough to inject any sort of counterpoint or unique perspective. This just seems like the natural outcome of the click-whoring online "news" structure we've created.

I'm confident this phenomenon exists in other industries too.

Is there a term that's equivalent to "reactionary" but applies to leftist/liberal ideals or is it fine for me to start referring to this kind of writing as "reactionary" save that I apply some sort of qualifier like "leftist" or "liberal" before or afterwards?

It is at least entertaining when certain CEOs speak off-the-cuff and reveal they have no clue what they are talking about.

Jensen thinks DLSS 5 works at "the geometry level", for instance. Oh and he pays engineers $500,000 to spend $250,000 on Claude tokens.

Reaction-baiting (or -bating depending on your perspective) really has ruined most discourse. There a direct line to advertising and social media.

At least it's slightly more interesting than "company X raises Y millions at Z billions valuation", but point taken

I've come to the conclusion recently that if a tech CEO is pushing for something , it's probably something normal people should be fighting against. To the point where "Elon/Mark/Jensen/Peter wants society to do [thing]" is a pretty strong signal that [thing] is actually a terrible idea.

Uncritically regurgitating what sources tell you is not journalism. It's too lazy to rise to the level of propaganda. It's more like writing them a press release for free.

>I'd end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it's abundantly clear they don't want to.

Yeah, shrinking revenue, lawsuits, death threats, buyouts and takeovers, government strong-arming all contribute to not really wanting to fight the fight that they need to.

There isn't a solution to this as you can't bankroll media outlets or journalists and not expect to be considered biased. The revenue has to come from every day people. So if the revenue isn't there to pay the best people, you're simply not going to have a good, independent media industry any more. Any very-rich person bankrolling that probably also has political affiliations, which again introduces bias.

With rising cost of living, the population will clearly cut out the media subscriptions thinking that the free journalism slop is enough to keep them informed.

This guy is all too right. Fortune.com today:

> A CEO trying to reindustrialize America says blue-collar pay is headed for ‘massive hyperinflation’ and kids should skip college to become welders

> Trump said the Iran war was ‘very complete’ three weeks ago.

> Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says ‘We’ve achieved AGI.’

It's like reading dispatches from an alternate post-truth universe.

> You can never return back to the claims to inform your readership whether they were actually true (this is especially true of CEO promises made before giant, pointless, disastrous mergers).

That's the worst. It's like it's now wrong to call CEOs on their bullshit.

Yesterday I noted that Donut Labs, with their heavily promoted solid state battery, had previously announced they would be shipping in volume in Q1 2026. I wrote on HN "They have until Tuesday." That was voted down.

The worst is "Jony Ive said"

This is ultimately a consequence of the attention economy, which is absolutely harmful for most everyone in the long term, with the exception of, you know, Elon, Sam, Mark and the like.

Another restatement of Brandolini’s Law. The cost of parroting this kind of information is very low, while the cost of refuting it is very high. And the value an outlet can extract from its readership to fund that refutation is nowhere close to cover its outlay. Maybe a counter is the occasional take-down article can sometimes go more viral than the original claim, but chasing those is probably unprofitable too.

Naturally media are on the side of money.

This is like half of the writing at Arstechnica for the last decade or more.

Now this was an article where I didn't even need to read the article. The headline was all I needed to know it has all the same complaints I do.

Also "some minority group is concerned about something" journalism.

This is all a result of the techbro "genius" worship culture that YC & co are definitely guilty in helping to create. Writing code on a computer doesn't make anyone smarter than anyone else, and hopefully people will wake up to that fact sooner rather than later.

Like media reporting about Trump. Trump is a (mostly) fake-news generator. The problem is that the traditional media is largely structued to suit different goals, often the owner (make more money), in part to send out a certain narrative (propaganda). Or both.

I don't have a good work-around for this either. I try to gather news from different sources and use my brain, but even then my brain is influenced a lot by what information is given. Youtube is kind of great and awful here; great because you may have critical content (e. g. I like Vlad Vexler's thinking and reasoning, even if I may not always agree with the rationale, analysis, premise or outcome), but there is also soooo much propaganda on youtube. Tons of parrots repeating a certain narrative. Peter Zeihan is my personal disfavourite right now (the recent "How to Break Iran" is pure propaganda IMO) but there are so many more examples, influencers too. One day I'll need to disconnect myself from youtube (and, in the process, Google); right now I admit I am too addicted to some of it (the content, not the platform; the platform pisses me off. It is not even usable anymore without ublock origin).

> There's no better example of this than what I affectionately refer to as "CEO said a thing!" journalism.

If you are half wrong with your first examples, maybe you should focus on yourself first?

I get the point you are trying to make, but you can't do that spreading misinformation. Jesus.

Elon Musk is an "unremarkable white supremacist"? Come on.