Like many the idea for what follows was born on IRC.

dub: BingoBoingo: I like how the journalist is a butthurt creditor too

BingoBoingo: dub: Funny how this works? Most "Bitcoin Journalism" being carried out by either Butthurt creditors or soon to be Butthurt creditors. And so now we take a look at what passes for "Bitcoin Journalism" in our current epoch.

The first piece for is to consider is titled "Outrage at Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Expenses as Creditors Prepare to Fly to Japan" and it delivers some interesting information, in that the bankrupt Mt Gox which is merely mostly owned by Mark Karpeles is continuing to pay Tibanne, a company entirely owned by Mr. Karpeles substantial amounts of money for various services. Kind of interesting information, but mixed in is a little bit revelation

Hopefully clearer answers can be received on the 23rd of July from the Liquidator and Mark Karpeles, who is likely to attend. It is not clear how many of the creditors will make the expensive trip to Japan, but this is likely to be one of the last chances for full answers.

with

The layout of the meeting is not clear, but it is probable that the many angry creditors who will attend will have the chance to ask questions and learn of the state of the assets as well as the process to be followed to recover a portion of the ever dwindling remaining funds.

Suggests that piece's author has a certain narrative they want the story to follow. Early in the piece we what do we have as an example of something Gox might be burning money on?

Currently, Mt. Gox creditors are receiving a fancy, double sealed, postcard, which merely re-iterates what is a very old announcement and readily available on the Mt. Gox website.

A reasonable person might come to the conclusion the author has a disclosure they should be making. There seems to be the very strong chance that the author of the piece is a butthurt MtGox bagholder. Strengthening this suspicion is another piece on CryptoCoinNews by the same author titled "Federal Agencies Criticized for Failing to Protect Bitcoin Users" which largely features a report issued by the United States Government Accountability office, but also includes the following:

What is more angering for many MT Gox creditors is the perceived silence from any government agency on any investigation of what many claim to have been fraud or an inconsistent and misleading account of events by Mark Karpeles.

Which is not reporting on the report, and seems to be someone venting their frustrations in the third person. As far as journalistic oversights go in Bitcoin, these are far from being as problematic as any other things though. Their great offense however seems to be in theirÂ lack of ownership for the words and the narrative. Maybe this is just a symptom though of the tendency of American educators to discourage their charges of using the word "I" to inject themselves into their writing. Maybe children are growing up with a fear of inserting "I" into a piece of writing even when it is necessary. There is a flipside to this problem though which is even more challenging.

Advertorials, shilling, and hyping various things and various nothings are the great plague on the outlets that represent themselves to be outlets for "Bitcoin Journalism" and historically the worst outlet for this metric fuck ton of bullshit has been CoinDesk. On February 24th, 2014 CoinDesk uncritically reports with ample praise NeoBee's physical location "opening for business" and then on April 5th, not even two fucking months later, reports on the demise of NeoBee while still offering praise and the pretense of credibility for all of the other services and systems that made the NeoBee debacle possible. Coindesk isn't alone in committing this sin, but they are perennially among the worst and these things have consequences.

Sure, now that the Internet is a thing anyone can put up a website with the traditional trade dress of a media outlet and play act being a media outlet. You can write stories yourself, or outsource the work to Fiverr or any number of other outlets where desperate youth will go through the motions of producing text at a rate which can give your site the impression of being a media outlet. Maybe you end up with some editorial content disguised as news, maybe you end up without any clear distinction between editorial and news content at all. What ends up happening often is that in the best case parts of the product are ever so slightly better than nothing in that they report some information that would have not otherwise been available, but in the worst case the product ends up contributing to the deluge of misinformation and bullshit that prevents us from having nice things.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2014 at 12:58 a.m. and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.