The media loved Sam Bankman-Fried; it hated Brian Armstrong | Semafor

Interesting article taking note of negative press coverage that Coinbase and Brian Armstrong received, versus the positive fawning that Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX got.

But the Armstrong profiles illustrate a broader phenomenon, reflected through the coverage of the two firms: The way in which CEOs position themselves in America’s polarized political and cultural conflicts, particularly on Twitter, cascades into coverage of often unrelated questions about their companies.

And concludes…

The coverage of the two CEOs is really a microcosm of tech coverage at its worst: Reporters at war with or enamored by the people they cover, and readers paying the price in the form of two-dimensional coverage. And what they missed was a contrast between two companies that couldn’t be clearer in retrospect.

It is easy to cite that people like working with people they like, but it is fair to highlight the incredible miss here on the part of everyone, including journalists. Reporting requires hard work, and nobody did that work in the case of FTX and seemingly didn’t want to do the work in the positive for Coinbase.