GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM: Yesterday, Forbes published a piece headlined “‘Queen Caroline’: The ‘Fake Charity Nerd Girl’ Behind The FTX Collapse,” which was promoted with this tweet:
Here’s the passage from the article on how Ellison is “a new darling of the alt-right:”
In recent days, Ellison has faced a barrage of particularly nasty criticism from crypto boosters who blame her for overseeing the downfall of Alameda. But amid the vitriol she has found some defenders in an unlikely group of people who have celebrated the musings about race science and imperialism on a blog she allegedly wrote in college. Some of her defenders, who call her “Queen Caroline,” are followers of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary political theorist and far right darling. Many of the people who have flocked to Ellison’s defense gather on Urbit, a peer-to-peer platform created by Yarvin, one of her online supporters told Forbes. They think Ellison was set up to be the fall person, and claim that former co-CEO Sam Trabucco, who they derisively call “Sam Tabasco,” is behind Alameda’s implosion. Trabucco didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
“I definitely think she’s innocent,” one said. “I think Caroline can be saved.”
And here’s how it got into the article:
More from David Strom at Hot Air: FTX now right-wing according to Forbes.
What is hilarious about this–actually there are many things hilarious about this–is that FTX is actually a darling of Forbes Magazine, who helped it vault to the top of the crypto world. Forbes hyped the company, hyped Sam Bankman-Fried as a genius, and along with the New York Times turned SBF into a hero, genius inventor. To the extent that Caroline the fraud was enabled, Forbes, Fortune Magazine, and the New York Times were the chief enablers.
The Times even listed Fried right alongside Janet Yellen, Zelensky, and Mark Zuckerberg as a speaker at a conference to be held…next week. After the collapse of the company–and their coverage of the firm’s collapse has been pathetic and sycophantic to SBF. The Times is covering its own ass, and Forbes has decided to do the same.
Much of that great PR that SBF and FTX received was purchased by distributing very large sums to a variety of publications: Sam Bankman-Fried’s media outlets must come clean.
The coverage of Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse, which has resulted in the disappearance of millions of dollars invested into FTX and crypto currencies, must be called into question, given his connections and donations to corporate media outlets. A media storyline is forming that while Bankman-Fried did lose billions almost overnight of FTX user and investment money, his heart is still in the right place when it comes to fighting for the same global causes that liberal editorial boards agree with.
Putting it bluntly — every media organization that accepted funding from Bankman-Fried should come clean and offer full transparency as to the nature of their agreement with him and their financial arrangements. As Semafor’s Max Tani reported, these grants and their funding mechanisms have been put on hold. ProPublica announced that they had received “the first tranche of the $5 million grant in February of 2022. The remaining two-thirds of the grant are due, respectively by April 1, 2023 and by April 1, 2024.” Happy April Fools’ Day indeed.
But to get back to the Forbes article, as Jim Treacher likes to say:
