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An upcoming story about Coinbase

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#101
post #81
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is enormously unfair to the journalistic profession. There are quite a lot of leaps from "it's not possible to report every fact" to "all journalism is slanted for metrics." Journalists like getting a big scoop but the good ones do their due diligence and go to great pains to report fairly and accurately.

I think there may be a mis-understanding; what I mean is that in the very essence of reporting a scoop, they have already chosen to report that event above other events. So the reporting about the given scoop may be 100% fair and honest, but there is still, in the bigger picture, a large statistical bias, since only some types of things qualify as 'worthy of reporting' and get converted to scoops to begin with. e.g.…

Sure, but I for one was not talking about this story as a marker of the general prevalence of racism, and whether or not it's a representative sample of such. I read you as impugning the integrity and consistency of individual stories in isolation, which is legitimate as well, it just requires more evidence than you presented.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#102

It's really really hard to prove your not racist. If anyone has any clue as how to do so, please share. They could have waited until the story was published I guess to share this statement, but publishing it preemptively makes sense too I believe (it's an always open entity that is incredibly easy to switch away from). But truly, when you get accused of racism, what can you even do?

> It's really really hard to prove your not racist. If anyone has any clue as how to do so, please share. If you have been accused of racism that's because somebody has an example of you being racist. If you did not have racist intent you can clarify your intent. Simply claiming you're not a racist won't do because pretty much everyone accused of racism makes that claim (example: central park dog walker, or any other…

> If you have been accused of racism that's because somebody has an example of you being racist.

If only that were true.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#103

This is an odd thing to see widely published. I'm at a company that had a rather detailed negative article written about us, and we were warned about it internally shortly before it was published, after the reporter had contacted us with details and questions. However, we didn't go public with a reaction until after it was out, since it seemed rather pointless to respond to something that hadn't been published yet, e…

Susan Flower's allegations ultimately led to the firing of Uber's CEO

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#104
post #51

Well, the whole press release / internal email smells of a company desperately trying to spin what they expect to be a very, very bad article. But this line jumped out at me twice: > To be specific: Although the story will likely allege that a number of Black employees and contractors referenced in the story filed complaints with the company, only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.…

> Reading between the lines, I imagine that the complaints workers claim to have filed were ignored by management at some level of the process, or not filed on the right paperwork or something. Reading the lines (instead of between them) tells you that two of the complains were investigated by a third-party which found no evidence of wrong-doing.

What you’ve said and what I’ve said are not in conflict. Coinbase clearly states that they believe there to be three complaints and that they’re generally in the clear.

My point about reading between the lines is that the explicit, specific repetition of the claim and the way they’re saying it implies that the NYT is going to allege there were more complaints.

So then: what of the missing complaints? What Coinbase is saying, essentially, is that whatever else is alleged either didn’t happen (eg, the NYT is outright lying), or that they weren’t really complaints.

That’s what I’m getting at. It’s highly unlikely that the NYT is lying. I would be shocked if they did not verify in some way that the complaints alleged were indeed made to Coinbase. And I also do not think that Coinbase would accuse the NYT of lying either. It’s not a particularly defensible position.

So - that’s the reading between the lines. To me, the most plausible explanation is that the NYT will allege multiple complaints, and Coinbase is trying to say “no those don’t count.”

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#105

This is an odd thing to see widely published. I'm at a company that had a rather detailed negative article written about us, and we were warned about it internally shortly before it was published, after the reporter had contacted us with details and questions. However, we didn't go public with a reaction until after it was out, since it seemed rather pointless to respond to something that hadn't been published yet, e…

It is odd to me that they would preemptively go loud on this, drawing attention to a story that might not even get that much traction.

It's hard for me to imagine an NYT story getting less traction than a Coinbase post, though. So is this really drawing attention to the story? Maybe this is just drawing more attention to Coinbase's version of the story, rather than the NYT's version.

Basically, if you're going to end up publishing a counterargument to an upcoming news story, why not publish the rebuttal first? Maybe the tradition of waiting for a bad newspaper article, then immediately publishing a rebuttal, is an artifact of the olden days when there were no corporate blogs and social media, when there was no way to bring attention to a pre-rebuttal.

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