Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Come on, man.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Everybody saw this coming.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Reputation Laundering Open Thread: The NYTimes Corner Office Knows Exactly What They’re Doing

Reputation Laundering Open Thread: The NYTimes Corner Office Knows Exactly What They’re Doing

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Hate-click money spends the same as the honest kind, and if Amy Chozick cared about being used as a social-media bait dog, she’d never have written the execrable Chasing Hilary. As for the vaseline-lensed subject, who can ‘know’ what a sociopath really thinks? What counts is that Holmes has yet again managed to push her punishment back, while her very wealthy baby daddy and his billionaire family work every possible lever to ensure she never has to face further consequences.

Holmes was — while the con held — a ‘self-made billionaire’! And young! White! Pretty (enough)! But, mostly, all that money! How can such well-compensated creativity be treated like some kind of lowly… crime?

Benjamin Mazer, an actual working pathologist, writing for the Atlantic:

… As a pathologist—a doctor who specializes in laboratory testing—I’ve been following the Theranos story since the beginning. Holmes’s rise and fall is the most glamorous scandal to hit my field in some time: Most are more body-parts-in-the-back-of-a-pickup than celebrity-stuffed financial crimes. Just last week, I was giving a grand-rounds talk about Theranos. Loopholes in laboratory regulation and widespread ignorance of how blood testing works had caused medical professionals and the public to fall for diagnostic scams, I told the academics in attendance. Toward the end of the lecture, I posed a question: Have the media learned their lesson after enabling Holmes’s charade?…

… [J]ournalists’ most stubborn instinct—the one they share with Holmes—is to lean into a good story. It’s the human side of science that attracts readers. Every technical advance must be contextualized with a tale of suffering or triumph. Holmes knew this as well as anyone. She hardly dwelled on how her devices worked—she couldn’t, because they didn’t. Instead, she repeatedly told the world about her fear of needles and of losing loved ones to diseases that might have been caught earlier by a convenient blood test. Of course reporters were taken in. The next entrepreneur to come along and tell a tale like that may also get a sympathetic hearing in the press…

Journalists are still telling stories about her too, for better or for worse. Holmes is not naive, nor are most readers of The New York Times. While last weekend’s “a hero or a villain” coverage may be said to have betrayed the patients who were harmed by her inaccurate blood tests, and the memory of a Theranos employee who died by suicide, it is also just another entry in the expanded universe of Holmes-themed entertainment. There are books and podcasts and feature-length documentaries. A TV miniseries about Holmes has a score of 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (“Addictively engrossing!” “Consistently entertaining!”) Surely some of those who now bemoan the Times’ friendly treatment have consumed this material for less-than-academic reasons.

The prosaic details of a convicted cheat’s domestic life aren’t really news, but they are interesting—because the character of Elizabeth Holmes is interesting. So, too, are her continued efforts to spin a narrative of who she is. But with such well-trodden ground, the irony is built right in. You know that Holmes is a scammer. I know it. On some level, The New York Times seems to know it too; the article runs through her crimes and even quotes a friend of Holmes’s who says she isn’t to be trusted. This isn’t character rehabilitation; it’s content. We’re all waiting to see what Liz gets up to next…

Reader Interactions

88Comments

  3. 3.

    Poe Larity

    Hucksters are as American as Apple Pie.

    Heck, in a couple of decades she can run for President.

  6. 6.

    Jerzy Russian

    Every time I hear about Holmes, I think about that big dude who tried to kill off half of all (intelligent?) life in the universe by getting all of those infinity stones onto his glove at the same time.  Fuck that dude, and fuck Holmes.

  8. 8.

    dm

    Ages ago I worked for a company which had a very good publicist (it also had some pretty good tech, and brilliant people working for it, but I’m sure it was the publicist that got the articles into the Times magazine, not the tech).

    Those publicists worked very hard to get puff pieces into the media — including the New York Times.

    The experience opened my eyes to how articles get into the Times magazine.

    Maybe Maggie Haberman’s mom is working for Holmes….

  10. 10.

    Carlo Graziani

    Theranos’ test never worked. Holmes knew it didn’t work.

    I don’t think this is right. Holmes didn’t care whether the tests worked. She didn’t need the lab evidence to construct her preferred reality.

    This stuff is straight out of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. The distinction between a liar and a bullshitter is that a liar knows and privately acknowledges the truth, and lies to conceal it. A bullshitter denies that “truth” is a useful category, and has no use for it in constructing his/her outlook or statements. In this sense, bullshitters are more destructive to discourse than are liars, who are at least respectful of the concept of “truth” to the extent that they know what they must conceal.

    Holmes is a bullshit artist, not a liar. This seems to be the golden age for such creatures.

  14. 14.

    Anne Laurie

    @Parfigliano: Why is this vile creature not in prison yet?

    She has money.

    Seriously:  She, and her rich baby daddy, have spent a metric ton of money on the best lawyers, pitching appeals in hand-chosen venues known to be sympathetic to rich people.  Also, she’s gotten pregnant twice, and used those pregnancies / her small children to argue that it would be cruel to send their mommy away.  (Most women now in prison are mommies, and a majority of those mommies were primary caregivers, but *they* couldn’t afford to buy clemancy.)

    One law for the poor, no laws for the rich could be the Liz Holmes motto.

  15. 15.

    scav

    The “O! but she’s pretty and really beeeeeeeeelllliiiieeeevvvvved! ingenue eyelash-fluttering BS defense.  Yup, rolled, but begging begging begging to be rolled.  Who cares what corpses litter the path of the fairy tale or valuable byline.

  16. 16.

    RaflW

    Of course Mike Barbaro had to weight in

    @mikiebarb May 7
    The entire piece is about what a good con woman she still is. I guess that subtly [sic] was lost on a few readers.

    My response:

    We’re just slouching towards social collapse while being utterly ironic about it.

    Revolting.

     A number of people enjoyed pointing and laughing at his typo / lack of copy editor.

  17. 17.

    Ken

    It is curiously fitting that in Dante’s Inferno, the material frauds (counterfeiters, impostors, and others who pass off fakes as real things) are in the tenth bolgia where they are punished by diseases like tuberculosis, leprosy, and rabies.

    The flatterers are a little further up-slope, Ms. Chozick.

  19. 19.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @RaflW:

    That’s not quite the winning argument he thinks it is

    ETA: Like, I’m pretty sure the kind of story he’s talking about isn’t supposed to be a whitewashing puff piece

  20. 20.

    Wag

    I read the piece over the weekend and was struck by the number of times the author came close the blurting out the truth about what a pathological fraud “Liz” was, but then pulled back at the last second, settling for a shrug that says “I guess we’ll never know for sure.”

    Lazy reporting, through and through.

  24. 24.

    laura

    @Parfigliano: because her initial strategic baby having failed to keep her from being convicted and her second strategic baby having failed to result in a favorable appeal but did manage to get the Court to delay her day of reckoning. If she isn’t strategically baby 3 having, I’d be surprised.

  26. 26.

    Baud

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I read up on it. She was sentenced 5 months ago.  She just filed her appeal which delays the start of her prison time. As far as I can tell, the pregnancies were not a factor.  It’ll depend on how quickly the Ninth Circuit rules on her appeal.

  27. 27.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Chozick’s book, Chasing Hillary, is getting adapted into a TV show, The Girls on the Bus:

    The Girls on the Bus chronicles 4 female journalists who follow every move of a parade of flawed presidential candidates, while finding friendship, love, and scandal along the way.

    What the fuck is this, Sex and the City for political journalists? It’s scheduled to air this year on HBO Max. It sounds so insipid and dumb. Are we supposed to take someone like this seriously as a journalist?

    ETA: Oh and she’s also an executive producer

  31. 31.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Baud: ehhhhh many of us found the character of Luca Brasi in the Godfather to be very compelling, but we wouldn’t want to meet him in real life.

  36. 36.

    Gretchen

    My last job was instrument validation specialist in a medical lab. I had to have calibrations, controls, validation curves of every assay we did to prove that they worked and were getting the correct results. We got frequent check samples from the College of American Pathologists (CAP) that we had to assay. If our results didn’t match what other labs got, and the expected results, we were in trouble. Miss a couple of times and we were in danger of losing our license. We had government inspectors out 4 times a year looking at all the validations, wanting to watch us calibrate and run samples. New York State sent their own inspectors who did the same. Every bit of paperwork and results was fair game for them to pick through, and every little variation showed up in their report, with requirements for remediation for any way we fell short of accepted practices. It just boggles my mind that they could just fend people off with “it’s proprietary – we can’t show you”. And nobody pushed back on that? The Advia instruments I was using are the same ones she was really using, while pretending that her Edison was really doing the tests. We ran into limitations diluting samples – they just didn’t work on more dilute samples. And she just made up results, smiled her pretty blonde smile, and all these old guys who considered themselves savvy ate it up. Why did nobody insist that an actual lab person inspect the labs? Where were the regulators? Why didn’t they have to do CAP check samples to keep their license? Did they even have a license?

  37. 37.

    NotMax

    @mrmoshpotato

    Be on the lookout for zombie Brooke Shields starring in The Creature From the Blue Lagoon, coming soon to a DVD remainder bin near you!
    :)

  38. 38.

    Ruckus

    @Anne Laurie:

    One law for the poor, no laws for the rich could be the Liz Holmes motto.

    She is by far not the only person to worry far more about the take than the product/service.

  39. 39.

    Prometheus Shrugged

    This piece read like it was the result of DougJ tasking ChatGPT to give him 1000 words on Elizabeth Holmes.   Amy Chozick is a parody of herself.

    The one horrifying thing that I learned from this story is that Liz must live less than a few miles from me–that is, until she goes to some minimum security white collar prison.

  40. 40.

    Eolirin

    @Gretchen: I do think the Theranos story really highlights a massive regulatory and systemic failings including on the investor end, and I do wish more of the focus was on that rather than the personality traits of a grifter. She should never have been able to get that far in the first place.

  41. 41.

    NotMax

    Hmm. Cannot tell whether this accelerating wave of exhaustion stems from today’s monthly trek into town or from getting a fresh COVID booster while there.

    Then again, ¿por qué no los dos?

  43. 43.

    Gretchen

    @Eolirin: that’s my question. Why didn’t the regulations and check samples apply to them? My whole job was providing documentation required by the regulations and running check samples to prove that our results were the same as everyone else’s.

  45. 45.

    RobArt

    … [J]ournalists’ most stubborn instinct—the one they share with Holmes—is to lean into a good story. It’s the human side of science that attracts readers. Every technical advance must be contextualized with a tale…

    For 30 years I have used abstract painting to break myself of the human habit of making a story out of everything. From my point of view it’s a terrible pathology that harms our species daily. Yes I can admit that there are benefits. And yes I allow myself to be entertained by fiction. The above quote reminds me of a forum I caught on NPR’s 1A when a doctor was asked why the autism-vaccine false link persists. “Humans want to have a story that makes sense of things.” I’m not joking when I say that I think this desire is deadly dangerous. It’s the reason for religion and all sorts of other dysfunction. It is possible to train oneself to let go of these comforting tales and accept that some things are beyond current understanding. And still be happy.

    I don’t mean to sound absolutist; trying to be brief before bed. I accept that my ways are mine alone. But, yeah, as someone who values abstraction as therapy I’ll often bust out with, “I’m anti-stories,” & of course it goes over like a lead balloon.

    Good night lovely people!

  46. 46.

    Eolirin

    @RobArt: I’ve found certain versions of Buddhism and Taoism to provide extremely effective tools for doing the same. Religion isn’t always part of the problem. Dogma certainly is though.

  47. 47.

    Chetan Murthy

    @RobArt: You’re right, and yet somehow, other journos manage to write articles about things like accounting control fraud, insider trading, and other really abstruse topics where you can’t point at appealing individuals who have been harmed.  I chalk it up to Chozick being shit at her job, and a shit human being.

  48. 48.

    Another Scott

    @Gretchen: Thanks for this.

    I think that the answer is the same one that lots of people gave about W and Iraq – They must know something that we don’t; they wouldn’t lie to us.

    But, in fact they don’t; and yes, in fact they would.

    Humans are too easily fooled, especially when they want to believe.

    :⁠-⁠(

    Thanks again.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  49. 49.

    Sloegin

    The NYT isn’t a paper for *you*.  It’s a paper for your *Betters*.

    Defending the wealthy is their core mission.  They just don’t put it in their banner.

  51. 51.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @Gretchen: yes, normal lab accreditation is a big part of ensuring the machines function and the procedures are sound. I never understood that part, either. She promised so much and the money folks never got concerned.

    (Former MT in clinical & research labs)

  52. 52.

    🐾BillinGlendaleCA

    @RobArt: In photography, I always hear the advice that a photo should tell a story, I don’t buy it.  Some do, some are just a pretty picture.  A stunning sunset doesn’t tell a story, it is a really nice sunset.

  53. 53.

    Gretchen

    @Another Scott: that’s the crazy thing about this, though. There are thousands of us that know how to evaluate whether a medical lab instrument is giving good results. Every hospital in the country has someone who can give an informed opinion on the subject. I never made more that $100K a year in my life, but I could have given an expert opinion on whether her instrument worked. But they never asked anyone with expertise. They just chucked millions of dollars at her. I’m sure a good bit of it was that she was a pretty blonde who flattered the old dudes that they saw something nobody else did, in their savvy, savvy way. But why didn’t the money guys hire some expertise? I would have been happy to fly out to California and have a look for pocket change in their world.

  54. 54.

    piratedan

    @Gretchen: c’mon Gretchen, you KNOW that Lab is the red-headed stepchild of the Hospital system.    Granted it’s roughly 80% of what clinicians use to craft their diagnosis on.  Lab even helpfully displays what type of abnormal finding is there.  The Lab tests their instrumentation and software because the work and information it provides is so incredibly important and key to diagnosis and treatment.

  58. 58.

    bjacques

    Cripes. Not for nothing does the alien pesticide in “Mimic” take the form of a pretty blonde white woman.

    Apologies to the majority of pretty blonde white women out there who are not sociopaths.

  60. 60.

    Kathleen

    The mustache and the uniform are gone, but the passion for his country remains. Over lattes in a Bavarian Cafe we talk about what’s next for the former Fuhrer (@urbanmeemaw)

  62. 62.

    Michael Bersin

    In the arts (especially music) I label this the “the triumph of hype over substance”.

    Also known as “marketing”.

    This does not necessarily mean that there is no substance in some hype, it’s just that there is no real need of substance for the hype to take off.

  63. 63.

    Michael Bersin

    @Ruckus:

    “…the majestic quality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from sleeping under the bridges, from begging in the streets, and from stealing bread…” – The Red Lilly, Anatole France

  64. 64.

    Rusty

    The part I find weirdest is having the two kids.  She is going to prison for most of their childhood.  All I can see is the same extreme self-centeredness that was part of her criminal behavior.  It’s not about the kids, or even it seems from the quotes I’ve seen that she worries she would be too old to have children when she gets out, but what helps her right now argue for avoiding prison.  They are a prop.  What a bizarre self-centered, manipulative person.

  65. 65.

    The Thin Black Duke

    One of America’s biggest problems is its mindless deification of rich people.

  68. 68.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @Gretchen: She dropped out of Stanford where she was studying chemical engineering to start her company, if I remember correctly. What possible knows or experience did she have for anything to do with blood testing??!!? She is a great con artist and possibly a sociopath. I believe she had two kids just to stay out of prison. She all probably run for office some day.

  72. 72.

    catclub

    @Another Scott: ​
     

    Humans are too easily fooled, especially when they want to believe.

    also [from Morgan Housel] You are twice as gullible as you think you are. Four times as gullible if you disagree with this.

  73. 73.

    azlib

    Because normal folks actually have something called empathy, we tend to think the best of people that do really bad things. Take the original Star Wars trilogy. After seeing in Return of the Jedi the touching scene between Luke and his Father, my spouse said simply “but what about the tens of billions of folks who died because of that monster.?”.

  75. 75.

    MomSense

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I’ve shared this before but during the time I worked at the inn that was the press HQ for the HW Bush whitehouse, I was with the press corpse every day.  I think the same is true of the people assigned to cover the candidates.  They are the kids in high school who were not in the most popular group in high school and desperately wanted to be.  They would do anything to be seen in that group even if they and the popular kids knew they weren’t really in the group. Holmes is the ultimate mean girl and she is using Chozick but Chozick doesn’t care because she’s finally sitting with the cool kids at lunch.

  76. 76.

    Geminid

    @sdhays: I know it will never happen, but it’s still fun to imagine a campaign debate between Elizabeth Holmes and George Santos. That one would surely keep the fact checkers busy!

    It would get good ratings, too. There’s at least one network that would want to host it.

  77. 77.

    George

    Holmes is a psychopath. Everything she says or does should be seen as an attempt to manipulate. It’s how she rolls.

  78. 78.

    randy khan

    I read the whole thing yesterday.  I don’t think it is anywhere near as sympathetic to Holmes as a lot of people say it is.   This, for instance, is how it ends:

    That Friday, the couple were getting ready to host a group of friends from the Bay Area. They invited me to stay. They repeatedly invited me to come back, to bring my family. We could all go to the zoo together.
    I appreciated their hospitality, but I didn’t fully understand it. Usually interview subjects can’t wait to get rid of me.
    Then I realized why they kept opening the door wider. Ms. Holmes is unlike anyone I’ve ever met — modest but mesmerizing. If you are in her presence, it is impossible not to believe her, not to be taken with her and be taken in by her. Liz Holmes and Billy Evans know that. I politely declined their invitation.

    Or, put differently – they’re manipulative people who you shouldn’t believe.  There’s a lot more of this in the article, too.  What I said to my wife after reading it was that it was hard not to see Holmes as a sociopath who’d say anything to get what she wanted.

  79. 79.

    sdhays

    @randy khan: If you are in her presence, it is impossible not to believe her, not to be taken with her and be taken in by her.

    I hate lines like this. It’s incredibly conceited and arrogant – “even people with savvy big brains like me are taken in by her”. No, it’s not “impossible” (although I’m sure it takes extra work), but it may just be that you weren’t the right person for this assignment, Amy.

  80. 80.

    Anonymous At Work

    First, NYT is mad because Murdoch’s WSJ reporting broke Theranos.  Murdoch invested in her but also let the reporters do their job.  NYT holds grudges like no other paper in America.  They hate Hilary because WaPo got Nixon.

    Second, what is everyone talking about how Holmes tried to defraud the rich and powerful power-brokers among SoCal’s elite?  She did defraud them for years.

    Third, read Bad Blood (both books by that name)

  81. 81.

    Miss Bianca

    @RaflW: I love both movies and devoured Bad Blood, the book about the Theranos debacle. Oh, yeah – and I hate Elizabeth Holmes, too.

  87. 87.

    bluefoot

    @Gretchen: ​
      I have worked in biomarker assay development and validation. The whole Theranos pitch was so transparently ridiculous. Some of the analytes they were claiming exist in blood in picograms per milliliter quantities, so it’s not possible to accurately measure them in a drop of blood.

    NYT wants a “human” story? Why not humanize the patients who were potentially victims – treatment and clinical care decisions would have been made based on wrong and/or fraudulent data. Why humanize the perpetrator? Holmes knew what she was doing, and did it with intent.

  88. 88.

    randy khan

    @sdhays:

    I actually think there are people like that (or very close to it), who can tell you things that you know aren’t true, but if your in their presence you find yourself nodding along  They’re pretty much all sociopaths, though.

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