But that's the concern here, isn't it? If the NYT chose to write this article because they heard that Coinbase was actively mistreating its employees of color, that's an important story and I'm glad to see it covered. If they chose to write it because Coinbase wouldn't endorse their preferred political slogans, that's a pretty serious problem.
The NYT didn't title their piece 'Coinbase is racist'. It's reporting on 'lots of Coinbase's black employees feel the company handles race and diversity issues poorly'. The reporting looks into that and, well, reports on why the employees think that.
The 'other side' of this is a Coinbase blogpost that says 'we hired a consultant who told us we don't have such problems'. You are certainly free to decide which of these is better supported.
It seems to me that Coinbase is well aware of NYT's recent decline from paper of record to race-baiting propaganda, and knows that instead of being factual about numbers NYT will use weasel words to make it seem like Coinbase's entire company is run by "far right extremist racists" or whatever similar language. Of course, only time and the publication of the NYT article will tell, but given their recent track record I would absolutely not be surprised if it's written as an exaggerated hit piece full of emotional appeal rather than, well, news.
2. Coinbase is being targeted at a smearing campaign, for not playing ball with the ideology of de-jure of some circles. It is kinda like a repeat of 2003: "if you are not with us (for the Iraqi war), then you are with the terrorist" mantra of conservative circles to justify their war.
The truth, is probably somewhere in between. Also, NYT has become heavily biased/activist type of journal. While they don't straight up lie, they often omit many important details in their story, in order to justify their conclusion.
is that an actual problem though? Controversial actions drawing attention to other issues isn't exactly new in journalism, what matters is if the allegations in the piece are going to be substantiated, and this preemptive post makes me think that will be the case. When I read that previous coinbase statement I actually wondered immediately if they have internal issues like this, and their policy was just an attempt to shut it down, I guess that's what a journalist might think as well.
It's of course also hilarious that Coinbases attempt at shutting political discourse at the company down now has put them into the crosshairs if that's actually the case.
Doubtful the NYT would spend >2 months on a story about one relatively small company. Journalist time isn't free. The timing does look very odd and let's face it, the NYT has a lot of people who would absolutely hate a tech firm standing up to their agenda in the way Coinbase has done. Having successfully politicised the NYT they'd certainly feel entitled to do the same everywhere else. The 100% idpol nature of the story also lends weight to this theory. I very much doubt that Coinbase is actually racist against blacks (er, sorry, Blacks). Never encountered a tech company that was.
This piece paints coinbase as a company with racist tendencies and a hostile place to work for black people.
Based on the evidence or lack there of provided the article and after reading coinbase's rebuttal, I must say this NYT piece feels like an attempt to bully coinbase/armstrong into reverting its/his stance on engagement in issues unrelated to coinbase core mission and into submission to the cause.
"There is no such thing as bad publicity", eh? You can count on NYT to publish any story at the intersection of Silicon Valley and Racial Justice, so a story about Coinbase itself won't be a big deal since public will forget it in 5 minutes. But by proactively publishing this blog post, Coinbase seems to be extending the news cycle around this.
Everyone in this thread is missing the forest for the trees.
Coinbase is a medium-sized privately-held company. Reading through those comments, they had some minor issue with a few employees and a relocation plan. This may or may not have involved discriminatory and/or racist behavior.
How is that a story in the New York Times? Or rather: Why is that a story in the New York Times?
It's obviously not because a particularly terrible thing has allegedly been done to those 15 people. This kind of labor case is literally business as usual for courts.
The NYT pursuing an agenda that has probably more to do with the company's stance on politics, and perhaps also an agenda wrt. crypto-currencies.
For context, this is a second hit piece by NYT on Coinbase. The first one was almost exactly a month ago [0]. They started after Coinbase specifically took a stance to separate political activism from work [1] and offered the employees who were not happy with it to take a severance package.
Maybe you're not aware of the back story. Coinbase was one of the few large companies that did not go all woke over the George Floyd incident.
The identity politics activists in the company took offence to this and demanded management make a statement. When management refused to bend the knee the activists made allegations of racism and took them to the nytimes.
> If you do have something political to say, a grave social justice error in the company's policy for example, you can still be reasonable about it. To mention it respectfully and proportional to the issue, rather than going nuclear.
> Any ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and political conviction you can think of and we all get along just fine with zero tensions.
This really sounds like you are blaming the black employees at Coinbase for standing up for themselves, and that if they just sat back down and took whatever hand they were being dealt that there would be "zero tensions"... which I guess hinges awkwardly on what you mean by "tensions"?
I encourage you to read this article--which, FWIW, I'm sure is one of the articles Brian Armstrong here is calling a "hit piece" in his Twitter thread--as this wasn't merely some abstract issue of "politics": black employees at Coinbase felt they were being actively discriminated against.
See upthread, with examples of how the article does exactly what you ask it to.
It seems like your criticism is that the article implies that Coinbase's executive management has racial bias problems, and the article doesn't establish that bias to your satisfaction. But that's always going to be a problem with news articles. Some will present evidence that is dispositive to you, some won't.
I find the reporting in this piece damning. I understand how others would view it more charitably. That's what we're meant to be discussing. Less productive: a discussion of the legitimacy of the reporting itself.
I'm not sure what you're looking for here. Are you saying that it is untrue that there are Black employees who feel that racial issues are being handled poorly at Coinbase? Because that's what the article says. It sounds like you're looking for enough information to make a judgement of whether the company is racist, in an innocent until proven guilty sort of way. But that is very much not the point.
You don't need to do anything. Newspapers are free to publish whatever they'd like. But if the NYT isn't interested in discovering the truth of the accusations, that lends credence to the idea that their primary motivation is not the accusations but Coinbase's lack of support for racial justice politics.
That behavior (passing over an employee due to their skin color) is not only problematic, it is against the law.
Did the editorial show that Coinbase is engaging in illegal discrimination practices? No, but they sure implied it.
Would it be problematic to encourage diverse representations to show up for company photos, if you did not ignore them for advancement? On its own, I think that's just common sense, and taking some PR advantage of the costly diversity programs.
A random/unplanned company photo I was in, was circulated online, to falsely claim that my company only hires white people. Felt really bad, especially for my multiracial colleagues present in that photo. Can you even give this movement what they want, without accusations of pandering/fake concern?
> Not specifically require Black employees to relocate to different cities while giving non-Black employees the opportunity to work out out whatever the nearest office is.
I refuse to believe that Coinbase based that decision on skin color, and I find it hard to believe anyone else sees that differently. As such, to follow this rule, you would have to overturn your decision -- based on rationale --, because it happens to negatively impact a person with a specific skin color. How is this a decent decision: "Sorry Chad, we can't let you work from home to care for your mother, because we just told some black-skinned support engineers to relocate, and we don't want to specifically require black people to relocate, and allow white people to work from home."? How is that fair? To who? It suddenly becomes justified if Chad was black, or if you allow everyone to work from home?
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.
This is the kind of thing that really leads me to distrust everything Coinbase is saying. 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.
And so Coinbase can probably claim on a technicality “they didn’t file a complaint.”
But being “technically correct” is only what you reach for when you don’t have any other leg to stand on. It’s a really telling move that they repeated this line multiple times.
I’m speculating, obviously. The article isn’t out. But this isn’t my first rodeo, and this kind of corporate speak isn’t new. This kind of desperate spin only serves to underscore the fundamental truths of whatever the NYT is going to publish.
Otherwise... why bother dignifying it with such a response?
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