A lot of fingers have been pointed during Theranos’ fall from grace, with most of them directed at the company and its beleaguered front woman Elizabeth Holmes. But now, a new report is placing some of the blame on new shoulders: the Silicon Valley press.
Tech reporters idolized Holmes without asking tough questions, according to a new article in Vanity Fair. A tech blogger had his blood drawn onstage as he interviewed Holmes at an event, the story points out. And Holmes featured front and center in stories in T: The New York Times Style Magazine and the New Yorker, but reporters rarely pushed back at the company’s test development.
It wasn’t until Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou saw a passage in the New Yorker‘s profile of Holmes that journalists started digging deeper. Ken Auletta, the reporter who wrote the piece, said that Theranos was “treated as a state secret” and that Holmes’ description of its testing was “comically vague.”
