Very helpful, here's a more accurate way of making the same point:

>"if you guys are so charitable, then why are you giving this money to political candidates and PACs, rather than to charitable causes?"

SBF wasn't just giving money to political candidates and journalists, he was giving it to a wide range of causes. The FTX Foundation was spending a lot of money on global health and welfare, for example: https://ftxfoundation.org/global-health-welfare/

Obviously those gifts don't excuse SBF's massive fraud! But it's not as if SBF was only donating to political candidates and nothing else.

Donating your customers' deposits isn't charity, it is fraud.

Right, but this was before the fraud was exposed; at the time the recipients had no way of knowing it was fraud. Obviously nobody would accept money from SBF now that the fraud has been exposed.

So I don't think the journalists did anything particularly wrong here. (Unless you think crypto is so sketchy that they should have treated _anyone_ connected to crypto as presumably fraudulent -- in which case, fair, I guess.)