紐時賞析／霍姆斯案 讓媒體不再一味吹捧矽谷

Holmes’s Fall Converted Media Into Tech Skeptics

霍姆斯案讓媒體不再一味吹捧矽谷

At the height of her acclaim in 2015, Elizabeth Holmes, the entrepreneur who founded the blood testing startup Theranos, was named Glamour’s “Woman of the Year.” Time put her on its list of 100 luminaries. And she graced the covers of Fortune, Forbes, Inc. and T Magazine.

成立血液檢測新創公司Theranos的創業家伊莉莎白．霍姆斯，聲望在2015年達到高峰，被Glamour雜誌選為「年度代表女性」。時代雜誌將她選入百大人物，她也登上財星、富比世和T雜誌等刊物封面。

Theranos collapsed in scandal three years later, failing in its mission to revolutionize the health care industry. But it did change the world in another way: It helped sour the media on Silicon Valley.

三年後Theranos因醜聞倒閉，無法達成革新醫療產業的使命。不過它確實以另一種方式改變了世界：讓矽谷的媒體走調。

That point was brought home when Roger Parloff, a journalist who penned the Fortune cover story on Holmes and Theranos in 2014, testified in a federal courtroom in San Jose, California, where Holmes is on trial for 12 counts of fraud. Parloff said Holmes had made misrepresentations to him, including the volume and types of tests that Theranos could do, as well as its work with the military and pharmaceutical companies.

這一點成為記者羅傑．帕洛夫在加州聖荷西聯邦法庭作證時的重點，他曾在2014年撰寫財星雜誌封面故事，報導霍姆斯和Theranos。在霍姆斯被控12項詐欺罪名的訴訟中，帕洛夫說，霍姆斯對他發表錯誤簡報，包括Theranos能做到的測試數量與種類，以及該公司和軍方及製藥公司的合作。

The discovery that Holmes, the tech industry’s most celebrated female entrepreneur, was misdirecting the world about her company marked a turning point in the tech press, ending a decadelong run of largely positive coverage. Reporters cringed over glowing articles they had written about tech companies that turned out to have stretched the truth, glossed over the negative consequences of their products or generally abused the trust they had enjoyed with the public.

霍姆斯身為科技業界最知名的女性創業者，她被揭露就她的公司誤導全世界，代表科技媒體的一個轉捩點，結束十年來正面報導居多的趨勢。記者以他們撰寫的顯眼報導吹捧科技公司，實際上卻曲解事實，掩蓋產品的負面後果，或是廣泛濫用大眾對他們的信賴。

“Holmes just becomes this fable of ‘You can’t just buy what they’re selling,’ ” said Margaret O’Mara, a professor at the University of Washington and a historian of Silicon Valley. “ ‘This was not what it purported to be, and we fell for it.’ ”

「霍姆斯只是變成『他們說的話不能照單全收』的寓言故事」，華盛頓大學教授及矽谷歷史學者瑪格麗特．歐邁拉說，「它看起來表裡不一，而我們卻信了」。

After The Wall Street Journal published exposés in 2015 and 2016 showing that Theranos was not what it appeared to be, coverage of tech companies generally became more probing.

在華爾街日報2015及2016年刊出報導，顯示Theranos名不符實後，關於科技公司的報導變得更深入徹底。

Reporters dug into Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential election, as well as scandals at Uber and a series of #MeToo accusations and labor uprisings at tech companies. The shift happened alongside the realization that the tech industry was no longer the niche realm of idealist computer geeks. It had become the dominant force in the global economy and needed to be held more to account.

記者深入挖掘臉書在2016年美國總統大選的角色，優步與一系列「我也是受害者」指控，以及科技公司的勞工抗議。

這個轉變伴隨一個認知，科技業不再是理想主義電腦奇才的利基領域，它已成為全球經濟的主導力量，需要負起更多責任。

文／Erin Griffith and Erin Woo 譯／莊蕙嘉