The New York Times is the paradigm of mainstream legacy reporting, but its business reporting is so fucking bizarre–so outlandish and downright weird in its selectivity–that you can understand why people who work in business resort to conspiracy theories to explain what its reporters are doing.

It’s widely been reported in tech news that Oracle’s Cerner data has been hacked, and that while Oracle is trying hard to downplay the hack, it is in fact a big deal. CloudSEK has called it “the biggest supply chain hack of 2025,” adding that six million records have been exfiltrated from Oracle Cloud, affecting over 140,000 clients. According to CloudSEK, the hacker was active for several weeks across January and February before being detected. Feel free to Google “Oracle hack,” and read the dozens of articles that come up. All of them have scooped legacy media by weeks.

Cerner is (or was) “a multinational provider of health information technology platforms and services, including electronic health records (EHRs) used by numerous healthcare organizations,” that was acquired by Oracle. In other words, we’re talking hospital data, which typically includes account-level patient data, including medical records, insurance data, and Social Security numbers. That by itself should be a big deal, but surely it’s a bigger deal that despite the hack, Oracle is the company long favored by Trump to acquire TikTok. So far, not a word about it. 

When I last wrote about this, on March 31, The New York Times’s most recent story about Oracle dated to March 18. It’s just published another story about Oracle a few days ago, on April 2: “How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul,” a speculative, gossipy thing about the bro-like relationship between Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Donald Trump. The point of it is that TikTok is up for grabs, Ellison wants it, and while no longer CEO of Oracle, as co-founder still has the pull to get it. Meanwhile, Trump wants to give TikTok to Ellison/Oracle, and very well could give it to him. If he does, Oracle/Ellison will have come to acquire a massive media empire, and put it at Trump’s disposal–a big problem for all of us.

Fine. That’s what could happen. What about what has happened? Not a word. Not a word, either, about the reason why TikTok is in this situation in the first place–because it was seen as too pro-Palestine for our pro-Israel elites, and had too much influence with younger people for comfort (for pro-Israeli comfort, that is), hence had to be put out of commission. In other words, a story about real issues–health care, data security, Palestine, free speech–has been buried in some bullshit about Larry Ellison’s relationship with his various wives and girlfriends, and with Donald Trump.

Obviously, no mention, either, that Oracle’s current CEO, Safra Catz, is an Israeli-American well connected to the defense establishment. But definitely check out the picture of Ellison on a yacht with fourth wife Melanie Craft. WTF: I mean, if multiple marriages and girlfriends were a bona fide news story, I should be front page news. Well, here’s my girlfriend on a yacht with some tech bros, and here she is in front of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing. I happen to think she’s way cuter than Melanie Craft. So when do we get our story The New York Times? 

Pretty in pink, with a smile that could hack an encrypted database

The same day’s harvest at the Times has a piece about how Trump has weakened the country’s cyberdefenses, the point being that weakening them incentivizes an attack on the electoral system which could undermine the prospects for our next feckless Democratic candidate. No doubt, but what about the actual attack on our health care system? 

The journalistic principle here seems to be: if it’s directly about Trump, it leads, no matter how thin or hypothetical the reporting. A Trumpian coulda or shoulda trumps actual realities in the indicative voice about large scale events that affect hundreds of thousands of people. This is how mainstream liberals do journalism nowadays–laser-focused on nothing but Trump. They’re obsessively fixated on Trump, therefore Trump is the only reality, eclipsing genocide in Palestine, the bombing of Yemen, the crisis in Haiti, the casualty count of the Ukrainian army, and cyberattacks on the American health care system. Meanwhile, they want us to buy into the pretense that they are the incontestable arbiters of unsullied, non-partisan truth.

They’re not. Technology has made one thing painfully clear: legacy journalism sucks. Addicted to superficiality, certain of their dogmas, blissfully insensitive to their own biases and fixations, mainstream reporters dial in the same vapid crap day after day, only to find themselves, day after day, overtaken by that dread nemesis, reality. Then they whine about how nobody trusts the traditional sources of knowledge and expertise. What knowledge? Expertise in what? 

You can’t really understand the Trump phenomenon until you understand the realities that drive it. Trying to understand Trump himself, as an end-in-itself, is a fool’s errand. But I guess we have to send fools somewhere. Except that inquiry isn’t a fool’s errand. It’s a different thing altogether. That’s why you mostly won’t find the answers to any inquiry worth undertaking in legacy media. You’ll find a lot of other detritus, though. It’ll keep you distracted. It’ll confirm your comfortable liberal beliefs. But it won’t tell you why you have those needs, and won’t help you break the habit of having them. That’s why it’s there. Unfortunately, it won’t tell you that, either.