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Maybe. Maybe not. Virtually every long form article I read I find out, sometimes years later, was a blatant lie. Or not? Sometime I never really find out.
Case in point, and something that never really leaves my mind. To this day I still don't know if this article in Bloomberg about China using their manufacturing to put backdoors in nearly every electronic device made there is true. It reads like it has tons of companies, if not on record, than with dozens of employees in them speaking of their experience in confidence. They appear to outline the actions numerous manufacturer's have taken to limit or mitigate this threat vector because they've been burned by it.
And yet in aftermath of that article, big splash though it made, virtually every entity named in it denied everything in it. I still have no clue if any of it was true, or they caved to pressure from China. I never heard of any real follow up reporting. And so I find myself almost less informed than if I'd read nothing at all. I have knowledge debt.
Edit: I'm going to double dip on this one actually.
Second example. Bitcoin. I tried for years to educate myself on bitcoin. It seemed interesting. Not one single news article about it told me anything. I was still reading Ars Technica back then, and even their "technical" reporting was lacking in any technical details and just came back to the same conclusion. Bitcoin is a scam. I remember this article in particular, which continues on that theme of seeming to impart negative knowledge. Like it's basically a blog of them setting up and running a bitcoin miner, but their stream of consciousness confusion about every step leaves you with an experience of a very unreliable narrator. And there is zero information what so ever about how any of it works beyond the most superficial ("it calculates hashes!")
Some time around 2017 I did my own research, ignoring everything "respectable" publishers were saying about bitcoin. I'm greatful every day since that I did, because I took literal decades off my savings goals by simply DCAing into bitcoin every month for 8 years. Even today the "respectable long form" articles about Bitcoin are probably 70-90% irrelevant smearing, ignorant half truths or malicious lies.
It kind of says it all that you're go-to example is a seven-year old story from a third-rate publication. This article was literally famous for the extravagance of the claims within it and the denials from relevant organisations. And you know who published many of those denials? Bloomberg. Perhaps something from the current decade and in an actual prestige publication might be nice - after all if 'virtually every longform article' you read turns out to be a lie it shouldn't be that hard to find reams of examples.
My example is a nine year old story from a second rate publication: Machine Bias from ProPublica was the last long-form news article I trusted.
I don't have anything newer because...I stopped trusting the authors, and therefore stopped reading the articles. I'll revisit the issue once they cut ties with the old, flawed system and try to make a new one. I'm not holding my breath, though.
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How about you give me a list of publications that would count to you, and how many examples you require.
That would take forever so to get an idea of what I mean I'll give some examples from a single subgroup, say foreign policy/international affairs (for no particular reason): Foreign Affairs, the Economist, ISW, World Today (Chatham House's magazine), the World Service, Brookings, the aforementioned FT and WSJ, Foreign Policy, JDW etc. etc.
This says more about your ability to recognize sources that regularly include slop than your ability to avoid sources that routinely include slop.
Foreign Affairs as an opener was a good joke, I will give you that.
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This Bloomberg story in particular has me quite mad. It seems like it should be easily falsifiable by anyone with moderate power (e.g. mid level NYTimes editor or FBI team leader) but no one has done so and I don't understand why.
My best guess is that the story is something like "directionally correct" with maybe half the facts being true and half the facts being made up, and this would explain why it's so hard for someone else to properly verify/discredit. Either way, the followup team has to do a LOT of work and they don't get any reward. For all the false parts they point out, the original authors can just say "but those are minor details" and for all the true parts they point out the original authors get all the credit for the work and there's no reward for the "peer review".
There were a decent number of followups, the problem's that we were kinda stuck between 'impossible to prove a negative' and 'she doeth protest too much'. Even if everything in the Bloomberg story was true, tearing down every single chip on a wide variety of boards couldn't actually disprove the claims, since Bloomberg said that only boards delivered to high-profile targets were modified. And neither did we ever see a released photo of a modified board, or a hexdump of whatever compromise it was supposed to be pushing. But there's also pretty good reasons to not want to do that from a national security perspective, and thanks to certain types of gag orders the feds can make it illegal to admit there's a problem.
My gutcheck is that it's not 'real' in the full sense Bloomberg claimed rather than just simple modified firmware -- though a lot of ErrataRob pointed out contemporaneously, a lot of the reasons that it feels 'not real' might be because of incompetence by the reporting -- but it's a messy enough situation that I can't put even moderate confidence in it.
It's not as if nation states invading a supply chain to make devices literally explode is unheard of.
Working in an industry that takes this sort or compromise seriously we have a list of countries we can't buy from. Sometimes even if it's a US based company but a particular model or production run of a product is from a 'wrong' location, we can't use it.
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