Disingenuity, or Amnesia?

While waiting for my espresso at Pinewood Coffee, I took a glance at the front page of the New York Times sitting on the counter, and saw this. Go ahead and read it:

I did not turn the page, but nowhere in these first few paragraphs is any mention made of the fact that TSMC (the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, whose single largest shareholder is the government of Taiwan) has built a fab in Arizona thanks to U.S. incentives under the CHIPS act, for this exact reason. The same is true for Samsung building a semiconductor fab in Texas. Now, the fault may be mine for not finishing the article (my espresso was ready at this point), and I don’t have a Times subscription, but you would think that such significant data points in the narrative that this article is telling would make their way into the first eight paragraphs.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Chip War for a comprehensive history of how we got into this situation. What I find ironic, though, is that raising concerns around Chinese hegemony and wargaming near Taiwan, and suggesting that we repatriate our industrial/technological base as a hedge against the risks of globalization, has been labeled as “nationalistic” in the pages of the NYT and similar publications over the last decade.

Whether the cause is disingenuity, amnesia, or incompetence, it’s no surprise to me that public trust in the “fourth estate”, at least in its legacy institutions, continues to decline.