https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65789916

Apparently it was a story told by an Air Force colonel at an aeronautics conference, who later retracted it.

Good article, lots of specifics as to what the accusations against TSMC are. Also, it appears there is a paper trail to back them up:

Earlier this month, after multiple health and safety complaints were sent to the state over the past year, TSMC and the state of Arizona signed a workplace-safety agreement. Both sides agreed to subject the company to higher safety standards than required at the federal level, including closer oversight and increased training and safety visits.

Every once in a while Steve gets visibly upset about corporate misbehavior, but I’ve been watching GN for a few years, and the news segment where he was replying to Linus’s dismissive forum post is the angriest I’ve ever seen him.

For those who aren’t aware why errors are an issue because all they’ve seen is wacky LTT videos where they mess around with stuff–Linus is the most popular (and profitable) computer hardware Youtuber, and he’s always done hardware reviews, but to some degree this whole scandal came about because of him wanting to be taken more seriously. Recently he’s been using his millions in an attempt to become the most authoritative PC hardware critic by building and staffing a state-of-the-art testing lab. It was one of his lab technicians who made the comment about how their testing was better than that of more respected channels like Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed that kicked this whole thing off. And the whole lab thing makes the continuing inaccuracy of the videos seem that much more egregious.

(if it really is one).

I mean, I’m not a journalist, I’ve just been reading them for decades. It’s a thing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/policies-and-standards/

No story is fair if it covers individuals or organizations that have not been given the opportunity to address assertions or claims about them made by others. Fairness includes diligently seeking comment and taking that comment genuinely into account.

Just as an example that came up in a quick web search–the Washington Post is a major US newspaper and this is its stated policy. Seeking comment from story subjects is an important practice in journalism, and if you consider yourself a journalist and don’t do it in a given case, you should probably have a good reason. This is why Steve felt the need to explain himself on that point.

It’s a customary practice, and I think it’s a good one because it makes the story less one-sided and can diminish the appearance of it being a hit piece if it’s negative. Bottom line, it’s natural to want to know what the person the story is about thinks of it and what their perspective is. Obviously not all journalists seek a comment from every subject, but if they do, they often mention that they asked for a comment even if they weren’t able to get one, because people want to know that they at least tried.

Understandable, but I think many people (including me) are fine with a little drama every once in a while as long as it’s warranted and doesn’t damage the substance of the content. Unnecessary drama can certainly be a problem, but unnecessarily making dramatic things boring is not necessarily the solution.

I agree it’s generally good practice to ask the subject for comment, and Steve seems to know that because he explains at length why he didn’t here. I criticized him for this when the last video came out, but I thought his explanation in this new video for why he didn’t contact Linus first is pretty good; I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted here, but since you are a former reporter I’d be interested in hearing specifics on why you disagree with it.

The one real point that I thought Linus had here was that Steve didn’t talk to him first. That part is getting a lot of ridicule, because it sounds petulant, but it’s valid–it is accepted journalistic practice to give the subject of a story a chance to comment before publishing.

Since we can now see what that comment likely would have been, it doesn’t seem to change the conclusion much. From experience I can guess at Steve’s likely response–he would have tentatively given LMG credit for compensating Billet for the loss, pending verification and comment from Billet, and ripped all the rest of Linus’s excuses a new one. But that still doesn’t change the fact that Steve didn’t quite live up to the journalistic standards that he touts on his channel.

That failure gives things a bit more of a “drama” flavor (It’s hard not to suspect that this is primarily a response motivated by that clip of Linus’s lab tech attacking GN’s and HUB’s testing methods). But of course it doesn’t absolve LMG and its vaunted lab of milking the Youtube algorithm first and being a source of real information a distant second–which was argued pretty convincingly by GN and which a lot of us started to notice long before this video came out.