Last week on Tuesday Gizmodo and Wired speculated to much derision a new candidate to correspond in meatspace to the ephemeral Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Both outlets ended the week by each publishing their own pieces resembling admissions of doubt about their initial reports in varying degrees. Wired came closer to doing the right thing by admitting (archived) they were in all likelihood attention scammed by Hoaxtoshi. Gizmodo on the other hand, lacking in humility and journalistic sobriety, in their piece work to salvage the narrative they presented with an appeal to mystery (archived).
Both outlets however are supposing information previously available of Hoaxtoshi as things that are "now known" in spite of everything except the post publication police raids being readily available for the asking. Their neglect in seriously looking beyond the document dump aggressively shopped to them and others meant that other outlets would parrot their anti-information (archived).
The only positive of these stories running beyond the clickbait traffic boost for the publishers was that it publicly blew open Hoaxtoshi's "I'll let you in on my secret identity" scam. Over the coming weeks and months it is likely that a number of counter parties hooked by the Hoaxtoshi fairytale will come forward with stories of how they were approached for loans against Wright's claimed stash of more than a million Bitcoins held for some reason in a nonsensical arrangement based around a fiat style trust.
The Hoaxtoshi documents were shopped around to news outlets aggressively before Wired and Gizmodo took the bait, with even Newsweek's Leah McGrath Goodman who likely conducted her search for Satoshi using the phone book refusing to bite. At least this time around though Goodman and Newsweek seemed to learn their lesson about succumbing to temptation and ending up as magnets for ridicule.
It's absurd that anyone would credit these stories. To even say one is "skeptical" of these hoaxtoshi claims seems to me an indictment of the so-called journalist's intellect. To be a mere skeptic is to imply suspended disbelief to the claims of a fraudster until proven false, e.g., I am "skeptical" that Bernie Madoff could realize the returns he claimed using the "long-short method". No, one should not be a skeptic of Bernie Madoff, one should say clearly that he is a fraud. But I wouldn't get too worked up about this lazy journalism on the part of Wired, Gizmodo, et al. After all, it has no real consequence, as unfortunately people who are this gullible cannot be saved from themselves except after the fact. Nor does the false reporting do anything to harm bitcoin or its authors.
"Betteridge's law of headlines" mostly applies.