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 here.

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 second–which was argued pretty convincingly by GN and which a lot of us started to notice long before this video came out.