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I don't really feel like the press coverage of the metaverse implosion honestly captures the access tech press' role in propping up Mark Zuckerberg's fake innovation mythology if you go back and read "journalism" from this era, 97% was indistinguishable from advertorial

it really was the pinnacle of lazy "CEO said a thing!" pseudo-journalism where you just parrot executive claims with absolutely no historical context, challenge, or objective third party expert analysis

zuck was just like "we're going to try and distance ourselves from a decade of privacy and ethical scandals by renaming ourselves and trying to monopolize the entirety of video gaming and virtual spaces" and the tech press, pretty uniformly, was like "sounds amazing!"

if you go back and read the press coverage from the metaverse launch era, so much of it was just access stenographers basically just repeating whatever the company said. just a complete acceptance of facebook framing

there was a handful of notable reporters of the time that were suitably skeptical, but that skepticism was not the norm, and for many of them it didn't really last there's a mike bloomberg tech columnist in my replies telling me the tech press did a good job, and I'm sorry but that's delusional

I'm not making this up because I'm mean. You can go back and read the interviews with Mark from the time and watch as they don't really ask very hard questions, and assist the framing that meta was doing anything particularly revolutionary

Ask hard questions? They were actively trying to rationalize and explain to Zuck what his vision was when he was stumbling on his own words trying to make it seem interesting or even realistic.