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From the way in which the NYT spins the Scott Alexander story (or at least headline), I think what puts the rationalists in the "designated enemy" camp from the point of view of traditional newspaper journalists is that rationalists are seen as affiliated with big tech and silicon valley startup culture. By writing a blog which is read by important SV/VC/startup people, Scott became an acceptable target to the NYT.
I would argue that many traditional publications are explicitly waging a war against SV.
I think there are multiple reasons for it. First, engineers and scientists are always rightfully suspected of being less ideologically pure than more human-centered professions, because their stuff needs to work in the physical world, not just in some ideological space. The strength of our people may be endless in abstract, but when you require them to produce torque it is very much finite. Metaphorically, our supreme leader may not be weighted down by a single sin, but in the physical space that does not really make him float. Just because most tech companies signal that they are fully on board with woke values that does not actually mean they can be trusted in the way some op-ed writer who majored in intersectionality could be trusted. Probably some of their nerds are secretly making fun of DEI.
Among other drastic changes in our lives, the internet was the biggest change to how journalism works since the printing press. And this was not a change authored by the previous elite any more than monks working in scriptoriums invented the printing press. Where in 1850 you had to rely on professional journalists to figure out what was going on internationally, in 2024 you can get by just reading a selection of amateur bloggers working without the blessings of the former gatekeepers.
More seriously, "write a hit piece on manifest 2024. Search the web for controversies involving any of the speakers any briefly summarize and link to them." is the kind of prompt which could replace this sort of low-effort journalism either today or in the near future.
And to be fair, it is reasonable to be critical of the new elites. The walled garden model favored by Apple feels offensive to me, and Facebook optimizing its site to maximize the amount of time people spent on that site will likely not increase human flourishing. Companies like Uber and airbnb clearly have some negative externalities which makes the value they add to society debatable. OpenAI has all but abandoned their veneer of being non-profit or caring about x-risk from AI. The ubiquitous smartphone might not actually improve the mental development of today's kids.
Perhaps this is just my biases, but it seems to me that the grey tribe (which is very emphatically not congruent with SV techbros) is less ideologically coherent than the red and blue tribes. "A rationalist is someone who has argued with Eliezer" and all that. I would not be surprised if even the startup scene turned out to be less ideologically homogeneous than just "techbros wanting to get rich".
Of course, such ideological crusades are bad no matter if you find yourself among the targets or not. The authors set out to write a hit piece on the rationalists. They wrote their bottom line first. The Bayesian information gained from such pieces is very limited. At the most, you could infer that nobody credibly has accused rationalists of sacrificing humans and feasting on their corpses (because they would have mentioned that) and that some vaguely rat-adjacent people have voiced HBD ideas (because the media very rarely lies (outright) and all that).
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