On the surface it looks like two tribes having a petty squabble. Beneath the surface, these are two industries competing.

Tech represents an existential threat to the media. The media has always controlled distribution channel, and enjoyed a monopoly on advertising and on getting messages across to the general public. In the last couple decades, however, that has changed, and tech companies are increasingly holding the keys. A few examples:

* People rarely buy their news from newspapers and magazines anymore, but instead find it via Google search, Twitter, Facebook, their mobile phones, and other tech channels.

* When the App Store first came out, Steve Jobs famously required a 30% cut of The NYT's mobile subscription revenue, while also retaining all of the subscriber data e.g. credit card numbers and email addresses. Very bad for the NYT and other media companies who always controlled this stuff. Amazon has done similar things to the book industry via the Kindle.

* Facebook has famously made a killing off of controlling distribution for media companies, e.g. which stories appear in users' feeds, and how much these companies need to pay for the algorithms show their posts to more people.

* Google News aggregates news stories and their algorithms control which sites get traffic.

* Twitter breaks news faster than any media-controlled platform, including TV and radio. This often forces media companies and journalists to tweet before publishing articles.

Consequently, the bulk of advertising revenue and readership now goes to tech companies and comes through tech channels, rather than going directly to media companies. The media has lost a lot of the power (and resulting income) that it once had. This is EXTREMELY scary for the media. Like I said, it's an existential threat. Think horse and buggy companies looking at the early adoption of cars.

So, what to do about it? Well, the media works like literally any other for-profit industry. They're going to fight back against competition. Why wouldn't they?

What that looks like from a strategy perspective is to use the strongest tools in your arsenal. For the media, that's the fact that they're still the ones doing all the writing. They can dramatically affect public opinion.

The playbook is simple: Hire a bunch of journalists who are anti tech. They'll naturally write a bunch of negative stories about big tech companies. They'll write about the dangers of an ad-funded business, not mentioning that this was a model literally invented by the media. They'll write about the dangers of monopoly, not mentioning that the media has always had a monopoly on distribution. They'll write about the dangers of censorship, not mentioning that media companies have editorial teams and hiring bias for their journalists, and that they allow their advertisers to censor them. They'll write about how rich and out of touch the tech elite are, not mentioning that the media elite are just as rich and out of touch. They'll write about the problems with diversity in tech, not mentioning the lack of diversity in the media. Etc.

That's not to say the criticism isn't warranted. Of course a lot of it is. And imo the journalists are sincere.

But the journalists don't control or necessarily even see the big picture, any more than the average software developer at Google controls Google. At risk of sounding overly dramatic, they're all just pawns on a chess board. If you control a media company, you don't even have to tell your journalists what to write. You simply hire editors and journalists who have already proven sympathetic to your viewpoints and let them go to work.

So beneath people calling each other names on Twitter, there's a lot more going on.