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Comment by flippyhead | Hacker News Reader

I'd very much appreciate a few representative examples of sloppy journalism from either the LA or NY Times. Can you recommend a couple?

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I don't mean to evade your request but I'm typing this on my phone while on a break at work so I don't have specific articles I can link to at the moment.

Off the top of my head I can give you some general topics I have found lacking in detail and nuance. The LA Times specifically has done a poor job imo on accurately representing some of the opposition to high density developments here in LA.

They also ran this piece [1] on Elon Musk's empire of subsidies which I thought was lacking in context. Disclaimer: I work at SpaceX so I'm obviously biased. There can certainly be criticism of subsidies given to Tesla/SpaceX, but when an article such as this makes no mention of the auto bailouts, or the similar subsidies given to the defense and oil industry I don't find it particularly balanced.

I've also found much of the NY Times reporting on Snowden to push a very national security establishment agenda. My apologies for not being able to give more concrete examples at this time, I hope you understand my statement was made in good faith.

[1] www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story,amp.html

Look up just about anything NYT has written about US wars in the past 15 years. Up until very recently, NYT even had an editorial policy against using the word "torture" in reference to any act committed by the US government / military.

Not too mention that Maggie Haberman and Mark Liebovich (and probably a few others too that I'm not aware of) can be found in the Podesta emails sending over their articles to the Clinton campaign for review, prior to publication.

> Not too mention that Maggie Haberman and Mark Liebovich (and probably a few others too that I'm not aware of) can be found in the Podesta emails sending over their articles to the Clinton campaign for review, prior to publication.

Can you reference the source for this? I ask because much of what I've seen between what WikiLeaks tweets and what's actually contained within the email messages is severely taken out of context. (e.g. not understanding what news embargos are [1]) The New York Times were also the ones who originally broke the story of the private email server.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_embargo

Cryptographically verified, by the way: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/4213

Thank you, here is also the response by Leibovich: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/magazine/anatomy-of-a-medi...

One example from Leibovich:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/4213

And one of Haberman's stories being sent to Podesta:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/51561

Here's a Clinton campaign strategy document that mentions Haberman and how she has "teed up many stories for us before and [we] have never been disappointed":

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3125945-Story-Memo.h...

Doing an advanced search on Wikileaks filtering by "nytdirect@nytimes.com" in the sender field, you'll see that the first drafts of nearly 50 different articles were sent to John Podesta:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/?q=&mfrom=nytdirect%40n...

One more I found just now concerning Leibovich:

"Here is the quote that Leibovich is intending to use from your conversation with him unless we see a problem. I don’t."

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33945

Thank you, I believe Leibovich's response provides the relevant context though.

NYT links are all paywalled for me, but I can't envision any possible excuse for what he did. I understand that "access" is a tricky problem and involves some moral grey area, but sending articles ahead of time for revision and "vetoing", and asking for permission to use a quote... those both strike me as a clear failure in journalistic ethics.

as a clear failure in journalistic ethics

To quote Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, "Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense."

Sean Hannity, Democrat operative.

So should journalists simply never agree to have conversations off the record?

I think there are big problems with the way access and coverage are mixed up together and traded on, but I'm pretty comfortable with a journalist agreeing not to publish remarks made during a conversation and then later asking to publish some of them.

Thank you, but in the second link, this appears to be a newsletter email from the First Draft blog on the NY Times [1]. The DocumentCloud link is certainly not verifiable as it contains only the single page.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/23/which...

You're right about those first drafts, my mistake.

That Clinton campaign strategy documents comes from, apparently, the Guccifer 2.0 hacks. Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang contacted Nick Merrill to confirm the document's authenticity, but received no response.

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak...

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