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Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

Nytimes should be banned from HN. It is paywalled and the information is dubiously sourced, if even true. This is not an acceptable source of news nor fact.

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I agree that the NYTimes should no longer be viewed as a neutral source; that doesn't mean that articles cannot be taken for what they are, often intellectual interesting and well-researched.

Refusing to read articles from left or right leaning sources on principle is ironically the point of this article.

Seriously? You have gotten to the point in your extremism that the New York Times, one of the most respected news sources in the entire world is not factual to the point it should be banned. How did the country seriously get to this point?

I am on mobile, however I will amend with sources. The NYT dileberately held back stories and pushed forward the views if the Clinton campaign. If you accept that wikileaks emails are authentic, you can not accept NYT as legit. Maybe we can assume it was incompetence that their polling numbers (85-15) we wrong, and that is subjective admittedly. I personally feel this too was intentional.

Edit: not to mention, like most media, it cant serve over https because of advertising refferers.

How Their Polling Numbers Changed:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/796209661456347136

How the HRC campaign used media to influence RNC and promote weakest candidates:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks

Op Ed on why Wikileaks isn't whistleblowing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/opinion/what-were-missing-...

here are some screencaps of various media companies front page and politics pages:

http://imgur.com/a/v2huv

I have to find the actual links to the wikileaks NYT stoiry placement emails, but this at least points out the narrative that was being crafted and why I dislike NYT. The fact that they were part of the reason we had Trump v. Cointon is enough for me to drp them. Trump & clinton are terrible people and the media (namely NYT) is the reason this was even possible.

It's possible that respect isn't entirely earned - indeed, even that their own reputation caused the New York Times to get an overblown sense of its own importance: http://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-...

The reason the Times is important isn't because their reporting is perfect, but rather because of their commitment to good journalism. They have made numerous mistakes in my lifetime, but they have generally owned up to them and tried to address what they did wrong. That is pretty rare today.

On top of that, consider the important work they have done just recently on things like arbitration agreements, how the wealthy exploit tax loopholes, the exploitation of immigrants at NYC nail salons, and Amazon's corporate culture, to name just a few. Those are all significant pieces of investigative journalism that have made us much better informed about issues we wouldn't know nearly as much about without the hard work at the Times.

(Re paywall: use the "web" link above to bypass)

Re sources: You propose we don't read this a article on education because they didn't back your candidate? Please.

It's not paywalled, you just need to authenticate. Not the best, but not paywalled either.

I was blocked. Felt a lot like a paywall to me.

On mobile I think it is a paywall.

If the New York Times is not an acceptable source of news then I'm the President-elect.

This is the same stupid shit as the election. My point is that there is apparent proof of dubious tactics in the wikileaks disclosures, their failure to call te election polling close, and the immeadiate dismissal of the comey announcement.

You can disagree with this evidence, but telling me "you feel" im wrong isnt intellectual.

It sounds like we're reading different NY Times regarding how they covered Comey's announcement. Immediate dismissal?

And there was a world of difference in how the NY Times or Guardian covered trump and how "new media" liberal echo chambers like Vox or Huff Post did.

Polling is hard and pretty much everyone was wrong on it, and we don't even know if it was "wrong" wrong or just on the wrong side of the margin of error... Shit happens.

I will withold judgment on your wikileaks claims until there's specific links to look at.

there is apparent proof of dubious tactics in [...] their failure to call the election polling close

I just want to address this one point. I think it's just untenable to imagine there was some big conspiracy to skew poll numbers in Clinton's favour. Why would all the pollsters fall in line, why wouldn't anyone break ranks and leak the story? It would be a huge story that would sell a ton of newspapers!

The pollsters were mostly wrong, but they were fairly close, only a couple of points off. Just about everybody (notably the Princeton Election Consortium) was way overconfident, with the exception of FiveThirtyEight who gave Clinton a 70-30 chance over Trump. That's not a bad guess given the final result. FiveThirtyEight never claimed to be correcting anyone else's bias, they just clearly stated their reasons for thinking the result was very uncertain. It's a shame nobody else followed their lead but you can bet they will next time round.

The one big outlier was the LA Times poll, which consistently put Trump ahead, but they put him way ahead, so they were actually one of the less accurate polls in absolute terms.

It will be really interesting to see what caused that overall ~2% polling miss, but I would bet a large sum of money that it wasn't "dubious tactics". The worst we should accuse the media of is overconfidence. (For example, a few left-leaning outlets accused FiveThirtyEight of gaming the system in Trump's favour; that just makes them look stupid in hindsight.)

If anything, Clinton's campaign would want to give the appearance that the race was actually closer than it was, because this would give a sense of urgency to Democratic voters and increase turnout.

You can see the same principle from the time before the first debate when Clinton's campaign was exaggerating Trump's ability to debate on live television in order to give the appearance of a comeback. The reality was that Clinton always had the advantage in terms of traditional debating and her campaign knew it.

If we can say anything about this election perhaps it is that reality (the mathematical/objective one) has taken a surprisingly minor role ...

Same with you feeling you're right. And I cannot trust any wikileaks sources, so unless you've got something else, I don't see you backing up your argument.

I havent double checked, however I believe the same batch came from the US State Dept

I don't get this argument against "paywalled sources". Do journalists not have the right to try and get paid for their work? Do you enjoy getting paid for your work? Why aren't you working for free for me?

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