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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Please don't conflate poor journalism with fake news.

Reporting what the government said with no deeper context is poor journalism. The government really did say there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The New York Times reported those statements, not faked evidence of the weapons.

Fake news is just making shit up, like inventing a dead body and saying it was killed by Clinton.

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There's a question of journalistic integrity.

If you read NYT as I do you expect to be told "the whole story" and not be reading a glorified crafted PR statement. I think that's irresponsible and as good as fake

The institutional failure of much of mass media is a problem. Trading on access, parroting PR, things like that.

But it's a different problem than the one where people literally completely make up click bait articles and present them as news. Not hastily written, fact light articles about real events, articles about things that simply never happened.

We do ourselves a favor when we treat them as separate issues.

I think it's related because they discredit themselves by rebroadcasting government lies, then they say "But don't you pay attention to that PatriotTruth2016.com website, that's fake what we broadcast is real and when it happens to not be true, well it's a truthful rebroadcast of some information that just happened to be false.

Also, being a faithful transmitter of the government line is not something to aspire to. Everything Pravda ever published was true insofar as it was the official line of the government of the USSR. If the NYT is the Pravda of the USA then I think we might just be better off with PatriotTruth2016.com.

Your also is misplaced, I called it poor journalism, not something to aspire to.

The point is that "fake news" hit the lexicon based on the completely made up bullshit and now people are confusing the issue by trying to broaden it out to include poor journalism. We have the words to talk about them separately, I'm not going to give up trying to get people to do that just yet.

FWIW National Enquirer etc. existed for ages and no one seemed to mind. There's plenty of fake news to go around...

What about "I am a NYT reader and I read it every day with the hopes to tell me who is a better candidate" and I read it, diligently, not knowing that the information is being fed from one candidate? Isn't that lousy?

The people that sued them (many won!) cared. Celebrities winning a libel suit means you are doing a pretty shitty job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Enquirer#Notable_stor...

And like I said, it's totally fine to be concerned with the quality of the content of the NYT. Just don't mix it up with the quality problems at the National Enquirer, which are a different thing entirely.

That's not a great characterization of your link. The Enquirer has a very good record for a publication so venerable and vicious, and rarely loses libel suits. People tend to confuse it mentally with the Weekly World News, which was awesome, proud to be fake news of no consequence, and shelved in checkout lines right next to the Enquirer.

I don't think the line is that sharp. The NYT was peddling completely false stories and attributing them to anonymous administration officials. I'm not willing to say that's not fake news; their sources had/have complete deniability to the point that there's no way that we can say for sure that the stories weren't being directly inserted by the government especially being largely laundered through a single fake journalist[1].

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

There's a difference between a reporter lying to the institution they work for and a couple guys in a garage making shit up for ad views.

I'd very much like to see less anonymous sourcing and PR parroting and so on. It's my belief that conflating those activities with the folks making shit up entirely harms that goal.

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