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Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

The most important area to focus on is accuracy. There's a huge prevailence of rumors masquerading as news. Plus, there's an entire political party who's base has lost faith in the mainstream media. If the NYT starts taking shortcuts, they will fall into a dangerous trap and will lose a lot of readers.

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It's just the one party, is it?

*rumors masquerading as news on other sites, not NYT

The op-ed and opinion pages of the NYT have their fair share of rumor & falsehoods

e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opinion/why-i-will-not-ca...

exposed here http://www.redstate.com/mickeywhite2/2016/12/16/new-york-tim...

e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/opinion/liberal-zionism-i...

exposed here http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/220635/why-did-the-new-york-...

I won't make a big list, and it seems are subjects are somewhat partisan, my comment here is not. What I mean to say is that rumor is equally at home on the NYT website as anywhere else.

Those are both opinion pieces, not NYT journalism proper.

Really? Equally?

I'd like to see your defense of the claim you're implying, which is that the New York Times publishes mere "rumor and falsehoods" with anything approaching the frequency of Breitbart, Fox News, or even CNN.

And while a news outlet surely should have some standards regarding the factual assertions made in the editorials they publish, a few highly debatable distortions is not the same thing as running an entire news outlet largely on misinformation masquerading as news.

In terms of accuracy, you'd walk away from 2016 far less confused about the world reading Breitbart than the NYT.

I made a fantastic return betting against The Upshot.

> In terms of accuracy, you'd walk away from 2016 far less confused about the world reading Breitbart than the NYT.

No, you'd walk away much more angry about all kinds of things, including Hillary's satanic rituals and pizza parlour pedophile ring, but still be very confused.

Baring one thing. Who your next president is. And who says that's not due to a lot of very confused people?

Serious question: Do you read Breitbart, do you know this to be true? I mean, I think it's fairly safe to assume it's a bit of a rag, but wondering if that actually goes beyond the typical conservative "slant" and well into knowingly presenting fake news as fact as you seem to be saying.

Oh yes, I read, and I read what Bannon himself says is the most important part, which are the comments and both go into the pile as, at best, disgusting and ignorant racist drivel and more accurately as smug inane rantings.

Would you have any examples of that? Sorry I don't know much about Breitbart. "Racism" has kind of lost its meaning nowadays.

I'm not sure how that's the case. With Breitbart you will end up with a view that, ironically given the parent here, holds there are vast Zionist conspiracies at work on our world. If you mean the election outcome, I'm not sure it was so much a "true prediction" as much as something like a stopped watch being right.

NY Times is as liberal as Fox is conservative. Fox has conservative commentators, just as NY Times has liberal op-ed. Fox News news coverage has conservative slant, just as NY Times news coverage has liberal slant. Also, I have seen no evidence that Fox News news coverage trafficks in falsehood. Sure, Fox News commentators traffick in falsehood--as do Times commentators; just read Paul Krugman.

I read the Times every day but I have no illusion about its editorial slant; however it is starting to seem to me that many Fox News viewers know more about the Times than the Times readers know about Fox News because Times readers believe everything negative they have heard about Fox News without actually watching it.

To say you have no examples is to simply stick your fingers in your ears. Many spring to mind, including "no-go zones" in Europe controlled by muslims, and their recent reporting on the amount of food stamps believed lost to fraud. They had to retract both stories on air.

Fox News viewers are consistently the least-well-informed of Americans in surveys. It would be difficult to dismiss that fact as simple coincidence.

That's confirmation bias in a nutshell. I read Paul Krugman for being mostly correct about things economic (and often political) for the past 17+ years. I can't say the same about FOX News commentators, which I watched regularly from 1999 through 2010 - most of the opinion shows were red meat nonsense or outright falsehoods. That said the news operation is fairly straight. This isn't dissimilar from the WSJ editorial pages, which is to me mostly plutocratic lunacy, even though they have a very solid news operation. The Times I view similarly, though I am finding WaPo to be more thorough the past few years.

I read Paul Krugman for being mostly correct about things economic (and often political) for the past 17+ years.

Except he's not. Krugman is no longer an economist, he's a commentator. And with that comes his slant. From the "Mises Wiki" [1]

The Economist cites critics of Krugman stating that "his relentless partisanship is getting in the way of his argument". In addition, a website (titled "Lying in Ponds") that tracks partisanship among public intellectuals rated Krugman second in the overall partisan slant of his columns, behind only Ann Coulter ... The Economist magazine supported the finding, noting the vast majority of Krugman's columns feature attacks on Republicans and almost none criticize Democrats, making him "a sort of ivory-tower folk-hero of the American left

As he moved from Nobel-winning economist to the political realm, he also left behind many of his economically sound ideas. For example [2]

Would cutting the minimum wage raise employment? - New York Times, Dec 16, 2009

  ...the belief that lower wages would raise overall employment rests on a 
  fallacy of composition. In reality, reducing wages would at best do nothing 
  for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary.

Training touted to close widening wage gap - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, page 8A - Feb 6, 1996
Stanford University economist Paul Krugman, however, said raising the minimum wage and lowering barriers to union organization would carry a trade-off --- increased unemployment.
...Deficits and interest rates - New York Times, Aug 14, 2009
It turns out that there's a strong correlation between budget deficits and interest rates - namely, when deficits are high, interest rates are low ... On reflection, it's obvious why...
A fiscal train wreck - New York Times, Mar 11, 2003
But we're looking at a fiscal crisis that will drive interest rates sky-high. A leading economist recently summed up one reason why: "When the government reduces saving by running a budget deficit, the interest rate rises."

[1] The site isn't working for me, so I can't get a link

[2] http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/06/paul_krugman...

OK. So Paul Krugman's positions have - maybe - changed on a handful of topics. Let's set aside the significant possibility that he is at least as likely to be right the second time on these topics than the first. But to get at GP's point, who would you say is Paul Krugman's closest competition at Fox News when it comes to economic expertise, and accurateness of his or her economic predictions? ...Neil Cavuto?

I'm not how we can arrive at an objective number. But it certainly happens with some frequency. See, for example, the one I posted just above:

Consider the recent misleading article about economists' feelings about market-based education. Scott Alexander points out what it seems to me can only be a deliberately-engineered effort to mislead:

By leaving it at “only a third of economists support vouchers”, the article implies that there is an economic consensus against the policy. Heck, it more than implies it – its title is “Free Market For Education: Economists Generally Don’t Buy It”. But its own source suggests that, of economists who have an opinion, a large majority are pro-voucher.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/30/contra-nyt-on-economist...

This is another case of bizarre false equivalency. On the one hand, I can see why you would quibble with the New York Times' wording here. B y saying that only a third agree, they imply (though weakly, I think, that two thirds disagree). But is this really in the same league as, e.g.,: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/01/03/dortmund-mob-atta...

I might be with you if your claim was just that the New York Times sometimes exhibits a liberal slant. And your citation would provide a perfectly defensible case in point. But to defend the claim that the New York Times is in the same league as Breitbart? Absurd.

Have you any suggestions about how we might quantify this for a meaningful comparison? I don't.

Well, I guess it's obvious how one could do this. Read everything that both have published in the last 18 months, and rate each on a scale from "completely true" to "makes a few misleading claims about relatively unimportant issues" to "makes a few misleading claims about important issues," to "blatantly reports misinformation about events in the world that never occurred, but would be significant if they had, in a way likely calculated to inflame the passions of its readers." (And possibly some intermediate scores to differentiate between falsehoods published as hard news, and falsehoods that are discussed within editorials.)

But I don't have the time to do that. And frankly, I don't have to in order to make a "meaningful comparison." I read the New York Times (and a few other outlets) every day, so I have a good sense of how much nonsense they publish. (I admit that I probably don't detect all of it, but I also don't read it completely uncritically.) And while I don't read/watch Fox News or Breitbart regularly, I look at them from time to time. One doesn't need to resort to quantification to see the difference.

If it were a close question it might be necessary to have a more robust methodology. But it isn't. Fox News, and especially Bretibart, are clearly much much worse.

What do you think that first "exposed" article concludes? I don't think there is any doubt as to the fact that Christopher Suprun was an electoral college elector from the state of Texas, and that he did not cast his vote for Trump.

That's what I got out of it too. I don't think the important issue was whether he was a hero on that day but whether he was, in fact, a faithless elector that viewed electing a belligerent vulgarian as president to be a rather negative thing.

Furthermore, what about Trumps oft repeated claims of "losing so many friends on 9/11" and after pressed, decided to not ever mention it again. Perhaps not stolen valor but stolen sympathy nonetheless.

I'm not trying to stoke the partisan fires, I'm saying that saying "NYT doesn't publish rumours" is demonstratably false.

I acknowledge they are op-ed and opinion pieces.

I don't have the wherewithall to do massive in-depth research on the subject.

I thought it was understood that Op-Eds were written by mostly external contributors with agendas and hence why they should be treated differently than regular articles by the readers.

They also printed this letter by Putin: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-cau...

Doesn't mean they endorse the letter and it's content.

And it seems like it would be wrong for them to be editing the content.

Their supposedly-factual section has its share as well. Consider the recent misleading article about economists' feelings about market-based education. Scott Alexander points out what it seems to me can only be a deliberately-engineered effort to mislead:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/30/contra-nyt-on-economist...

You don't get much more "fake news" than Jayson Blair or Judith Miller.

But I still do appreciate their journalism. Unlike some journalism outfits they do seem to try to get it right.

2 disgraced journalists from 13 years ago is hardly indicative of a problem with the NYT now.

Apparently much of the memo talks about how much editing a Times story undergoes, a process that certainly existed 13 years ago. If all these editors didn't catch Blair, what value are they adding?

Editors at newspapers may well ask hard questions about how well sourced an article is--as well as making lots of other changes to improve rigor and readability. But, as in the day-to-day operations of many professions, they tend to assume that the journalists aren't actively lying about things.

The difference is between organizations that admit when they're wrong by issuing retractions, firing people, etc. and organizations that allow known falsehoods to linger without comment.

But that party's base has lost faith in the media precisely because it reported accurately and did not set forth a bunch of propaganda about a return to the utopia of 1950s.

What do you even mean? NYT has a price sheet for sponsered content/native ads. If you have the funds, you can put any "fake news" you want in the NYT. Much more up front about it than back in the day.

All "news" is fake to some degree or another, it is a fantasy to think otherwise.

What a load of garbage. If you're talking about what I think you are, you're mentioning those half/full page ads that are marked "advertisement" and have slightly different fonts than the normal news. It's hardly a conspiracy theory to allow Trump to buy reporters.

I remember thinking it was odd that for the last year or so I've been getting bombarded with mail and advertising from ZipRecruiter...and then magically they have a major quote in a NYT piece pre-election around the state of the job market.

What do you mean all news is fake to so degree? That just sounds like Thiel's contrarianism or just an attempt at being provocative, or is it some sort epistemological claim?

This is a trend I've noticed: because everything is on a scale then people just feel justified to basically pick whatever they want. Because its impossible to say anything with certainty, everything can be given equal consideration?

You can allow for nuance and uncertainty without using faith-based logic for news, science does a pretty good job of it and gives a good framework for best-guess judgements.

Just because everything is "fake" to some extent doesn't excuse lazy, confirmation-biased opinions.

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