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Comment by montrose | Hacker News Reader

I felt bad about upvoting this, because the writer is so nasty about it. His style of writing feels like long-form Twitter trolling. But I upvoted it because the information in it is important. It shows how addictive Twitter is. It also shows how plugged in you can be and still feel yourself to be unplugged.

Farhad ends up seeming like an alcoholic talking about how he's on the wagon, and then you look down and there's a bottle in his hand. The important point though is not that he's some sort of hypocrite, but that it could be any of us.

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>Farhad ends up seeming like an alcoholic talking about how he's on the wagon, and then you look down and there's a bottle in his hand.

I know that feeling! I am social media clean for two months now. All that browsing random news items and commenting on people's posts, it had to stop, it was eating away at my soul. I have no idea why people feel this urge to share their most intimate details of their lives with anonymous people on the internet. It's a disease worse than alcoholism.

Phew, glad to get this of my chest, my completely socially unconnected fellow HNers.

Is news.yc 0% social media in your mind?

That was self directed sarcasm (unless my sarcasm detector is broken)

Doh! On re-reading, I think you're right, but it zoomed right over my head...

Something interesting here about the inability for people to detect sarcasm in social media posts...

Yeah this piece was definitely more ad hominem than it needed to be. Ironically, Manjoo confessing to not being able to completely cut off Twitter would've made for a more compelling story, even if it meant a less sexy and concise headline and summary. But that would bolster the overall theme that situations/stories are just too complicated to be summed up in Tweet-optimized headlines.

"Ad hominem" means "to the person". The way we use it on message boards, referring to the "ad hominem fallacy", we mean "an argument improperly addressed to the person who made it, rather than to the argument itself". That's clearly not what's happened here; the argument is intrinsically about Farhad Manjoo. Articles criticizing the actions of people aren't intrinsically fallacious.

There's a good blog post somewhere about this phenomenon, which it dubs "the ad hominem fallacy fallacy".

That’s a fair point. What I had meant to say was that Manjoo’s history of questionable articles (which, to be fair, are just a few selections from a very long and generally liked career) did not seem directly relevant to whether he is being misleading now, other than to imply that he is generally a poor pundit/writer. But you’re right that the argument refers to his work as evidence and not to Manjoo himself.

Agreed. That seemed gratuitous.

>history of questionable articles [...] did not seem directly relevant to whether he is being misleading now

I believe the point being made was that his use of social media could have been the cause of this. The implication was that the perceived decline in quality of the output and the ever-increasing use of social media were correlated:

>Manjoo’s latest column seems to be of a piece with these earlier works. After trying, and failing, to get him to own up to the fact that his assertion that he had “unplugged” from social media was not true, I asked him whether perhaps his use of social media was messing with his own self-perception. He didn’t respond to that question.

We can argue about the validity of such assumptions, but, nevertheless, the author of the article was trying to build a case here.

The phrase is also commonly used in the sense of an "ad hominem attack", meaning an attack directly on a person's character or actions, rather than their work or ideas. It doesn't always refer to the fallacy.

This doesn't have anything to do with social media "addiction". It just shows plainly how bad the NYT has gotten when even the simplest most trivially checkable assertions of its reporters turn out to be slimy and weaselly. How can you trust anything they write when things that you can verify turn out to be "true" only with the most absurd definitions of "true"?

The NYT 20+ years ago wouldn't have let this happen and would have taken action. The NYT of today isn't the same.

I read both the Times and the WSJ for years now, and can say the opinion and lifestyle pieces on both have chronically suffered from a lack of “journalistic integrity”... because they’re intended to be biased from the get go.

IMO, this has been a pretty consistent feature of lifestyle/opinion pieces across the history of newspapers. It just used to be buried away in its proper section. Unfortunately, these types of fluff/garbage pieces can “trend” and blend in with proper journalism making you feel like they’re to be held to some standard of journalism or science.

Unfortunately, people have a lot of difficulty distinguishing between the two, which is probably why people consider things like conservative talk radio and the Huffington Post and this lifestyle piece rigorous journalism.

There’s a difference between being biased (= expressing your personal non-objective opinion) and lying.

I was just addressing OPs statement about paper quality as it has existed across "rigorous" papers (conservative and liberal) for decades. Op-ed has always been a steaming pile thats thankfully not reflective of the actual news published.

As to your point, I agree completely--this guy just needs to be fired, and the NYT should post a correction. He was a trusted writer who made false claims about his own behavior.

Should the NYT have surveilled Manjoo's "experiment" for a fluff piece? Should it monitor their writers to make sure they actually went and tried that new cupcake place on 5th avenue?

Maybe. But I feel like the issue here is that this staff member blatantly lied to both the paper and the public, which feels akin to a doctor violating his hippocratic oath.

As for the rest of op-ed, I honestly feel like cherry-picking facts and figures to form a one-sided opinion is tantamount to a lie--perhaps an even more sinister one. And just like we don't have op-eds on Wikipedia, we should be damn sure to isolate them from what we call "news."

Same playbook as the Enquirer. Entertainment > Credibility. Credibility isn't what sells to the NYT target market.

I don't understand this. Addiction, sure, it exists, and for those affected, maybe unplugging is impossible.

But how can you claim to be "unplugged" if you're not?? This is ridiculous. Words have meaning, or they should have, esp. for a journalist.

FM either is lying, or is delusional. He should be called out for it.

How does a druggie claim to be "clean" if they are not??

They lie.

Nasty writing was deserved.

Yes, especially when "nasty" just means "pointing out that the guy was blatantly lying".

When you're making a snarky retweet it should occur to you you're still using the internet. If you only planned to hop online to output headlines, that is what you do (hop on, hop off). Clickbait is getting a backlash.

I don’t think you should feel bad about it. The New York Times should be held to a high standard.

Look at it more cynically.

It is not unfair to say this article was penned by someone who is just a pen for hire, who can write on any topic and churn the words out to get paid. In this mode there is nothing written from direct personal experience, everything is just copied from the internets and news wires, not really felt. It is not really writing, it is arranging words in a presentable way to be paid. Any soul to it is feigned.

But how does this type of journalism come about?

It does so all the time, every day, when there is something new to write about.

Imagine you work in the media and that there is a lot of public interest in a topic and that there is a market for content. It could be anything, e.g. the dreaded blockchain, some new bird flu etc.

There are broadcasters with a public service remit that means having original programming or current affairs programming is expected to fill a quota. Therefore, much to your surprise, there is a market for 'original journalism' to fill that gap, with real money on offer to those that can provide the content.

Your company needs all the work that it can get so you pitch for that documentary on 'blockchain and internet cat pictures', saying that it will only cost $50000 and be done by next Tuesday. Your programme gets commissioned and now you have the problem of filling 45 minutes of screen time with a lot of informative stuff you know nothing about. But this is not a problem.

Your researchers, that were paid to research bird flu yesterday, are now having to research the dreaded blockchain and how this is helping cats get paid for their pictures online. Of course you fire any researchers that fail the task, therefore it is impossible for your researchers to fail. They could research how the moon landings were faked for one show on a sci-fi channel one week and then be researching the return to the moon for another channel the next week, adjusting their conclusions regarding whether the moon is made of cheese accordingly.

Sausage meat style the programme is put together and the world gets to learn about blockchain or hamsters or whatever it is, the broadcaster get their ratings, the regulatory body see that they have done a 'serious' programme and not some soap re-run and everyone is happy.

The people we expected to see talking about blockchain/hamsters/bird-flu are in the video, the experts and the sceptics, the graphics are as you would imagine them to be plus there will be the presenter explaining facts thanks to a globe-trotting tour of warehouses in China and Iceland, via the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

The normal advertisers will run their normal adverts and everyone will get paid.

This 'sausage factory' style content creation is everywhere. The danger to it is that you really can create a narrative out of thin air. If the facts were known to a story then there would be no need to commission others in the media game to do 'journalism'.

Any story can be told for a price, if the government decided tomorrow to get into research into 'polywater' then over the next few days the media would suddenly be experts on it. Even though there could be no such thing it would happen and new experts, able to be cited by the media, would be borne into existence, to become household names as experts in their fields.

Given this cynical take on how it all works in the media, the error made was to think that not a single reader would check facts, i.e. whether they had been on Twitter or not. To a journalist that does not really expect fact checking to ever happen this is a fair assumption.

I read your entire post.

Why did you mention Ecuadorian Embassy in London?

I don't get the thought process.

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