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Oh please. What a load of hogwash. NYT and CNN aren’t perfect but making some kind of comparison to the rantings of a lunatic like Jones is absurd. Get a grip.

Well for you it might be clear it is much better than Jones, but from the distance the "us vs them" narrative and the obsession with whatever is the latest "scandal" (Clinton's emails, Weinstein, Trump & Russia) makes it seem like pure tabloid. So you can actually make good argument about NYT being similar to Jones (better crap is still crap).

It's quite clear if you understand the distinction between journalism and infotainment. Journalism outlets spend millions of dollars to staff professional reporters and fact checkers; when they report a story, they've often got a whole team of trained professionals on multiple locations collecting details and interviewing primary sources. When the outlet we're talking about is the NYT or WSJ, those teams are in dozens of countries around the world operating out of large full-time bureaus.

Infotainment outlets hire a couple dozen people to make shit up and put it on a web page and a Youtube video.

Sometimes reality gets tabloidy. Sometimes editors make decisions that optimize engagement and viewership over clarity. CNN and Fox both run pundit shows along with hard news and blur the lines by hosting their hard-news pro's on the pundit shows. But no matter what happens to make CNN seem like infotainment, it simply isn't, because the process that generates it is journalism.

Editorial staffs have been decimated for decades.

There is far less fact checking than before, far fewer corespondents and almost all military reporting is through access-journalism: “our give us pretty footage, we’ll write nice things”

At which point I prefer Jones: so trashy that I know it’s BS

The thing is that most of the web and the printed word is spam that will actively confuse you the more that you read it. Compare the newspaper to a cookbook. The cookbook, if it's good, can be tested for effectiveness quite readily even allowing for variations in things like your ingredients and how your oven functions as compared to the one in the author's test kitchen.

It's a good thing that I have a memory and can compare interpretations and predictions made by different outlets in the media with subsequent events to evaluate their reliability.

> because the mainstream news websites like CNN and even sections of the NYT became more Jones-like in their reporting

What an amazing claim! Surely you have examples of this? I'd love to read conspiracy theories coming from CNN or NYT that are in line with something as absurd as "Michelle Obama is actually a man" or "Sandy Hook was fake" or the absolutely insane birther movement.

NYT: "You can't be racist against white people".

There you go.

Can you link some context?

Sure: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/sarah-jeong-shou...

What about "Trump is Russian puppet."

I hate the guy and he does sorround himself with scumbags, but this implied narrative sounds like fairly generic conspiracy. "Scandals" like Cambridge Analytica "confirming" this just underline the conspiracy tone.

Maybe it's just people reading NYT, maybe I'm misreading the implications, but imo the GP's claim is not that outlandish.