The Der Spiegel journalist who messed with the wrong small town
spectator.us
spectator.us
Even something like the claim that the city administrator was a gun-toting virgin is something that a fact-checker is expected to call and independently confirm. And even if the guy gives a non-committal denial, e.g. "That's ridiculous, I don't want have anything to do with your left-wing fake news article!", the fact-checker should be prying the reporter for all the documentation/notes that support the claim. In fact, in this scenario, the fact-checker should be highly suspicious that the city official is so standoffish, if the reporter managed to gain his trust enough in the first place to reveal that he's a virgin (and is ostensibly embarrassed about it).
Der Spiegel has a lot of questions it has to answer for how it failed so thoroughly for so many years here.
The most common touristy photo is the city sign.
Also, Der Spiegel has long had an extraordinary reputation; my impression is that, of publications outside English-speaking countries, Der Spiegel has the best reputation among Americans. I'm not sure that many do their own evaluation, though Der Speigel looks like what we expect serious journalism to look like. Taking a longer view than just this immediate problem, do they deserve the reputation? If not, I'd be interested in who others recommend (outside English-speaking countries).
I am German and even when I went to school (before the „life-sucking Internet“ from a comment below) there was the saying that all you could trust in Der Spiegel are the dates and numbers (although this article suggests even that might be too much).
IMHO, there are much better German-language news sources out there (Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Süddeutsche, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Brand Eins, to name just a few with differing political leanings).
As a German I'm also surprised about that reputation. The Spiegel is somewhere between a serious newspaper (like FAZ, Süddeutsche or Zeit) and a tabloid (like Bild). Hunting for great headlines and stories, but not necessarily concerned with objective news reporting.
I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, we do a lot of internal reviewing of employee behaviour. When things go wrong, it’s possible to steal 111 million danish kroner after all[0]. Despite our best efforts, things still do go wrong though, and that’s because, even in the heart of bureaucracy, we still rely on trust, and when people intentionally abuse it, shit happens.
It’s unfortunate, but things aren’t perfect. Everyone is pressed for financial resources and then everything from financial security to editorial journalism becomes patch-work “good enough” type systems. Because the perfect system simply doesn’t exist. One of my user accounts has a lot of privileges for instance, more than it rightly should. It’s like that because I need access to so many different things, that our IT-department would need a half-time hire if they were to keep my user rights for our 500 different IT systems up to speed. It’s an imperfect solution that only works as long as I don’t misbehave, and while we do a lot of internal reviewing, the truth is I could abuse those rights.
At least Der Spiegel fired the fraudster when they found out.
[0] https://www.information.dk/debat/2018/10/111-millioner-krone...
I would like to ask what caused der spiegel system to fail, and I would guess that given the context of this article with the 2016 election and trump, a portrait of rural America that is this extreme would have raised alarm bells if their internal fact checking group had a more diverse mix of political views. The story is way to clean and fit too nicely the political narrative that now in the after match it seems almost silly.
So having a certain degree of trust and accepting the few cases of misbehaviour might at the end be the best possible system.
Here's a good article about the New Yorker's process: https://www.cjr.org/the_delacorte_lectures/new-yorkers-fact-...
As a personal anecdote, the only time I've ever been published in the New York Times was in the NYT Magazine. A staffer had seen a comment I posted on HN (in a HN thread about a NYTM article) and asked if it'd be OK to print it as a letter to the editor. When I agreed, I had to email back and forth with a fact-checker for a couple of days to clarify the content of my HN comment -- she even went so far as to point out, to my embarrassment, how I had misremembered the plot of "Dumb and Dumber". If they put in that much time for a letter to the editor, I imagine that their actual staffer articles put under the same amount of scrutiny.
Every place I've worked at for the last decade expected that everyone would have a vod ed review before merging. Not because they didn't trust us, either, but because the risk is high.
I can accept your argument as "what happened", but not that it was a reasonable result.
The fact that European readers even believed half of the fabrications in this story is telling of how ignorant they really are about the USA.
Just because you have seen movies which are the product of LA and NYC doesn't mean you know anything about the USA. Let me be clear: people in NYC and LA themselves know nothing of their country. This is blatantly obvious when you watch ANY Hollywood creation set in rural America.
It is frustrating to deal with self righteous assumptions of my culture like this based on movies and TV shows.
But accuracy is not what sells movies and the powers that be seem quite set in their opinions that the innacurate, stereotypical views they hold are what people want to see.
Just like the writer of the article in question.
I am not trolling. But seriously, I doubt that the Spiegel has any "fact checking" that deserves the name. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that the Spiegel has some serious "opinion policing". It was once a news magazine run by journalists. Now it is more or less a political voice for the guy who inherited the majority of the shares. I would not call it a news magazine anymore, nor would I call it serious journalism. The guy delivered just what he was supposed to deliver. His messages fitted so undeliverable well in what they wanted to hear and communicate.
See this article form 1973:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41955159.html
Today Spiegel would call this "hate speech". The declining sales numbers are not surprising. In history, propaganda was free. You pay for journalism but who is going to pay for propaganda?
The translation is not to blame - the story is pretty gross. At least that is my opinion as a German native speaker.
Can I ask what exactly is gross about it? I didn't read the article in full, but did skim through it for a few minutes, and it seems to me its only "crime" is not being politically correct by the modern standards of today. But I question whether or not that's truly a bad thing. Are journalists only allowed to write positively about immigrants and refugees or any other group that is considered "underprivileged", while hiding anything remotely negative?
It could be argued that that in itself is gross. Is that the standard of freedom of speech and freedom of the press that we should be striving for?
But you can't write a non-gross story about the proclivity of immigrants to "multiply" once arrived. Nor is "look at all these Turkish immigrants with all their Turkish ways" a real look at the impact of immigration.
I'm curious, now, where did 'jayalpha even find this nasty piece of writing?
I looked for another one from Spiegel. "X Million Turkish people are already here, X Million more want to come" but could not find it anymore. This was the first google hit that showed up for my search.
If you work for "Der Spiegel", the answer is defiantly yes.
I have absolutely zero respect for “journalism” at this time. It is, as far as I’m concerned, an entirely dead art, all life sucked from it by the great destroyer we call the Internet.
This network we created, and in particular most of the shiny things at L7, is not healthy for even an above average psyche. It attenuates all feedback loops that our bodies require to form empathy, while amplifying the worst parts of us through appeals to fame, fortune, and notoriety.
I don’t even hold this particular journalist in particular disregard. The sooner we recognize that he was so outmatched by the construct that he didn’t even have a chance, the better.
The 4th Estate is a very important thing for us all.
Watching Cable News these days is crazy because you can watch journalists, spin, lie and misrepresent ... but at the very same time they are presenting facts that do matter.
Go take a look at 'waybackmacine' and click some links from even 10 years go - the news was not nearly as crazy and clickbaity.
I truly hope that things can settle down a bit maybe in the next political cycle.
Finally - I should say that almost all MSM left and right completely misrepresent middle America. The reality in Cleveland, rural Ohio, Utah, Houston, Alabama ... it's just not anywhere to be found on the news unless something terrible that happens where the press wants to use that piece of information to construct a narrative.
Edit: I should add that there is a very real financial pressure right now for journos - newspapapers are falling apart everywhere, this is a real thing. Individual journos are not natural capitalists. We used to pay for the news we don't now, and we still haven't figured out a model. This is a major factor.
I currently live in Canada and get the local news from Vermont. It's sublime and cathartic: local girls basketball team highlights. Interviews with part-time stat reps who also run the local store. No clickbait language between state reps, governor etc.. No culture war.
The national news is a circus, with each clown playing a part. It's ideological, clickbait, narrative-driven and parsed to remove anything that could upset corporate sponsors.
'Normal' is simply too boring for television.
But your assertion “journalism is an entirely dead art” is far too broad to possibly be true.
Surely there are some people doing proper journalism. I don’t see how you could stand by your claim.
If we must inoculate ourselves against being informed by news, then news loses its ability to inform.
It's like a solipsism.
That can be exploited too, but the exploit won’t be necessary until that sampling process is automated and widespread. At that point you will need to escalate further.
But your alternative—believe nothing you read—is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you stop reading nonfiction you will be seriously hampering your ability to compete.
Care to elaborate?
Also, what do you mean by “L7”?
Sorry, but huh?
"blaming the game" in this context means understanding that such constraints exist, and as for "then what": work to change the economics of that situation. Give money to support organisations doing proper investigative journalism, educate yourself on political issues and educate your friends so fewer voters will be swayed by populist rhetoric, volunteer to do some menial task so resources can be put towards longer-term goals.
IMO that's a completely different game.
People interacting with other people. Which is why good things to do are, as you said
> Give money to support organisations doing proper investigative journalism, educate yourself on political issues and educate your friends so fewer voters will be swayed by populist rhetoric, volunteer to do some menial task so resources can be put towards longer-term goals.
because that's kinda interacting as a molecule, with the other molecules of the social system -- not "the body as a whole", which is more an idea than anything one could do in practice.
> Economic constraints, or opportunity costs, or the time required to establish consensus all put limits on what people can do, and often require people to do nothing, or even negative things
That's absolutely not the case for Relotius. Jörg Thadeusz is actually pretty pissed off at those excuses, he says they need to end and I agree.
https://www.welt.de/kultur/medien/article185920966/Podcast-W...
For every excuse, you can often find dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of people who are in the same or worse situation as the excusee, but have not resorted to what they're excusing.
So "blaming the game" ostensibly says that we should focus on fixing the system, and not blaming its individual "players" who are incentivized or even forced to fail/act wrongly. I'm sure you're aware that every professional sport has had in its history a number of rule changes to make the game safer or more well-run, and these rule changes have had far more systemic effect than just penalizing players and coaches.
Which is people interacting with people, and calling some of that "system". I asked, now what, what does it mean in practice... actually unpack these abstractions, and think through what those abstract words mean in practive step by step: it's all just people dealing with people. When the rules in a sport change, that means people discuss with others, maybe write stuff down, then referees learn their job based on those agreements, and actively enforce the rules.
> these rule changes have had far more systemic effect than just penalizing players and coaches.
That's like saying a beach has more of a systemic effect than the grains of sands it consists of. When "the rules get changed", that boils down to nothing but interaction between rule committees (or whatever the mechanism may be), refs, players and coaches.
unfortunately too many journalists have demoted themselves to "copywriters based on things you find online", whatever the things are. I m frankly not surprised this guy ended up writing fiction: when you only look at the world through a glass, it stops being real to you.
it is becoming almost impossible to find eyewitness journalists. OTOH, connected journalism can only be useful in extraordinary cases that can be verified via online channels or which involve anonymity (E.g. snowden case)
Is that the natural endgame of journalism? who knows
They have become narrative creators. They create a number of narratives, and people attach to the one that fits their preconceptions. Reality doesn't matter that much.
These forms of schmalz the journalist at hand fed his employer also fed into a cherished world-view. Cherished by co-workers and by the dozens or so jurors and organizations that plastered him with awards. All of this happened before the dominance of internet in German journalism as well. But most importantly, you don't need the internet present for those things to happen. What you need is a deep bias.
e.g. at Der Spiegel
- a left-leaning political stance is commonly held; in 1987 they in a successful attempt to derail the campaign of an conservative politician, stirred up what became to be known as the Barschel-Affair [1]. It ended with the suicide of the conservative politician and the social democratic successor stepping down a couple of years later, when in the affair's aftermath his own corrupt doings were laid bare.
- From 2000-2007, when the "national socialist underground" committed their serial-killings against immigrants (and a police officer) Der Spiegel was at the forefront portraying them as "Döner-Murders"; that the killings were all part of the inner workings of the Turkish mafia.
- an "Israel critical" stance is somewhat commonly held; in 2010 you could get away with articles with complete made up facts about orthodox jews in Jerusalem (hint: bad people that don't use cell-phones etc.) [2]
- In 2016 a court ordered Der Spiegel to redact 14 claims it made against an investigative journalist [3] and subsequently agreed to redact the whole piece.
- In 2018 at another publication, Die Zeit, in a prime example of biasedness, its editors-in-chief publicly smeared one of their own inhouse journalists after she in one of her articles dared to pose the question whether the NGOs cruising the Mediterranean Sea to rescue refugees were always helpful or whether they might increase the human toll after all (since smugglers counting on those NGOs to pick up "their slack" started to massively lower the quality of vessels used to transport the refugees) [4]
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barschel-Aff%C3%A4re#Berichte_...
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/ultraorthodoxe-juden-m...
[3] https://www.ksta.de/kultur/rechtsstreit-um--schmaehartikel--...
[4] http://schmid.welt.de/2018/07/19/liberalitas-hammoniae-die-z...
I’m sorry to tell you, „left leaning“ is not something you define, but rather something that gets being „left“ by comparison of what is considered the opposite of left.
In that sense, Spiegel was always left-leaning. Most certainly so, when campaigning against a 1980s conservative.
Duranty was awarded with Pulitzer for blatant lies in the first half of XX century, and it took more than 60 years for this to be widely revealed. It wouldn't be that easy for him nowadays.
Media has been always flourishing on sensationalism, propaganda, pushing somebody's interests, and manipulating social strivings. And I mean it - it happened to me to talk to a historian who worked with first European newspapers which appeared soon after press (as a mechanism) became a common thing - most of them were exactly like modern clickbaity news, it's just that it was easier to amuse a reader back then, so their sensations look a bit naïve by modern standards. You can re-read Mark Twain for very recognizable patterns of political reporting of later times, then came mafia influence, revolutionary preachers, liars, and useful idiots. Bribery, business interests, gov't intrusions, political biases. And then internet appeared, and broke the beauty of journalism :-) The phenomenon of US press as being generally useful as whole (compared to USSR, or eve Europe) is because of its diversity - ensured by freedom of speech - call it a really big choice of distortions. And the internet made this choice even wider, actually. "Good journalism" which is impartial, and correct, and truth-loving is a romantic myth, and always been.
Also in the FAZ, there was a very good commentary on the whole case by one of the publishers [2]. He identifies the same narrative smoke-bombs ("story-telling kitsch") in the Spiegel's writeup of the whole case as in Relotius' original articles.
[0] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/betrug-beim-sp...
[1] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/fall-relotius-...
[2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueber-die-fa...
Slightly improved Google translation:
„One does not write about arguments, ideas and concerns, but about the people who supposedly have them and about how they are, how they look and how they live, where one has met them, how dangerous, or at least exotic it was to meet them at all, and that the wind lashed against the quay wall, when splendor and misery came together at night in the room no. such-and-such. But as long as one writes in such a way, because one thinks in such a way, the case of Relotius will only lead to appeals to conscience and to the condemnation of those without conscience. The underlying issue, the storytelling kitsch, will not change.“
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25387895-the-confidence-...
1. We value honest hard work. However, we rarely value the people who do it. (The journalist was a "star" journalist and was required to perform at that level constantly.. does this ring a bell to any developers?) 2. Confirmation Bias is rather nasty, and that has been used to propagate some bad narritives. Right now the political deviviness has encouraged by the media. This article: Look at these "racist", "sexist", *ist people in some low-class people in this rural area. At least this is what I get from it. (That's been the garbage tauted by the left) 3. This guy was trusted as a leader way too much. I would not be surprised if he's a psychopath. (He has no concerns over the people he screws over, and the only reason he seems sorry is that he got caught).
And it really is telling that the perpetrator so easily gets styled as kind-of-also-a-victim, as if having won a few prizes created this pressure/temptation no human could possibly withstand.
(I started to write my comment in response to someone who replied to you and said you using the word sociopath was "dehumanizing", and that they don't want to defend the journalist, but that "any normal and well adjusted person" could have gotten addicted to having won prizes -- that as well as some comments on the first story about the subject on HN is what I meant with styling them as victim, not your comment as such)
When I first heard of him, his behavior and how people described him that was my first thought. It ticks all the boxes:
- „nicest guy I know“, knows intuitively what people want to hear
- is extremely good at fooling others, and can uphold a fake story for a long time
- does it for narcissistic reasons, and to enrich himself with no deeper goal in life
- adept at building alliances with people in power (the guy who got him was afraid he would be fired)
I know it’s a German publication, but this is perhaps a symptom of the monoculture that permeates a lot of organizations in the “West”
Ultimately the reason why he did it is because he could and I blame the nonexistent fact checking at Spiegel for this. But on a more personal level Relotius said he couldn’t stand the pressure of not delivering a great story (he won multiple awards first). I would also blame these awards for beeing to trusting, somebody like him should never have reached this level of fame and reputation.
I never really read his stuff, but I remember reading one story a long time ago that had someone start singing a song and I remembered wondering if this really happended or if I am in the realm of phantasy there. Now I know.
The problem is incentives, always
As a German living in Hamburg, where three of the main German publications (Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Der Stern) are produced (and Die Bild as well as Die Welt were also until recently), having worked with as well as being friends with a lot of people working there, I can assure you: it's not just incentives for the author, but also incentives for other people in the news organization(s) at work here.
The author's completely made up stories about, e.g. ...
- an American women who is traveling the whole country voluntarily, so that the quorum of one person being present at an execution for it to happen is met
- an innocent Syrian boy who thinks he caused the civil war
- an American town at the Mexican border, that is openly racist and full of dumb backwater, redneck folk
... feed into a commonly shared narrative. Those kind of elegantly written stories serve to immortalize these world-views held by many working at those companies.
Veterans of Der Spiegel were quick to point out, that in their days of working there, it would have been impossible to get even one of his reports pass the inhouse fact checkers and attribute this current blindsightedness to the rise of constructivism amongst journalists.
In what sense do you use constructivism here? I assume it's not mathematical constructivism.
Two examples:
1) As avid reader of American news, I'm always amazed by their one-sidedness when they report about "success"-stories of the German renewable energies program ("Now This" has multiple videos that if translated to German would come across as a teenager's propaganda attempt). But since their audience is American, usually not fluent in German, it's a cakewalk to "construct the truth" by not write a single sentence about domestic German criticisms of those programs.
2) The right-wing example in Germany would be reporting about violent and raping refugees, without stating that most of the victims are refugees themself and that it is often refugees who help with the investigations etc.
“Now This” has nothing that doesn't come across as a teenager's propaganda attempt (or, perhaps more to the point, rehashing press releases from interested parties) in English, so I'm not to surprised you think it would come off that way translated to German.
Then again, if you asked Americans to name a respected news source, “Now This” wouldn't be a frequent response.
„Now this“ is of course an exaggeration of journalistic constructionism, there are more professional approaches.
Constructivism is, in any of its manifestations, never a normative theory. Rather, it tries to describe how reality or certain concepts come about. Instead of saying that we should discard all notions of truth and try to construct reality/some concept in a certain way, it is a simple acknowledgement that our perception is socially mediated.It, of course, doesn't deny that there are two mushroom heads on the ground but rather it highlights that we view (i.e. construct) them as two mushrooms even though they are part of the same organism
Are you sure about this?
There are editors in such publications, and editors have bias.
which is not to say you aren't right, but assuming this reason omits a whole can of far more unpleasant worms
/s
believe me, the liberals and progressives I work with in the tech industry are just as bigoted if not worse than anyone I met growing up in the midwest. They outright dehumanize the "other" ie conservatives with complete blindness to the hypocrisy.
Trump is openly supportive of LGBTQIA+++ people, was the first Republican presidential nominee to be, and was supportive of them long before Hillary and Obama were.
Healthcare does not automatically equate to socialized healthcare, and it is ignorant and arrogant to make a blanket characterization that voting for a Republican is a vote against "healthcare", whatever that's supposed to mean.
Trump supporters were assaulted, that much is factual. The notion that they were a) liberal b) activists, is not a notion you can support with facts.
progressive university professor and black lives matter activist cracked a trump supporters skull with a bike lock
Of course since our court system is a joke filled with activist judges he gets 3 year probation for what should be attempted murder
If you flip the situation it's a hate crime covered daily by the mainstream media
Did you get everything off of your chest yet? Did you or your alternate account have any other grievances that you wanted list?
> Following Dr. Knuth’s doctrine helps to ward off moronry. He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays seems almost twee.
Calling the idea that code should be readable by humans "almost twee" just makes me think that the writer has no idea what they're talking about. Sure, there are times when people write crap code, but being readable by humans is the whole reason why we built coding languages. Not to mention, the average readability of code has probably increased over time, not decreased. The author is basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish Knuth's reputation, to the detriment of the credibility of the rest of the article.
It's nowhere near the magnitude of the fabrications in Der Spiegel of course, but it does seem to be the case that writers are willing to trust their own prejudices without fact checking. I was able to spot when those prejudices in the above example but only because I have relevant domain knowledge. It makes me wonder, how many times do I swallow the BS without knowing it? It's just a matter of how small (or big) of a statement they're willing to make without verifying it's veracity.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-comp...
I think people who study the arts are less likely to have experience with and understand complex systems and, because of the different structure of knowlege in a subject like journalism, it's easier to be overconfident in one's knowlege. Especially when extended to topics like physics which require mathematics to truly understand.
This is a strange criticism, and ironically it seems to reveal your own misconception of what "literate programming" actually is. Setting aside the discussion of how languages and design philosophies make tradeoffs that affect readability, Knuth's particular brand of "literate programming" pushes a concept that is orthogonal to language design, and substantially different than the precepts of style and commenting practices offered by things like PEP8. "Literate Programming". From Knuth's homepage [0]:
> The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.
From the literateprogramming.com page that Knuth's homepage links to, an excerpt from Ross Williams:
> Instead of writing code containing documentation, the literate programmer writes documentation containing code. No longer does the English commentary injected into a program have to be hidden in comment delimiters at the top of the file, or under procedure headings, or at the end of lines. Instead, it is wrenched into the daylight and made the main focus.
Here's a HN thread about docco, one of the few real-world tools related to literate programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2089912
"Literate programming" is not just about readable code, it's about fundamentally restructuring the entire program to be read as one would read a work of literature. And this is something that is not at all standard practice, nor a philosophy that everyone agrees to even be ideal in theory. Here's Peter Norvig's criticism [2]:
> I think the problem with Literate Programming is that assumes there is a single best order of presentation of the explanation. I agree that the order imposed by the compiler is not always best, but different readers have different purposes. You don’t read documentation like a novel, cover to cover. You read the parts that you need for the task(s) you want to do now. What would be ideal is a tool to help construct such paths for each reader, just-in-time; not a tool that makes the author choose a single pth for all readers.
So saying Knuth's philosophy of "literate programming" is "twee" is not at all inaccurate. The sentence structure from the NYT article could be rejiggered so that it's clearer that "twee" refers to Knuth's philosophy, and not "code that is readable by humans" in general. But the author is absolutely right to describe Knuth as being a pioneer in literate programming, and that it's a paradigm not followed in practice by mainstream software development.
[0] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html
[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/
[2] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2016/07/06/literate-programmi...
> He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays seems almost twee. Dr. Knuth has gone so far as to argue that some computer programs are, like Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral,” works of literature worthy of a Pulitzer.
Note this part specifically:
> the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance...a notion that nowadays seems almost twee"
"literate programming" is the notion emphasizing* the "importance" of writing code readable by humans. And this "notion" The word "which" would make it even clearer that the subject of the clause is "literate programming", but the sentence is still grammatically correct as is. Everyone thinks it's important for code to be readable, but Knuth is the one who is radical about how important it is -- to the point that he thinks programs should be "literature worthy of a Pulitzer".
In any case, the NYT author is more accurate than the previous HN commenter, who seems to have jumped to a conclusion without knowing anything about the concept "literate programming", or how and why Knuth is known for it. The NYT author is not "basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish Knuth's reputation", but it seems the commenter is not as familiar with Knuth and/or computer programming as he thinks he is.
Actually..
no.
He did do this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
And it's not just that programming should be in languages rather than machine code, but that the code + comments should read like a coherent document.
In other words, just because you write in a programming language doesn't mean it's literate programming.
A quick example of this in action. A friend of mine is irrationally partisan when it comes to being a Democrat. The party can do no wrong; all wrongs are ignored, without exception. Hillary Clinton was her unicorn politician that was to change everything bad about the world, she cried for weeks about the election loss. Then she moved on to attacking any of her friends she suspected of supporting Trump. When that wasn't enough to sate the anger and hurt, she moved on to demanding proof of loyalty - proof that you didn't support Trump and did support Hillary (Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein supporters were also evil).
She loves any documentary or media she can get her hands on about lesser educated / poor white people in America (she is a white person, and grew up in poor Appalachia). She loves to make fun of them; these are people she hates. It confirms her existing bias and makes everything feel better by reinforcing what she believes about politics generally and the 2016 election specifically. It gives her a villain group to blame any negative situation on (identity politics practically requires groups to designate as evil or bad, to properly establish the framework).
That’s the part that annoys me most. You want bigoted hick towns? As of twenty years ago, I could have rattled off a half-dozen towns in Indiana that would have qualified (though the author’s pre-conceived image would have been a stretch for even these towns). I can’t believe that in twenty years they’ve all turned into liberal enclaves. But that would have taken more work and research, so pick an innocent town on the map and write your narrative about them instead? And if all places, Minnesota? Of all of small town America, I picture MN as probably most “liberal”, for lack of a better description, though I admit little data.
I dunno, in the end I’m annoyed that the reporter didn’t even do a very good job of faking it, and a small town of what are probably nice folks (“damned good folks”?) took the hit.
For me as a German the comments here read like: A "The New York Times" article stated... which is odd, everyone usually drops the "the", if it doesn't fit.
We also change the "der" in German newspapers. E.g. "at the Spiegel" "bei dem Spiegel" or "in an article of the Spiegel" "in einem Bericht des Spiegels".
https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/inside_the_worlds_l...
It's quite obvious that article about that small town had not passed through the most cursory fact checking.
The CJR owes some explanation.
I was under the impression those were just examples. The article says that the biggest difference from the american model is the timing of consulting with the fact checkers. As far as I understand, in the american model the fact checker is often responsible to verify sources and details, as described in The New Yorker job description:
Yes, this is exactly what fact checkers at top newspapers were traditionally paid to do.
I have no idea how many true fact checkers are left, but you described the job precisely.
Humans at work
The internet has made everybody a publisher, from your cousin who thinks Elvis isn't dead to that MIT scientist with 17 degrees. And they're all online.
It's also created an instant feedback loop, where you instantly measure how "good" your publishing is by tracking clicks, page time metrics, and referrals.
It even provides a zero-overhead revenue model. The money's not what publishing used to be, but hey, you can tap into it without having to do much.
Finally, because of the previous items, it has destroyed traditional journalism. What do I see when I consume journalism today? I see fear. Everybody knows it's dead and internet eyeballs is the only thing that does anything. The person and their emotional connection over Twitter, FB, YouTube and the like is the brand, not the paper or magazine. Everybody knows that.
This means the old guard is gone, the people who used to sit in an office and tell you that your story was crap. They cost too much in overhead and nobody cares if your story was crap as long as you correct it the next day. (It's all self-correcting, right?)
So instead of news, we now have celebrities who give their personal impressions of how it all makes them feel. People reward or punish publishers by their ability to draw them into some event and make them feel one way or the other. This reporter (I use the term loosely) knew how to do a great job of that. He also knew that the emotional content far outweighed the rest of it. People loved him. His publisher loved him.
Until they didn't.
The only reason he was fired, the only reason BigNetCorp X would care if they're screwing you over or not, is because enough other people were able to raise a big enough rukus that it couldn't be ignored. He could have kept doing this for years as long as he was willing to scale his fabrications in accordance to how much of a PR stink people could have made.
While interesting as a stand-alone story, my feeling is that each of these just makes the next bunch more clever.
It's not a very good time to be alive for people who like journalism.
You just cruise Twitter to find some random poor soul who said something consistent with the narrative you want to construct.
Now you say: "People are saying XYZ"
And deflect the source of the narrative from yourself.
What is "Whole Foods" territory?
The "Blue wave" flipping 40 congressional seats was the major story of the 2018 election.
Though I should say for the record when someone says “DNC” like this it usually means they learned what the DNC was from the Russia hacks, given the DCCC is mostly in charge of house races and has been increasingly sidelined by small dollar funding and independent PACs like Bloomberg’s.
Most Germans I've talked to are incredibly misinformed about what life in America is actually like. They think the entire country is more like a small southern town and that police roam the streets shooting citizens at random.
We have our problems of course and are far from perfect but the extent of them is grossly exaggerated by European media.
In a sense this this is not so divorced from reality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#...
So if you ignore the context, it does seem like police roam the street shooting citizens at random.
It's really easy to pick up caricatures of life in foreign countries. I don't think anyone is immune to imaging that foreigners are more exotic and strange than they really are. I remember someone on an American forum confidently saying that in anime, a character's family owning a car was supposed to indicate great wealth because car ownership was super rare in Japan -- a vast exaggeration of a minor demographic difference.
I'm a German who's lived abroad for the majority of his life. This statement is so true. I've heard of Africans asking if Hitler was still in power, Americans thinking Germans all lived in castles, and Germans wondering whether we had electricity in Zambia. If you've never lived there, how can you know?
I have dozens of American friends and frequently read American publications. I daresay I have some understanding of US culture from this exposure - but even so I still don't know what it's like to actually live in the United States.
https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...
I think that's a better link than the one above, which is to a partisan political website.
That accurately describes one of the established ways to bookend a stint in politics. In the UK, this caliber of bullshit would either tip them for a future cabinet post should they ever stand for election, or indicate that they are a recently retired MP, fabricating scandal to preserve some remaining public relevance, which they know only how to measure in inches of print.
* business model crashing, so experienced staff laid off
* smart millennials don't opt for a career in journalism
* the ones who do emerge inculcated by the college monoculture, largely unable to question authority
* growing up with net-access, they are ill-equipped for any method of fact-finding except google searches
* laziness, incompetence and docile conformity make them soft targets for vested interests
* many stories are therefore just regurgitated press releases
* many 'reactions' are strikingly uniform across independent organizations
This whole article reads like that guy from the fifth season of The Wire.
1) Fargo, ND often has the cheapest gas in the area because it has 3 pipelines going through the town.
In 2014, Relotius sold two stories to the monthly magazine of a Swiss paper, both interviews with hairdressers. The second one (still online: https://folio.nzz.ch/2014/februar/blondinen-faerben-ihr-haar...), a supposed interview with a Finnish hairdresser immediately received a comment from someone in Finland ("this report seems to be fiction"), complaining that the mentioned salon doesn't actually exist, the mentioned prices were all wrong and the mentioned name had the wrong gender. The magazine printed a correction and decided to no longer work with the author.
No offense to Finnish hairdressers, but if someone completely fabricates a story this meaningless, it's reasonable to assume that he's a pathological liar and not a single written word of his can be taken seriously.
Given that the guy was such a pathological liar, even about trivial matters, I find it very hard to believe that no one supposedly ever had any suspicion about the truthfulness of writing.
Maybe David is willing to hand out the data he has downloaded?
>> As far as I can tell from their mea culpa, this vetting process is limited to what can be Googled from Hamburg.
The damn thing doesn't even load properly with cookies disabled.
I apologize for the toxicity but the content got lost to me.
Also, TIL that many germans haven't watched "Game of Thrones", apparently.