I cancelled my subscription to the NYT because I felt this way about many of their pieces.
If you cancelled your NYT subscription, may I ask what other daily newspaper you find to be as informative but more objective? Or have you given up daily news altogether?
If you want to listen to audio, there are a lot of great podcasts, many from the above publications. (People in the rigthwing media bubble will complain that the above four pubs are liberal, but frankly: reality has a liberal bias in 2019, and all the above are truth-first, and thus VERY different from rightwing pubs like WSJ, Fox, Daily Caller, etc.)
As for NPR: it is really a terrible example of our current 'both sides', conservative-influenced media. NPR sounds fair, but the NPR news production is strongly controlled by its individual member stations. Because of that station control, NPR is highly susceptible to whining from the right, and so they end up presenting "both sides" of many issues, even when only one is true. It's sad. (Example: NPR refused to use the word "lie" to refer to DJT's statements even as late as Dec 2016, when the NYT had come out with a usage of "lie" to great hoopla in Oct/Nov 2016). The NYT is better than NPR, except for NYT politics coverage: don't read its politics coverage and if you can, skip its headlines. For some reason NYT editors and politics reporters are strong believers in the both sides, fact-second religion.
I do end up finding myself on The Atlantic fairly often through links. It has some good opinion pieces, but I don't really think of it as "news" so much. Or at least, not the stuff that I've read.
I’ve a great deal of experience in the healthcare field. Their recent series of work on healthcare has been amazing and amazingly bad: they’ve chased down data, analyzed it thoroughly, and apparently not bothered to speak to actual experts in the field to contextualize that data. Particularly where that would interfere with their agenda.
The result is, as they say, noise and fury signifying nothing. In honor of the gell-man effect, I couldn’t in good conscience use them as a source for a field I’m not an expert in.
AHA! Thank you for giving a name to a phenomenon I've talked about for years!
Every now and then I’ll deep dive into an area for whatever reason. E.g. when Trump did his tax proposal, it directly affected us because of the reduction of the marriage penalty. So I looked at how it compared to tax laws in other countries. My conclusion was that the main effect of the proposal would’ve been to move is closer to the tax regimes in Germany, etc. Much of the Western world is following a trend of lowering corporate taxes, e.g. Sweden. But reporting that Trump’s tax policy follows a global trend is not consistent with how journalists today report the news (on both sides), where every story has to have identifiable villains or heros and support some broader narrative and agenda.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-el... "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia" Nov 11, 2016 (Note that quite a few reporters have publicly said they think this story was sourced to Trump partisans in the NY FBI office, but there has been no firm reporting about the true reasons for it. Yet.)
1. cross referencing your sources 2. seeking the other side of the story / opposing viewpoints 3. asking those involved for comment
because it seems glaringly obvious to me in the Covington Catholic case, none of that was done until 48 hours when some high profile twitter names started actually pointing out the glaring errors.
And I certainly won't say the NYT is perfect. But it seems a bit much to claim the NYT has so many errors that it is unreadable or reality free. And it is certainly better than the vast majority of alternatives.
After all, in the very case you mentioned, they did print this[1] almost immediately. And the problem in this case comes far more from the "like" button and yet more twitter storms than it does news papers. Papers which attract vastly fewer eyeballs, have far fewer curse words and require attention spans greater than a chipmunk.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...
If their editorial standards permit them to rush to judgment as they did in the Catholic school incident how can I trust their editorial standards in more nuanced areas where I don't get to see the full story on video for myself?
I think this particular instance is minor, though unfortunate for the unfairly maligned children. What really worries me is just the judgment of the paper. They should've known they didn't have the whole story and that the whole story would be available on video. Why not wait until you knew the relevant information? I can understand people making mistakes, this scenario just seems so simple and obvious though and I can't believe they botched it. It makes me worried - how can I trust them to handle complicated issues?
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/making-sense-of-the-phi...
Over the last couple days I’ve been watching the unfolding reaction and re-reactions to the video of the confrontation between Native American activist and elder Nathan Phillips and a crowd of high school students from Covington, Kentucky on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The whole story is a good example of how we can react quickly to a zoomed in (both literally and metaphorically) video and miss a lot of what led up to it, as well as some key context. With that said, though, when you add all the context I’m not sure it’s all that different from what it looked like on the first go, despite some now saying the new evidence and new videos change everything.
Saturday night and into Sunday I watched numerous different videos of the encounter itself and what led up to it. So let me give you my impression of what happened as well as links to videos and accounts which can help you come to your own conclusions.
First, the initial videos could easily give the impression that Phillips (the man with the drum) was in the midst of marching in a protest when he was surrounded by a crowd of white teenagers in MAGA hats. That’s not what happened.
(Be very careful of the takes from rightwing, billionaire-funded/owned publications like the Daily Caller, Reason, WSJ, IJR, Fox News, Drudge, or anyone on rightwing radio: they have a political reason to play down racism from a white kid wearing a MAGA hat.)
The initial account was nothing less than a setup. The derisive referral to boys in “MAGA hats”, the utter speculation about what a boy was feeling to fit a narrative in direct conflict with the boys own statement, the over-generalizing “they were all doing tomahawk chops”, and on and on. This is a tortured attempt at ass-covering.
Most glaringly, failing to directly call out the utter lies told by Phillips (a professional protestor and agitator) to the press, which entirely discredits him, the adult in this situation, who was in fact an instigator.
The NYT followup piece [1] on this incident was actually significantly more fair. But it still doesn’t excuse getting it wrong the first time.
What’s beautiful is anyone can watch the full uncut zoomed out videos and see for themselves. This second-hand “analysis” is toxic to the truth, which is just a click on YouTube away.
Compare and contrast the TalkingPointsMemo piece with this one [2] — which I don’t know anything about that site, but the author seems to be a lot more clear headed about what seems to have happened. What I read there was someone describing what they learned from watching the full 1 hour 40 minute video showing what really happened. [3]
In short it’s been an absolute banner week for “Fake News” and you would certainly hope this would provoke some soul searching from the so-called journalists responsible for this.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...
[2] - https://reason.com/blog/2019/01/20/covington-catholic-nathan...