Edit: some fair counterpoints to me, below. But publishing an opinion piece does not necessarily imply endorsement, and nor does it diminish the author's point(s) one iota.
It's a valid counterpoint. The guy who wrote about X is not, usually, in charge of X. Agreed. The criticism, however, is not about the author - it's about the organization that endorses both the action X, and the criticism of X.
The NYT is an opinionated organization, not a public wall open to whoever wants to throw things at it. They have an editorial stance. When they write criticisms of X, they are implicitly - as an organization - criticizing X. When they do X themselves, they are - as an organization - implicitly endorsing X. When they wish to distance themselves from a criticism in an article, they explicitly point out - hey, this is an Op-Ed from such-and-such author, and doesn't represent the views of the NYT. When it's not an Op-Ed, and/or when it's not disavowed, they are saying: this article represents the views of the NYT.
The writer is not a hypocrite. The organization, however, is.
There's nothing illogical or invalid about holding the organization accountable for doing bad things, and for pointing out that the organization is trying to earn goodwill from the public by being "against X" while perpetrating the act themselves.
It's not at all. It is a valid attack on the NYT, but it's not a counterpoint. I.e. ad hominem.
I follow the news to get informed, not to measure the moral virtue of the media (except as it relates to the accuracy and representativeness of their reporting).
This is not how how a functioning news room works. That's not how any of this works. You don't check your individuality at the door. A good publication can and should promote well reasoned work, especially if it conflicts with the status quo or view points of other writes in the org.
I think accusations of hypocrisy usually map to an insightful argument: "Hey, there's a reason people do that thing you object to, and it's usually a good reason, as demonstrated by the fact that, given all the options, you find yourself resorting to it. So, maybe instead of shaming people, you should be helping to isolate the reason and find a way to obviate it instead of just throwing stones."
I don't suppose the author of this opinion piece wrote or controls any of the privacy policies they reported on. But they chose which privacy policies they were going to report on, and which ones they were willing to highlight in their article. Is it really an unreasonable ask of a reporter who is focused on privacy to also be willing to research the practices of the website that hosts them?
To be fair, of all the news organizations I have beefs with on privacy, the NYT has been doing a lot better in their reporting than their competition:
- They have a disclaimer at the bottom of this article linking to their own policy. They also include several news organizations (including themselves) in this dataset.
- Reporters have been willing to publish articles that talk about and link to (good) ad blockers like Ublock Origin, and acknowledge that they're an effective way to increase privacy.
- Their editorial staff has been (relatively) self aware about the NYT's privacy practices and appears to be talking about it internally.
Could they be better? Yes. Is it a weird omission that in an article that specifically calls out Google, the reporter doesn't mention that the current NYT privacy policy is both more complicated and longer than Google's current version? Yes. But comparatively, if I was going to call out any set of reporters on this, I wouldn't start with anyone working for the NYT. I think they're moving in the right direction here. This is a well written article.
In general though, it's not unreasonable to call out reporters for failing to look at or refusing to talk about the privacy policies of their employers in their articles. I don't expect them to force their tech teams to change things, I don't expect them to walk away from their jobs, and I don't expect them to lobby their bosses on my behalf. I just expect them not to ignore important, relevant parts of the stories they report on -- because shifts in privacy regulation are going to have huge impacts on things like news funding, and we need to talk about that.
While not mentioned in the article's text, the New York Times does feature as a data point: https://i.imgur.com/uaOqPod.png
And the article ends with the NYT's own message: "Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of The Times's practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections."
In general though, I disagree that reporters lacking control over the platforms they use means that they're immune from this type of criticism. News organizations are a part of this conversation whether they like it or not, and there are no resolutions (legal or technical) that won't affect news sites. It's irresponsible for a reporter to ignore that.
When people call out the hypocrisy in articles like this, they're not blaming the reporter for their employer's data policies, they're blaming them for ignoring that those data policies exist.
It doesn't mean the reporter's points aren't valid, it does mean there's a dimension of the story they're ignoring, either through ignorance or through choice.
Apart from that, addressing seeming hypocrisies in things that newspapers complain about but engage in is often illuminating: I recall an Atlantic(?) article complaining about deceptive ads that went out of their way to talk about their own likely serving of deceptive ads, describing the difficulty in knowing which ads you'll be serving given the byzantine web of sellers, resellers, exchanges, etc etc that Web publishers deal with.