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Comment by finnthehuman | Hacker News Reader

The LDS church is interesting in that it simultaneously large enough and insular enough to make stark differences in journalistic angles sharp.

Journalism often falls into a trap that puts the cart before the horse. It's preordained [no pun intended] what type of coverage many events are going to get. Who among us couldn't guess what the NYT's take is going to be in a mormon leader's obituary before they write it?

A journo doesn't go into something to figure out "what's the deal with [foo]?" That won't sell (not to the public, nor their editors). But the reality is often worse. Journos think they have everything all figured out before they even investigate. They just need to investigate enough information to slap it into their story as if they were a algorithm automatically writing a sports story from the game stats.

edit: I'm editing out an already-vague story about being involved with something that receives media coverage. I'll just say if you notice how dumb journos are when they cover subject matter you're a unrelated professional in, being the "who" in receiving end of news coverage lets you see just how much they want to draw conclusions for the rest of the world unless you work on visibility to counter their obvious narrative angles. And the worst thing is, once this is the game it doesn't matter how right or wrong they are because organizations are going to fight negative coverage either way.

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> notice how dumb journos are when they cover subject matter

This is a key takeaway that, I suspect, everyone who has ever been interviewed, covered, or quoted in the press feels.

Every time you see a story in the general media that grossly misrepresents a subject you know well, remember that feeling. Because for every other topic covered, I guarantee there is a domain expert feeling as you did.

I’m three for three in terms of regretting journo contact. Whether it was the local rag or a national broadsheet; misquotation, glib misrepresentation and sheer fabrication are inevitable results.

Corollary: reserve your greatest mistrust for anyone that openly and actively courts the media. They are well aware of the outcomes and are manipulating the game. This includes your in-house PR team and most elected officials, including the ones you voted for.

> Every time you see a story in the general media that grossly misrepresents a subject you know well, remember that feeling. Because for every other topic covered, I guarantee there is a domain expert feeling as you did.

I learned that in the 80's. I was working in an office building that developed a gas leak, and after a couple hours it ignited and blew the roof off.

The 3 local news channels all covered it. They each told starkly conflicting accounts of it. None of this was because they had any agenda. It was just sheer sloppiness and rush to get the story "in the can" and on to the next. For example, one described the building as a warehouse. It was actually an office building, and looked like an office building.

It's interesting how easy it is to forget that feeling.

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton

I had a profound realization about journalism in college, when I read a popular science article about what it claimed was some astounding discovery in physics, then when I read the original paper realized that the journalist had taken a single sentence from the abstract completely out of context, misunderstood it entirely, and turned it into a sensational headline. I'm sure it was simply because the journalist didn't have a deep understanding of the principles involved in the paper, and that not all journalism is so far from the mark. But it definitely instilled a skepticism of journalism in me.

Yeah, but there's plenty of physicists who don't understand physics among proponents of string theory, multiverses and fine-tuning.

The point is who would you trust for basic news among NYT, Fox News, the Post, the BBC, NHK, Russia Today, China Daily, some crazy Mormon journo?

> This includes your in-house PR team and most elected officials, including the ones you voted for.

Important exception: leakers. (Keep in mind you wrote "mistrust" and not "skepticism.")

That’s fair. Too late to edit but skepticism would indeed target the intended sentiment more precisely.

I’d hesitate to suggest that leakers aren’t playing the same game. Requiring leakers to be entirely pure in motive and innocent in expectation would be a false and unfair standard.

Leakers are playing their part in the same game. In the case of companies I've worked for in the past, leakers were just grabbing cash in exchange for helping the media push the distorted narratives that were already being published, framing the leaker as a hero. This isn't to say all leakers are to be mistrusted; "skepticism" is indeed the right word, and I believe it still applies to leakers.

Edit to add: there are obvious cases where whistleblowing is a necessary and welcome action for ethical reasons, but most often "leaks" that I've seen get blown up by the media over sensitive information that does no one any good, inside or outside of the affected company. I think "737 Max is unsafe"-style leaks are less common.

I was interviewed by a major newspaper twice, both times they published almost the opposite of what I told them. Once they also misspelled my name, which actually made me happy, because it was like "okay, I am definitely not imagining things, they really can't get anything right".

In both situation I was just some unimportant rando. I can imagine that people they dislike get much worse treatment.

> Journos think they have everything all figured out before they even investigate.

Matt Taibbi didn't have a story before he began investigating the financial sector corruption leading up to and following the 2008 crash.

Jeremy Scahill didn't know the details of the Gardez massacre until he got a contact to actually drive him to the scene. (An act so dangerous I believe he called "incredibly stupid" in his documentary "Dirty Wars.")

I have no idea what David Barstow thought he had figured out when he wrote the Pulitzer-winning "Pentagon Pundits" story for NYT. But the evidence he uses in the story clearly backs up the meat of his claims, and a GAO report corroborates it. So why would it even matter in this case?

For Seymour Hersh's Abu Graib abuse story his pre-conceived notions are similarly irrelevant due to the photographic evidence.

Ronan Farrow's preconceived notions about the Harvey Weinstein case are similarly irrelevant.

Hell, consider the leaker to Project Veritas who somehow got the footage of Amy Robach talking about ABC shelving her story on Epstein. What's the relevance of Project Veritas' goal or political bent given that was a genuine video of Robach passionately discussing the shelved story?

> I'll just say if you notice how dumb journos are when they cover subject matter you're a unrelated professional in, being the "who" in receiving end of news coverage lets you see just how much they want to draw conclusions for the rest of the world unless you work on visibility to counter their obvious narrative angles.

But for the most impactful ones it's almost certainly not the same "dumb journo" from your area of expertise writing the story. Given that newspapers hire writers with as varied talents as Barstow and, say, Thomas Friedman, your shortcut seems quite likely to lead to a flurry of "dumb journo" false positives.

It's not that sometimes coincidentally they don't ever get things right; it's rather that quite often their biases shine through when their job is to present a more or less unbiased take on newsworthy events --with exceptions for organs who by their nature are biased like "The Daily Republican" or "The Democrat-Constitution", etc.

In essence journalists with bias are TV with laugh tracks. But instead of laughing for us, they make our minds up for us.

There are certainly some who do this, notably News Corp[1]. And the huge presence of that organization gives the impression that all others are this way too.

But it simply isn't true of respectable publications. People don't go to journalism school thinking "I'm going to devote my life to hiding facts". If they do, they don't graduate. And papers aren't interested in hiring people that are going to create an endless stream of retractions. Likewise, any outlet that doesn't issues retractions is highly suspect. So reporters at respectable paper really are trying to find the truth.

Indeed, this whole thread is not about facts but about a person's opinion about the tone of an article. And, quite frankly, a blog post that is lying about the article when he says it only mentions negative aspects of Monson's life[2] Which is probably why the lead image is not actually linked to the NYT article.

Papers often print things people don't want to be true, or say them in ways that offend certain groups. But to rely on a gut feeling or general annoyance or selected anecdotes to decide that a paper is lying would be an error.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/obituaries/thomas-monson-...

The article focuses on opposition to gay marriage and to women in the priesthood, briefly touching on only an expansion in size of # missionaries and openness of records.

The blog post author argues that Monson had huge influence internationally, the article does not show that.

It’s not about tone, it’s about emphasis.

The New York Times routinely hides facts and generally ignores relevant viewpoints and context when covering substantial topics.

To pick a random example Injust noticed the other day: how often has the New York Times parroted the Democratic talking point that “Medicare is prohibited by law from negotiating drug prices.” It’s a point that is not only misleading but completely non-sensical. (Medicare doesn’t directly provide prescription drug coverage. Prescription drug coverage is offered by private supplemental plans under Part D, which do negotiate drug prices.) I’m constantly running into stuff like that, where journalists unthinkingly repeat talking points that turn out to be misleading upon deeper inspection.

To use another example, the Washington Post recently had to issue a correction in an article that falsely claimed that education spending in the US has decreased over the last several decades.

Perhaps worse still is the narrative and lack of context. How often did the New York Times mention that Trump’s corporate tax cut would bring us in line with countries like Sweden, France, Canada, and Germany? How often do articles about Warren’s wealth tax proposal mention that Sweden and France recently abandoned theirs? How often do they mention that the biggest difference between taxes in the US and in Europe are not lower taxes on the rich, but vastly lower taxes on the middle class? Does New York Times coverage of education ever mention that school choice, including public funding of religious schools, is common in Europe? Does it ever mention that we spend more than almost any other OECD country per capita on K-12 education? Does it ever mention that abortion is legal to 22 weeks in Georgia but only 14 weeks in France and 12 in Germany? Did the New York Times ever put Trump’s “anti-Muslim rhetoric” in context by pointing out that Islamic head coverings are illegal in many European countries? (By contrast, when the international context advances its political agenda, the Times happily provides it. How often does the Times invoke the fact that developed European countries all have universal healthcare coverage, or stronger gun control? Apparently, the views of people on the other side of the pond are highly relevant in deciding what kind of health care system to have, but not in deciding what kind of tax system we should have to pay for it.)

These seem like fair points. So there's definitely plenty of room for improvement at NYT. Do you mind me asking if you have a similarly prepared spiel for Fox News? Didn't they claim the American President wasn't actually American for years? I know this is whataboutery, but I suspect NYT is one of the better media outlets in the US despite the failings you've pointed out.

I’ve don’t read or watch Fox News regularly so I don’t know. The NYT may be one of the better papers, but I don’t find it crosses the threshold of being worth reading.

I don’t really trust the news. I’ll read the Chicago Tribune or Bloomberg to get a general sense of what’s going on, and then try to research specific topics based on primary sources. I really like National Review. Unlike the NYT, NR is explicit about its viewpoint. So even though, for example, I support keeping the ACA, I can read an NR article on healthcare policy because the authors “show their work” in terms of how they perceive the facts to fit into their (generally conservative) take on the issue. That at least gives me a basis for researching things further. But with the NYT, I feel like I’m just constantly being manipulated, and because the NYT is so terrible about citing sources and data, I don’t even really have a starting point for further research.

This is an excellent point about transparency. Not just the NR which is very transparent, but on the other side you have mother jones and democracy now and the like. Those claiming to be purely objective and without bias, NYT for example, are the dangerous ones. Many of the readers don’t think there’s any bias in NYT coverage. Scary. As you said, good authors “show their work.”

organs who by their nature are biased like "The Daily Republican" or "The Democrat-Constitution"

There are a lot of local papers have things like Republican and Democrat in their names for historical, not political reasons or for political reasons that are by now long historical. Here's one example:

https://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/columnists/ensley/...

Investigative journalism is not the norm, less so over time.

Taibbi talked about this (again) on Rogan's podcast. Explained (paraphrasing here) that he probably wouldn't have been able to break those stories today. It's just that much harder to get someone to pay for the effort.

On the flipside, I'm very encouraged by podcasters experimenting with long form.

99% Invisible had a brief recap (of the how) of their reporting on homelessness in Oakland. A reporter wanted to really dive into the story. Build relationships with people and follow them around. For months and maybe years. That takes money.

She had to write a proposal, have a plan. Then her editor (publisher?) had to secure funding. Hit up a bunch of relevant philanthropies, pitch the story, just like a startup pitch. 99% is also listener funded.

Pretty much the opposite of ad funded outrage amplifiers, aka corporate media.

I really thought Cringely's core notion for NerdTV was going to become a thing.

Truism: The story is made in the edit.

He'd publish ALL of the source material on a topic. He'd edit and publish his own story. But any one else could also make their own edit and publish their own story.

> Journos think they have everything all figured out before they even investigate. They just need to investigate enough information to slap it into their story as if they were a algorithm automatically writing a sports story from the game stats.

That’s unfairly broad and in my experience, untrue. And to the extent it is true, I would argue that is largely because we have moved to a model that rewards journalism for writing the things people or publicists want to read, making it harder for investigative work that ruffles feathers and makes it challenging to even do the work of learning.

And although I won’t argue that many, many journalists aren’t subject-matter experts in their beats, the good ones are. More to the point, many more are willing to become experts and talk to experts.

And for what it’s with, “what’s the deal with [foo]” was my go-to question when working on big stories when my full-time job was a journalist. I’m a naturally curious person. I want to learn as much as I can about as many things as I can. And maybe I was lucky, but my editors certainly didn’t have a problem with me pursuing those stories — even if I wasn’t able to do as many of them as I would have liked.

> Who among us couldn't guess what the NYT's take is going to be in a mormon leader's obituary before they write it?

Their obit for the previous president, Gordan B Hinckley is quite positive...

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/us/28hinckley.html

Edit: here are more if people are curious. One before, and one after the Mormon church allowed black people similar position as non-black people. They're still pretty upbeat.

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/01/19/archives/david-o-mckay-mo...

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/07/us/spencer-kimball-mormon...

There's a certain irony in the OP accusing journalists of starting with a premise and working backwards, when the OP did it themself.

I don't really see that here though. He's over-generalizing, but you can't claim that some (many?) journalists don't do exactly what he mentioned. People expect what journalists write to be trustworthy, but too often what they write is not. Think back on the Covington kids saga. They were dragged through the mud and many journalists participated in it. If they get something like that so wrong, despite there being video evidence of the event online, then how are people supposed to trust what they write? Obviously not all organizations are as guilty of it. When I read something by Reuters I'm fairly confident of what I'm reading, but it's much less so with many others.

presumably actual journalists would train against unconscious bias... maybe you're saying we can't expect they be any better than your average person on the street.

I would argue that defending against Bias is the editors job, they are not there to catch typos!

This is true of almost everything human created.

I think the contrast is that the church has been heaped in controversies since Monson became President.

The CES letter came out and 'A Letter to my Wife', which both have historical (from the source LDS.org) sources that basically do a lot to disprove and change the entire understanding of how the church came to be, of what really happened in the days of Joseph and Brigham, and what they were really like..

As an ex-mormon, we were taught deeply all about Joseph, and that he was not a polygamist that started w/ Brigham, the CES Letters (to which the church responded by being (more) transparent and created the Church Essays which back up the CES letters but try to spin it as 'it was the times they lived in'.

A big split in the church for example was when Joseph was hitting it in the barn w/ Fanny Alger a 14 year old (he was 38). Even in that time it was NOT okay to have relations w/ a 14 year old.. the average wedded age was 19 and the average age difference was something like 23:19 a 38 year old marrying a 14 year old was very rare, and when he's already married very improper.

His wife Emma rightly so was very against the practice. The kicker is that the reason Joseph was 'martyred/received justice' was because he'd burned a privately owned newspaper that was about to blow open the polygamy story and destroy his reputation. He couldn't have that so he burnt it down, which led the hidden opposition to turn against him and bring down the state law upon him (rightly so imho).

He basically got what was coming to him, he wasn't a Saint, he was a conman. Just as the church has been conning people by saying that tithes goes towards building temple's and humanitarian aid, but has really been going to investment funds and business building.

Back to the topic at hand, the fact that the church has all these controversies since 2012'ish is probably a HUGE reason that the Times decided not to be Mormon friendly. The church is hemmoraging members (exmormon sub on reddit has > 100k members now). It's excommunicating the 'good ones' left and right like Sam Young who's only sin against the church was calling for reforms regarding children being left alone in Bishop's office where they ask them about their masturbation practices and fantasies and if they act on those fantasies. Having taken DCFS foster care classes and learning about 'grooming', the Bishop's office is the perfect place for grooming to take place, and the fact that numerous Bishop's and ex-bishops are in prison for child abuse cases simply proves that.

It's all just a matter of the 'times we live in now'... don't blame journalism for the slant, blame the times. Just like the church blames every negative historical thing they did on 'the times in which they lived'. Like Brigham who claimed a black person's highest celestial glory would be to be a servant to 'the rest of us' in Heaven. I'm pretty sure in the bible when a prophet 'believes' something that's wrong, doesn't God correct him and MAKE him change the narrative? Isn't it his job to CHANGE the times and belief of the TIMES? Not continue to be prejudicial because it's convenient? If any of them were prophets then they'd be on the right side of history not the wrong side.

Edit adding: Also the November doctrine (November/2015) was a huge thing at the time as well. Basically it stated if you're a member of a family with same-sex parents you couldn't be baptized till you were 18 and partake in the blessings of the faith, unless you basically disown your parents. Many have left the faith over this one change in doctrine.

Sources: https://cesletter.org/ https://www.letterformywife.com/ https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topi...

Sam Young has over 1000 stories of abuse of children by clergy in the church at: https://protectldschildren.org/read-the-stories-2/

Thanks for sharing this context--just a small response on polygamy...

> As an ex-mormon, we were taught deeply all about Joseph, and that he was not a polygamist that started w/ Brigham

Polygamy is taught in the Doctrine and Covenants, which almost every Mormon will carry to church on Sunday..

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-test...

> Revelation given through Joseph Smith the Prophet ... including the eternity of the marriage covenant and the principle of plural marriage.

I wouldn't restrict this to journalists. Wasted a year during undergrad working for a political scientist who knowingly ignored evidence on a historically oriented project that would render their fashionable hypothesis void. Bringing said evidence up in meetings on multiple occasions didn't help my prospects of getting anything positive out of the professional association (besides perhaps that should get out of the racket?).

An afterthought: I suspect this is done subconsciously too quite often by people in such fields as part of their evidence seeking (hypothesis confirmation) procedures which are admittedly more adhoc than those sort of naturally built into many STEM fields (I'm sure someone could provide numerous counterexamples to this latter point though, especially with the replication crisis).

Even in the "quantitative" fields, one must have random inspiration to make a novel idea; faith to go to the effort of the researching it, ego to believe it's worthwhile; and drive to get things done by force of will to survive re: job+funding. An interesting combination of qualities.

On top of that, many concepts are only feasible to measure by using human-invented models+metrics, under very tightly controlled conditions. Oftentimes these metrics' equivalence to real-world circumstances is matter of faith or philosophy.

So everything is untrustworthy. The people doing it can be totally incompetent even in making simple observations. They can be wilfully or negligently unaware of competing evidence or errors in analysis. They can be measuring the wrong thing entirely due to historical precedent or because it's good publicity or because it's impossible to measure the thing you really want to test.

Ultimately this probably shouldn't be surprising to anyone that's experienced the real world practice of anything. But it is worth remembering that anecdotal evidence from your own eyes can be more predictive than statistical evidence from strangers.

I get the feeling that you have a very ingrained idea of what it means to practice journalism and what it means to be a journalist. All of what you wrote goes against the basic principles and ideals of journalism, so I wonder if you mean that current journalism is not living up to it's ideals (I.e. it's a temporary gully) or if you mean it's systematic within the profession?

Either way, what way do you propose that normal citizens get the investigative information needed to participate in a democracy if we don't have journalism? What's the alternative? Or if there are outlets practicing journalism in the way that you'd approve of, which are those?

>Either way, what way do you propose that normal citizens get the investigative information needed to participate in a democracy if we don't have journalism?

I think there isn't one, but I also think that average citizens are already not getting the information needed to participate in a democracy from journalists. Almost any politically important issue is inundated with political advocacy that's masquerading as journalism. That isn't to say that there aren't journalists who don't do this, but rather that as an industry, journalism seems to push a lot of questionable content.

There isn't an alternative to journalism, which is why we should be skeptical of it. Regulatory capture happens in the government. A similar problem can appear in journalism, where a journalism organizations can be "caught" by those looking to control the narrative.

I like the way Reuters does things. They seem to be much less biased than almost any of the generally well-known publications. Even then, they might change in the future.

> Either way, what way do you propose that normal citizens get the investigative information needed to participate in a democracy if we don't have journalism? What's the alternative?

That is a vitally important question whenever ideas like "Gell-Mann Amnesia" come up. Cataloguing journalists' mistakes and ethical lapses is easy, and I think that can sometimes evolve into a cheap cynicism that deprecates the vital job that journalists do, and that cynicism is toxic to democracy.

Journalists are all kinds of imperfect, but despite that journalism still performs a vital function for democracy. There's no other practical way for the public to stay broadly informed with timely information, than to have generalist communicators try to summarize into digestible bites the fire hose of events and specialist knowledge for broad dissemination.

> Who among us couldn't guess what the NYT's take is going to be in a mormon leader's obituary before they write it?

[sheepishly] raises hand

I had the same thought. I'm a NYT subscriber and while I'm not always the most careful reader, it doesn't seem to me the paper covers Mormons who are not Mitt Romney nearly often enough for there to be a stereotypical take

One can be extrapolated with eigenmorality though!

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1820

You mean this idea?

> A moral person is someone who cooperates with other moral people, and who refuses to cooperate with immoral people.

It's just so naive. A slightly cleaned up version of ordinary tribalism: "we are good and they are bad", with no further justification. Anybody can claim their own tribe is the moral one this way.

Oh, I certainly agree. But a naive algorithm can be used to predict the opinions of the naive.

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood you.

I was mostly reacting because I remember reading that blog post when it came out and thinking it was a neat idea, and now I'm recoiling in horror at how terrible it sounds.

The article actually discusses this very argument, though in a slightly tangential way.

I'm grimly curious as to whether or not you really think I'm going to read all that.

This is the perfect and always perfectly accurate response whenever someone links to the Rational-sphere. On the other hand, why use few words when you could use—Jesus Christ—6,663 words instead?

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