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Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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