Sorry New York Times, I decline to be interviewed | Hacker News Reader

Sorry New York Times, I decline to be interviewed

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23 pointstosh12 comments

Regarding the second tweet,

If you plot the word frequency of "coronavirus" it will show a quantum jump on 2020. So what? Journalists report on what's happening around them, so if people keep talking about "male privilege" then of course NYT will pick it up, whether you (or NYT) are for or against the concept.

If you want to argue that NYT or the larger journalism caused the rise of terms like "male privilege", you need a better argument than cute pictures. Using a 10x10 grid of cute pictures cherry-picked to maximize outrage is precisely what people are complaining about modern journalism, or so I have thought?

To claim those plots in the second tweet show NYT became partisan like the author does makes no sense. Given the events over the past few years, all of those trends are logical and do not mean NYT made a conscious choice to become partisan.

If using terms like 'feminism' more frequently is proof of something becoming partisan, then it's time to look oneself in the mirror and think hard. I would be ashamed if I'd made that tweet.

Coronavirus would also spike on google trends which is the control mentioned in the tweet.

That doesn't follow, because people normally don't search for "male privilege" or "inequality" or "victimization" - even those people for whom these words are parts of their daily discourse. When was the last time you searched for "pointer"?

So, of course the graphs aren't going to match. Not to mention the graphs themselves are all over the place. (What insights are we supposed to get from the decreasing trend of "general motors"?)

That second tweet with word usage trends of the NYT is shocking. It's like a phase transition.

Wait but the words highlighted in the word usage trends don't support the claim that NYT "abandoned it's commitment to nonpartisan reporting"

Explain how a big uptick in the use of words like "feminism", "islamaphobia" and "anti-semitism" mean the NYT became partisan?

I have a lot of beef with the NYT but the graphs don't show what he claims. And if he actually believes they do, then I have seriously questions about his viewpoints.

Especially considering events that happened around the phase change, like the muslim ban and Me Too movement, that could easily explain the step changes in word frequency around 2014-2016. And is there any comparison with other news outlets word frequencies?

If anything, the step changes show that before 2014ish, NYT was failing at recognizing important issues that they have now started reporting on.

fl3x

> The data makes it plain that the NYT has abandoned its commitment to nonpartisan reporting. When the internet threatened their business they made a devil’s bargain to amplify outrage and us-vs-them psychology.

They abandoned any such commitment in 1946, when they introduced the still-active editorial rule [1] that:

race should be cited only when it is pertinent and its pertinence is clear to the reader. The race of a victim of a hate crime or the subject of a police search is clearly germane, an essential part of the person’s description. But the race of a person convicted of a crime is not pertinent unless the case has racial overtones;

It is left as an exercise for the reader to find out in which cases race was pertinent. Reuters and AP have similar rules.

[1] New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, 2015 Edition, pg. 2183 http://1.droppdf.com/files/bp7ed/the-new-york-times-manual-o...

I fail to see how this decision in 1946 is relevant. Its clear you are just pushing a narrative and reaching way, way, way into the past to try and sell it.

Way into the past? The rule is still in place today.

I'm totally lost, because I can't see why this rule is a problem. It seems logical to only include a subjects race, only when race is relevant to the article.

And if the NYT only deemed race relevant when the perpetrator was Black and victim was White, filling the pages with "Black kills White", and never the reverse, would you see the problem then?

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