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Comment by bigbubba | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times once allowed itself to be used as a mouthpiece for Stalin, publishing Walter Duranty's denials of famine in Ukraine. They didn't come clean on this until 1990: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-not...

More recently, they allowed themselves to be used as the uncritical mouthpiece of the American federal government when they were starting an illegal war predicated on lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller

If the NYTimes isn't pure, then surely none are. Genocide denial is particularly egregious, but at least they eventually came clean. I still read the NYTimes more than any other paper, but we must always remember to keep an open mind and to never be too trusting of what any newspaper says.

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This seems to be a straw man argument. No in this thread is arguing that only "pure" outlets should be respected. The question is whether it was correct to lock the account of a media outlet that seems to be deliberately publishing news they know to be likely untruthful in an effort to sway the upcoming US presidential election.

Would twitter have blocked NYTimes in response to Walter Duranty or Judith Miller's reporting? Denying genocide or uncritically spreading pro-war propaganda seem comparably egregious to anything the NYPost has done.

If the NYT's reporting were obviously a falsification, yes. Twitter would probably block them as well.

At the time it wasn't obvious. In those days information traveled much more slowly, with many more intermediaries than today and was, therefore, much less reliable.

Being reputable and being perfectly accurate all the time are different things. Listing a handful of cases where a reputable source was not accurate does not prove the source is not reputable. It's like trying to prove science is a sham by talking about phlogiston.

None can be counted on. I happen to think the NYTimes is better than most, which is why I read them more often than the rest. But you cannot count on them to not tell lies, even in the most important sort of matters, and anybody who reads any newspaper should always keep that uncertainty in mind.

> But you cannot count on them to not tell lies,

I think that's the wrong framing, at least for an organization like the NY Times.

For one, there's a difference between "a lie" and "an inaccuracy" even though most of the time (but not always!) lies are a subtype of inaccuracy. If you make a similar conflation in software development, you'd say that a team member who pushes buggy code to your repo sabotaged your project instead of saying he made a mistake.

Also there's a difference between an organization and its members. Those individuals you mentioned may have lied, but that doesn't mean the organization lied. If a disgruntled member of your team does try to sabotage your project, that doesn't mean your team is sabotaging the project.

I encourage you to dig deeper into the background of the Walter Duranty and Judith Miller cases, in both cases the individuals were lying and their colleagues and coworkers knew they were lying or had good reason to suspect it. In the case of Walter Duranty, it took the organization several decades to admit Duranty was full of shit, long after the facts were widely know.

> I encourage you to dig deeper into the background of the Walter Duranty and Judith Miller cases, in both cases the individuals were lying and their colleagues and coworkers knew they were lying or had good reason to suspect it. In the case of Walter Duranty, it took the organization several decades to admit Duranty was full of shit, long after the facts were widely know.

Duranty did his reporting literally 90 years ago, which is several generations in the past. That case is of limited use when reasoning about the organization today.

Miller was criticized by colleagues and was eventually forced out. She seems to me kind of like a software engineer who came up with some grand design that had fundamental problems, but couldn't let the design go. That's mistaken, arguably incompetent, but not sabotage.

But you CAN count on the New York Post to tell lies.

Whataboutism does not seem helpful here.

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