What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes | Hacker News Reader

What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

savingjournalism.substack.com

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I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-...

> Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking

> Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States.

My company has banned Jetbrains now and received questions from regulators about it. Don't see them banning Microsoft anytime soon.

Glad someone else brought this example up. Honestly, what a staggeringly low quality piece of journalism.

Interestingly I just had an unrelated discussion on goodreads about that. The first mentioned author of the NYT article is supposedly a cybersecurity expert. The article lacked any evidence and called the company russian and obscure, they edited that but it’s still on archive.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20210106195835/https://www.nytim...

I left a goodreads comment on the NYT authors latest cybersecurity book calling her knowledge and practice in question. How can article like this stand, if it cannot be backed up, bad journalism and a lack understanding of the matter?

This makes me wonder, 3 branches of government exist to balance each other out. Journalism stands on its own, what’s the counter balance to journalism?

Social media

I wish. It seems like social media largely serves to amplify biased or outright false journalism rather than give it balance.

I've seen plenty of cases where social media users accurately pointed out false or misleading journalism. But I suppose it depends on who you follow.

Social media is just pushing the narrative of mainstream media at this stage.

Other journalists.

"Journalism" - quotes intended.

It’s other newspapers and online entities such as this. In this case I am sure the company suffered financially, they should be able to pressure the NYT to retract the story, they have some muscle with the google ties.

Theoretically, the judicial branch, via defamation law.

Once upon a time, ombudsman and journalist associations, and competitors. These days, those tend to all be the same, if they exist at all and aren't deemed "propaganda" or "fake news" or "disinformation" or similar.

Journalism, "the 4th estate", in the past was used to go after the powerful but it has recently become the power.

It's a concerning change and I don't see it getting better. Maybe it's "corporate journalism" that is problematic.

There was never a time when journalists challenged "the powerful" as a collective. They challenged the powerful enemies of their powerful employer.

The difference is now we have better information infrastructure and they can't make things that are disagreeable quietly disappear [0] so easily. The disappearing news story isn't a new act; what is new is now the story can linger despite that.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50296742

If you’re in the US, or any country with comparable speech/press protection: the same rights that give them protection to publish. I know it’s unpopular here but social consequences punishing bad press behavior are effective, just like punishing bad politician or famous people behavior. This is sometimes paraphrased as “vote with your feet” or “vote with your wallet”, but lately it’s been maligned as “cancel culture”. Either way, you’re allowed to just call bullshit on a publication. You’re especially allowed to not consume it.

I thought cancel culture was about trying to get individuals fired for things unrelated to their work?

It's evolving. Cancer now wants everyone cancelled.

Replace "cancelled" with "held accountable for their actions"

The fact that you think those things are unrelated to their work tells me I should probably avoid working where you work.

"Cancel culture" isn't choosing not to consume media. "Cancel culture" is actively trying to destroy it, like advocating lawsuits against Fox News, or deplatforming media hosts.

What you describe is how it's always been. Current "cancel culture" is nefarious as it actively tries to remove other's ability to access it. "Cancel culture" is authoritarian and undemocratic.

Critical thought. Other journalists and free speech can be censored by private companies that have no obligation to follow any due process. During information war critical thought is the most important asset, without which you're as good as illiterate.

Um, in countries where the government can play the ultimate arbiter of truth in speech they also get to determine what due process is, which usually is exactly what suits them. Private companies reflect the values of their shareholders and customers, which at least is made up of citizens without the coercive and exclusive power to say, lock you up for your reporting, or literally kill you and your loved ones over your reporting, which still happens to this day. If there is demand, and placed out of the state's hands, at least alternate channels, whether more accurate or not, more ethical or less, with or without an agenda, can exist. The alternate scenario easily renders them unable to exist in the first place. "Due process" when applied outside of official government action is simply coercing a standard set by the government upon collectives of private individuals even if - especially if - it is unwanted. It's an illusion of fairness that masks coercion, because there's either enforcement mechanisms for compliance - coercion - or there isn't - which is a charade and meaningless. Neither produces positive outcomes. Those in power will simply use it to cover up mistakes or intentional wrongdoing first.

Companies can't literally speak as in vocalize as a person, but they can, as entities, create the equivalence of speech in the societal sense, and shifting the arbiter of truth to the state will simply centralize that power in an entity that, in addition to dominating the marketplace by default - you can't exactly pick where you're born, nor where you can move to realistically for the most part - they can bring real consequences. Deplatforming is child's play compared to actual imprisonment or getting pushed out of an airborne helicopter.

Ah, that uncensored dark web existed IRL: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/27/314961287/ho...

“Journalism” is not a single entity or even a unified bloc.

Journalism exists in the market economy, so other market forces counterbalance - consumers, other corporations.

Journalism also exists under government regulation, despite strong legal protections.

You can't even sue them for libel. It's the kind of article that's perfectly legal, and yet does tremendous damage.

Yes, HN and Reddit comments can point out the flaws, but that's not going to make a dent on the public opinion.

So what options do we have to counter-balance "journalism" like that?

Out of curiosity, what would you want to see clarified? They said that it “may” be an entry point for the SW hack and, according to some National Security folks, it is being investigated.

Is there reason to believe this is incorrect in some way? It may be premature and amount to nothing if Team City had nothing to do with the breach, but it doesn’t appear to be misleading or false. If it was, I’d imagine JetBrains would have filed a lawsuit.

The weasel-wording still left most readers with a clear impression that flaws in JetBrains software were directly implicated in the hack, and many US companies proceeded on that basis.

But it wasn't -- the attackers had reconfigured the build servers to add malicious code to product builds, but their malware was targeting MSBUILD.EXE processes on startup, and would have worked just the same if SolarWinds wasn't using JetBrains at all, and those processes were started instead by Jenkins, CircleCI, or a human typing at a command line. Here's a technical writeup:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/sunspot-malware-technical-a...

As to the lawsuit: JetBrains is not based in the US; a lawsuit would probably take years to reach resolution, and be a massive, expensive distraction.

Readers interpret the article with prejudice, the resulting understanding is what needs to be clarified.

If your company bases security decisions on articles in the NYT then they’re beyond helping. Frankly that’s both laughable and incompetent.

No professional (in any field) should base a decision solely on something written in any secondary source. Even if it was a specialist publication, a competent professional should do their own research, and look at the primary sources.

Imagine if a doctor or civil engineer based professional decisions on what they read in magazines and newspapers. The thought is horrifying.

The problem is not that the NYT article is factually incorrect (if in fact Jet Brains were being investigated, which seems plausible). The problem is that anyone who’s reasoning skills exceed that of a five year old child should realise that there is a good possibility that the investigation would turn out to be a red herring.

In our field it is actually a reputational risk issue, but you're right. The fact they couldn't come up with a better solution than banning Jetbrains doesn't speak well.

> The problem is that anyone who’s reasoning skills exceed that of a five year old child should

The problem is that many companies have lots of clients that don’t have this reasoning capability. The reputation damage is much worse than the actual harm if you’re a “known contractor compromised by Russia” or whatever the dumb narrative is. It’s literally easier to drop it immediately “pending investigation”.

Is it really that obvious? If a company gets a bad rap for being insecure, is it rational to go for them? Sure, you should do your due diligence, when picking any solution, but it's certainly a factor which could discount someone from a shortlist.

You're not always the one to make a decision. When you are, there are a number of stakeholders who can influence your course of actions, and when solutions are similar enough, it is easier to take the path of least notoriety.

The "rap" in this case is entirely artificial. There's no evidence TeamCity is insecure, or at least, no more insecure than any other CI system.

I’m a 100% with you, but this is unfortunately not how people in many companies operate. The fact that organizations like Gartner and any one of the Big 4 exist proves that people are very much in the habit of transferring their decision-making risk onto another party.

I'm not sure I agree. I'd much rather that doctors base their decisions on what they read in publications in their field rather than do their own research.

> Imagine if a doctor or civil engineer based professional decisions on what they read in magazines and newspapers. The thought is horrifying.

Naaah, don't worry, doctors are only basing their treatment on what their most obnoxious patients are requiring, based on things they have read on Facebook and Twitter. (I mean, how can you trust journalists ? As the linked article says, those people are "wrong" , too.)

> No professional (in any field) should base a decision solely on something written in any secondary source. Even if it was a specialist publication, a competent professional should do their own research, and look at the primary sources.

> Imagine if a doctor or civil engineer based professional decisions on what they read in magazines and newspapers. The thought is horrifying.

No, I really really don't want doctors looking at primary sources. They don't have time to find and read all the sources, and they tend not to have expertise to understand specialist papers.

I would much rather we have organisations like NICE or Cochrane who employ experts in evidence based medicine to gather and précis the science and come up with recommendations for assessment and treatment.

The doctors however absolutely should not based their decisions on NYT.

I have a similar experience, where Jetbrains is effectively banned. Do you have any updated source that I could circulate to clear their name?

Writeup of the actual attack malware running on the build servers:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/sunspot-malware-technical-a...

It attacked MSBUILD.EXE processes on startup, and it didn't matter if they were started by TeamCity or by a homebrew script in Powershell.

They wrote about it on their blog.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/07/an-update-on-sola...

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/08/january-8th-updat...

Summary: they have no idea what anyone is talking about, nobody has told them anything and there are no known issues with TeamCity. Later they did a blog post with security tips for locking it down but they're all pretty generic things that'd apply to any CI system.

These companies that are banning JetBrains and thus locking themselves out of some of the best software tools out there are now suffering the consequences of years of mass hysteria over Russia, largely promoted by the New York Times. Every time someone read or quoted the New York Times as an authority on something and did not receive major pushback, it was another brick in the wall that has now led to this.

It was all entirely predictable. In 2017 I wrote about an even more deceptive and malicious article in the New York Times on the topic of "Russian Twitter bots" and Brexit. The story was based on an academic paper that superficially made it seems like credible expertise, but was intellectual fraud from beginning to end.

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

After that I started compiling a list of stories I read about Russia that fell apart when fact checked. I gave up after doing sixteen of them because it was just endless.

https://blog.plan99.net/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B4%D0%B0...

The thread article starts by saying, "Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy". This is probably true but just makes it clear that education doesn't make people smart. The total unreliability of anything Russia-related in the "educated" press has been obvious for years. The only way for things to get better are for people to repeatedly attack the credibility of these outlets, in public, on any topic where they engage in deceptive practices, in front of the sort of decision makers who are now making snap anti-Russian decisions on the basis of prior articles.

> decision makers who are now making snap anti-Russian decisions on the basis of prior articles.

This is how you get the public to support hostile actions later, including even armed conflict. We all know the only reason for the relative peace between the West and Russia has been nukes... But Russia is still seen as the enemy and anything criticizing them can go almost completely unchallenged in popular media.

China is also on the same boat. Not that they do not deserve criticism, they certainly do... but when people don't need any fact checking at all to believe whatever allegations come to light (as you mention, examples of fake allegations going unchallenged are endless) you do need to start worrying that the rethoric can go too far and cause undue harm, eventually.

1. Thank you for the response and resources.

2. As a paid NYT subscriber, I am becoming increasingly aware that they make some big mistakes in their reporting. They deserve some criticism, absolutely. I continue to expand my sources outside of the bubble and think critically when reading the NYT.

3. In 2012, Mitt Romney was mocked after a debate with Obama for saying Russia was a threat to the USA. That has aged poorly. Let’s not make the mistake of dismissing Russia as a legitimate cyber threat. Not all of the reporting on Russia is incorrect.

I agree the Russian government (as opposed to all of Russia) is absolutely a legitimate threat to the integrity of US networks, as are the governments of many other countries. And of course the US government is a proven threat to the integrity of both US and non-US networks.

Unfortunately the reporting on purported Russian hacking events seems invariably to collapse when examined. My conclusion from all this is that the Russian equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ (the GRU?) must be pretty good at not leaking and not being caught with obvious fingerprints on its operations. Every plausible connection between a serious hack and Russia I've seen is extremely circumstantial, whereas for the NSA or GCHQ we actually have their internal training materials and presentation slides.

Attribution is always hard but SolarWinds has some obvious fingerprints.

If you consider it hacking, the Russian bot farms (IRA) is well documented too.

Maybe they are good at not leaking, I’m not sure. I will say, I’ve heard some grudging respect for the SolarWinds operation in security circles. They have a functioning offensive cyber organization, that’s for sure.

What are those fingerprints, in the SolarWinds case?

"Hacker used linux."

ipso facto linux is dangerous

ipso facto ban linux.

"Hacker was breathing oxygen"

oxygen aids cyber terrorism

...

I remember that one. They did change the headline in fact. The original version erroneously said

    Russian Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hack

They changed "Russian" to "Widely Used"... Oddly the version the wayback machine caches has "Russian" in the headline as well as "based in the Czech Republic" in the first sentence.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210106195835/https://www.nytim...

It is clearly an alarmist "yellow journalism" kind of article, I agree. The headline swap is a bit revealing; they never would have framed the article this way in a similar situation for a U.S. company, even if "may be entry point for huge hack" would be just as accurate.

I'm not sure there is anything technically incorrect in the current version of it though.

Also holy cow is Internet Archive doing god's work, I'm gonna go send em some money right now.

Czech here. JetBrains is really incorporated as a Czech corp., but in the same way that many ships are registered in Liberia. I have some paid licences of JetBrains, I have e-mailed back and forth with JetBrains employees in different positions, and all were Russians.

I agree there's a hint of yellow journalism afloat here.

> My company has banned Jetbrains now and received questions from regulators about it. Don't see them banning Microsoft anytime soon.

It was their collaboration software that got hit iirc. I also recall the delivery method being very smart, something along the lines of inserting code during compilation. While it's certainly reasonable to ask JetBrains to prove their releases are infection free among other things, banning all of their software seems excessive.

Could that sort of misrepresentation qualify as libel? Or are newspapers somehow immune to that?

“ Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.”

Let’s stop right there. I think the last 8 years have shown the media to have lost significant amounts of public trust. I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.

> I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.

Yup. These days I only get my news from The Daily Wire and Joe Rogan. I'm educated, and I just can't trust the lamestream media.

Poe’s law is pretty strong here.

Is this comment missing a /s? The Daily Wire is actual fake news, with a long track record of misinformation and poor quality content[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]... While not perfect, NYT has a long track record of quality journalism that goes back hundreds of years, winning 130 Pulitzer Prizes.

[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-daily-wire/

[3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/shadowy-right-wing-network-beh...

[4] https://www.factcheck.org/2017/04/carson-didnt-find-hud-erro...

[5] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-we-know-wh...

[6] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/global-quackery-earth...

[7] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/daily-wire-article-mi...

[8] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-mohammed-popular-name-n...

Yes, I believe that to be sarcasm.

I don't know. I know people who truly think that way.

Ironically the Media Bias / Fact Check site you have linked also has a long track record of being arbitrary and reflecting the author’s opinions, basically. See what CJR wrote about them in the section titled “armchair academics” here: https://www.cjr.org/innovations/measure-media-bias-partisan....

> [Media Bias / Fact Check’s] efforts suffer from the very problem they’re trying to address: Their subjective assessments leave room for human biases, or even simple inconsistencies, to creep in. Compared to Gentzkow and Shapiro, the five to 20 stories typically judged on these sites represent but a drop of mainstream news outlets’ production.

I’m not a frequent reader of the Daily Wire but have read articles from time to time and haven’t found factuality issues any more so than other news sites. Glancing at their front page right now, nothing seemed obviously off. They have their own selection bias of stories they cover but that’s because they’re meant to be the answer to a lack of coverage of the same topics or same perspectives from traditional news media.

EDIT: looks like you added more links. I don’t have time to go through them all but The Daily Beast and Popular Info (run by Judd Legum, formerly of Think Progress) have a strong left bias. As for the Snopes fact check you linked, it is authored by Bethania Palma who authored an embarrassingly bad fact check about AOC’s account of the Capitol riot recently (https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-bias-alert-snopes-fact-c...). It seems you’re listing out a mix of anecdotal examples and opinions from people who themselves have political bias reasons to discredit The Daily Wire.

Discounting the fact check, accusing the journalist as being biased because of who they worked for is intellectually lazy and a fallacious argument. If you had read the content, you'd see that the fact checks are accurate and well sourced. From the examples I listed and lack of retractions associated with them, it's clear that Daily Wire has no journalistic integrity. They are not in the same ballpark as NYT.

I think maybe you don't see the problem in citing a bunch of heavily left publications saying a heavily right publication is fake news.

Snopes is cool, though.

yeah it's a questionable claim for sure. This was a widely cited poll that asserted for the first time ever, the majority of Americans mistrust the mainstream media: https://www.axios.com/media-trust-crisis-2bf0ec1c-00c0-4901-...

You'll note that trust varies widely by political party, with 18% of Republicans trusting the media vs 57% of Democrats. So the post in the op seems to equate "educated" with "democrat" perhaps. Even if that's valid (don't really have the facts to dispute it personally) 57% is nothing to brag about.

Another interesting poll on this subject here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m..., which asked people what their political affiliation was and what their main source of news was. Of those that said Fox, 93% leaned Republican...no surprise there. But what's striking is that of those that said MSNBC, 95% leaned Democrat. The NYT, 91%. NPR, 87%! Kind of makes me wonder what the trust numbers would be if the media outlets weren't increasingly becoming echo chambers.

> This was a widely cited poll that asserted for the first time ever, the majority of Americans mistrust the mainstream media

A poll released by the largest PR firm in the world[0], famous for their work with Walmart, GEO Group, Keystone XL, etc.

Why would the creators of "Working Families for Walmart" ever try to manufacture consent? One wonders.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edelman_(firm)

Reader distrusts media poll showing high distrust in media.

and more importantly... reader shows obvious bias against Walmart... I wonder if he works for Target?

(Lesson: Random idiots on the idiot yelling at each other about who can't be trusted pushing "conspiracy theories" about "The Wallsmart" pushing polls and people who don't believe the polls and etc etc etc. Yes... I'm one of those random idiots.)

Manufacturing Consent is a book that had a big impact on how I perceive media, and I think it's wise to examine who's saying something and what their motives are, but I don't totally understand what you're saying. What's their motive here? I can't see a link between the narrative that people distrust media and their pr work for a bunch of gross corporations.

Removing the media as an independent voice increases the power of the voices left. Meaning, one less force to counterbalance corporate power.

Same reason Trump hammered on the media — one less voice to speak against him.

I'd buy that except the major media outlets are the corporate power.

Well mostly, although corporate power is not a single entity or a unified bloc. And independent media does exist, just without the reach of the large operators.

It surprised you that MSNBC, NYT, and NPR have primarily left-leaning audiences? Their coverage leans left like Fox News leans right, particularly MSNBC. If you asked the surveyed Republicans how much they trust Fox News specifically, I’m sure the stats would be a mirror image. Similarly, democrats trust a news industry which, outlet-for-outlet, is more aligned with what they want to hear. After all, it’s never “our” news we mistrust, it’s the other guys!

Truthfully, I think the smart folks on both sides of the aisle know the news media is a for-profit business whose interests are tangential to telling the truth.

The same MSNBC that shat on AOC up till it was obvious she was going to be a progressive darling/favorite among a portion of MSNBC viewers, mocked Ron Paul repeatedly*, and have never covered Bernie Sanders close to the way they cover the Democratic establishment? MSNBC is nothing like the lefts Fox.

I completely agree with the point of hating the “other” guy’s news. I don’t think the vast majority of people distrust mainstream media. At least not their favorite outlets. NYT being beloved by a lot of my friends as one easy glaring example of typical highly educated well paid “liberal coastal elites”

* principled progressives/hard left have quite a bit in common with principled libertarians. Ron Paul being one. Not his son though. Chapo Traphouse for example can recognize Ron Paul being legit. Or Jon Stewart for a more mainstream example.

Trump supporters feel the same way about Fox that you feel about MSNBC. That’s why there’s OAN.

Most of those supporters still support Fox though, no? How many are actually against Fox, never watch it, and advocate against it?

Perhaps that number is bigger than I’m imagining, but I doubt it. Edgy comments online saying Fox sucks for a week because they didn’t do a good enough job isn’t the same thing. That’s still on Fox’s side.

I don’t think the comparison is the same. Maybe for Democracy Now and some progressive YouTuber/online shows.

> Most of those supporters still support Fox though, no? How many are actually against Fox, never watch it, and advocate against it?

Seems like a lot. That's why OAN and Newsmax grew so fast.

> I don’t think the comparison is the same. Maybe for Democracy Now and some progressive YouTuber/online shows.

Democracy Now and TYT are the progressive version of OAN/Newsmax. MSNBC is the progressive version of Fox.

From minor anecdotal musings of conservatives I know, they will sometimes say negative things about Fox and be more pro OAN/Newsmax, but they aren’t principally opposed to Fox or hate it out right.

TYT and Democracy Now overlap, but TYT is almost purely neoliberal stuff. Perhaps I don’t understand the nuance between OAN/Newsmax though.

It’s not hard to dislike MSNBC and not watch it while being into Democracy Now. It makes sense. If you’re into Chapo Trap House, you’re completely opposed to MSNBC.

You can see the differences just from seeing how Reddit’s Ohanion did a classic neoliberal move weeks before Chapo’s ban of saying his board seat should go to a minority. A move MSNBC would say congrats, work accomplished to. Unlike progressives.

You can also see the general difference of how things are viewed based on the attention The Donald subreddit got for their ban vs Chapo. Trump’s subreddit was a 4-5x bigger, but took up almost all the news cycle vs the other subreddits.

It’s not as simple as Democracy Now on left is a mirror of Newsmax on the right.

Either way, we are mostly in agreement. We are talking about details vs any bigger disagreement.

Cheers

Smart people are actually more susceptible to biases. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-...

Funny that I link to a New Yorker article. Fitting that it is from 2012.

I guess being aware of bias is not part of the "smart" equation?

Being aware of bias is in no way the same as being unaffected by it. In fact you can imagine the possibility where being aware of a bias allows one to believe that they are unable to be affected by it and thus pay less attention to whether their thinking is flawed.

So i guess "paying more attention" to flawed thinking is not part of the "smart" equation? See where this leads? I'll be direct: the concept of "smart" is vague and has different meanings to different people, and different measures, so to say "smart" people are like this or like that doesn't make sense.

> After all, it’s never “our” news we mistrust, it’s the other guys!

You imply this is some kind of hypocrisy or other character flaw, but this will always be true when there's uncertainty. If someone holds the same prior beliefs as you, it is rational to trust them more. Otherwise you would be assuming your own beliefs are wrong which makes no sense by definition.

Of course media outlets tend to go beyond just filling in the blanks with biased guesses, but still people will be more forgiving if they seem "sensible" generally.

Only to the extent that “bias” is a character flaw. I understand the nature of it, but it is certainly a liability when after the “truth”.

> If someone holds the same prior beliefs as you, it is rational to trust them more.

It may be rational, but that makes them terrible providers of news for the people they agree with. They have the same blind spots and are looking to support the narratives you both already believe.

I would even say it's not rational, but cult like. Rationality is based on logical skepticism. More often than not, it's swimming against the tide questioning generally accepted axioms.

I agree. Rationality includes avoiding confirmation bias (the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values).

Favoring information that confirms one's prior beliefs is the opposite of rational.

If you trust one side or the other, you need to re-calibrate your beliefs, because they are wrong.

Beliefs are a spectrum. There are no two people with the same beliefs, which means there's always disagreement.

> Their coverage leans left like Fox News leans right, particularly MSNBC.

I don't think it detracts from your points, but the coverage of all these outlets leans Democrat, but not left. They are centrist papers. Left voices (think Chomsky) are almost completely absent from mainstream media.

This is changing the meaning of the word left, and then redefining Democrat as centrist, which is just incorrect.

Depends on where you are from. In most, if not all, western democracies the Democrats pass as centrist. People like Bernie pass as slightly left of center in Germany for example. And passes as left parties over here would considered full-blown communist in the US.

If we're still talking about US news outlets being mistrusted by American citizens subscribing to US political parties, this comparison is irrelevant.

That's just not true of the Democratic Party by any useful metric and likewise there is nothing about Bernie's platform that would be centre-left anywhere in Europe, the majority of his proposals being to the left of anything implemented anywhere.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunda...

If I understood the NYT article correct, the Democrats are put left, among other things, because of support for climate measures. Fun fact, the CSU, as far right as you get in Germany when you ignore the AfD, is also supporting measures to fight climate change now. The CSU also kind of opposes gay marriage, are among the more extremer views regarding abortion. And support public health care. They do not fight to make abortion illegal so. No do they with gay marriage. I see that as them being more "left" than anything I see coming from the GOP at the moment. And the CSU, as I said, considered the most right / conservative of our mainstream parties.

Bernie on the other hand would fit in perfectly well with the SPD, our social democrats. "Die Linke", the leftest one in the article, is a joint party of the SED (the former DDRs government party), some communists from western Germany and the far left wing of the SPD. They are as much left as the AfD is right.

I do see a lot of parallels between the AfD and the right wing of the GOP so. Especially regarding immigrants, muslims, the Covid pandemic and views of family values.

Do you see a situation where the word left means something different if you are talking about national politics versus international politics as a good idea? Because that is the situation you are in if you won't acknowledge that the Democrats are centrist. What then do you call left leaning politics outside the US? Left left? Foreign Left? Communists? This misuse and redefining of words is one of the reasons we have people crying Socialist or Communist of left leaning politicians.

Left and right are relative really. Wanting to shift to a constitutional monarchy was once "the left" or having only Chrisianity as first class citizens in comparison to only Catholicism or Protestantism.

International politics should be contextually anchored essentially. So you say "Party X from country Y is further left than part A from country B." That is putting aside "mixed political aspects". Is a communist country which outlaws homosexuality to the left or right of a free market capitalist country which has gay marriage?

Sure, but in my opinion you should base that on the political leanings of the population of the countrybypu are analyzing, not only on its political parties.

Mixed political aspects are a good argument to be careful in discussing 'overall' political leanings. There are real-world mixups like you describe - for example, Marine Le Pen, while a frighteningly far right extremist on social and foreign policy issues, was to the left of someone like Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton on many economic policy aspects.

Well, personal freedom is neither left nor right but rather up (Libertarianism) versus down (Authoritarian). If you divide the political spectrum in a XY scatter chart you get both Bush, Trump and Obama at Top Right pretty close to each other in Authoritarian Right. Someone like Sanders is to the Left but still pretty Authoritarian in some ways, so not really what is seen as Left outside the US. Someone who is what is normally called Left (left and down) would be Jill Stein (or Noam Chomsky if not only looking at politicians). So in short, both your examples are likely in the Top Right; Right Authoritarians, if they are from the US.

>Wanting to shift to a constitutional monarchy was once "the left"

Yes, in many places they still have names from back then. For example one of the biggest political parties from Denmark is named "Venstre" which literally means "Left", even though they are to the Right (conservative-liberal). Quite funny that a close match from Norway is called "Høyre" which means "Right". They rooted for Joe Biden in the election though and had a big party back when Obama won, because US Left is their Right to center-right and the republicans are just way too extreme for their taste.

It's not, the US left is represented by papers such as Jacobin, intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, and politicians like Bernie Sanders, (who has only recently - ~last 10 years of his half a century career- joined the Democratic party), and organizations like the Nurses Union.

Sure, it's true that the Democratic Party is to the left of the Republican Party, and that there are actual leftists in the DP, such as Bernie or AOC, but the vast majority of the party is centrist at best, especially on economic issues.

On many economic issues, Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi are on the right of someone like Marine LePen or Viktor Orban.

The context is different when referring to politics in a two-party system like the US, versus political philosophy. In the US political system, the center is relative to where the two parties are - there is no “absolute truth” of the center. The democrats are the party of the left like republicans are the party of the right — meaning political views will roughly trend according to party membership. Centrists are defined by being able to keep a foot in both sides, so democrats are by definition not centrist anymore than republicans. Either party may be comprised by more or less centrist politicians, but if that holds it just moves the center over time. Both parties change their stances on issues periodically in ways that would seem to violate first principles of a philosophical left/right philosophy. But political philosophy is always more accurately measured in a quadrant system[0] than a linear one. In a two-party system, or one of a forced synthesis/aggregation of viewpoints and dialectic conflict, a Democrat will tend to hold views left of center in the US, or at least support politicians who hold such views, and the reverse for Republicans.

[0] the intersection of two axes measuring social and economic positions, popularized as the “political compass”

Politics in the US is not limited to the two parties. The population of the US has a wide range of political opinions that don't neatly aligned to the mainline Democratic or Republican views. Especially in the US, with its system of primaries, the real politics of the population are relevant even when the official election essentially only offers 2 candidates.

And in the real US, the Democratic party is to the right of a vast majority of its own voters' views, on issues such as Medicare for All most prominently, but others as well. It's even to the right of the views of large swaths of Republican voters on many issues, such as withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democratic party is much closer to the Center of the political opinions of the US population, at least on economic and foreign policy matters (I would say it's well in the center-right of American political views actually on those matters). It may well be on the 'real left' on social and family matters, to be fair.

Not to mention, there are many other political forces and voices, which form a clear left pole far to the left of the Democratic party (I gave specific examples), and they have large amounts of increasingly organized support. They will likely pull the Democratic party to the left instead of establishing a pure leftist party, but that is far from having happened. You can look instead at how much the extreme right has been pulling the Republican party right to see the mechanisms

So the way I see it, the US population has left leaning people, right leaning people, and centrists. Looking at the relative opinions of the population, the Democratic party is overall in the Center, and the Republicans are well on the right (these are overall generalizations). Of course, in the absence of better choices, leftist voters will generally vote Democratic, as the Center is preferable to them than the Right.

More importantly for this claim, papers like the NYT and networks like CNN are explicitly cultivating centrist beliefs (especially on economic and foreign policy matters), often leaning far more to the right on such issues compared to the majority of the population (look at Brian Williams repulsive praise of the 'beauty of our weapons' on MSNBC[0] as they were reporting on a US missile attack on a Syrian base).

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNHOJwgZyfo

In practical terms the US is limited to two parties. Name the last time a third party won the Presidency. This is woven into the structure.

This doesn't limit the spectrum of opinions of individuals by any means but it does compel some degree of consensus and organization to mount a serious campaign.

> They will likely pull the Dem party to the left

Yes, the parties vacillate in how far left or right they are, and the center moves accordingly. Still, the center of US politics isn't defined by some "objective truth" it's defined by the relative position of the two political parties. Some ideas that have been centrist in the past are now extremist, some ideas that have been considered extreme in the past are now considered the accepted consensus.

In the end this is just a matter of definitions. For my own understanding, I define left and right and center in terms of the relative opinions of the population, not the parties. You define them by the parties' positions - that's fair of course, it's a workable definition.

I do think there are advantages to my definition - by your definition, the majority of the US population has an extreme left position on Medicare for all, as an example.

I would have expected that these media have primarily left/right leaning audiences, but having the proportion be 95% of so is a bit surprising and even extreme.

There’s a phenomenon quite similar to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: the bias of an outlet is quite obvious in the coverage of an event one is particularly familiar with. Of course then we flip a page and continue taking them at their word.

"the news media is a for-profit business whose interests are tangential to telling the truth" <- That's well put.

And yeah I guess I wasn't that surprised by MSNBC, but definitely didn't expect the percentages to be so high for the "paper of record" and NPR.

> if the media outlets weren't increasingly becoming echo chambers.

This conclusion doesn't stand up. If the most popular network skews 93% republican, the alternatives are going to skew democrat regardless of how balanced they are.

That doesn't make sense.

If one block is 93% blue, the other blocks are going to be more red than blue regardless of how balanced they are.

Negatory - the sets being compared aren't independent.

That is, the overall population is (roughly) half red and half blue. If you divide that population into groups - on whatever basis - and the largest group is 93% red, then it follows that some of the other groups are going to be mostly blue.

That's only the case if you have equivalent populations and people can make only one choice, neither of which is true here.

They're equivalent to a first approximation, and the numbers we're talking about are from a poll where respondents could make only one choice.

> Kind of makes me wonder what the trust numbers would be if the media outlets weren't increasingly becoming echo chambers.

Compare median Republican and median Democrat in 1994 (earliest year in the data, pretty close together) to where they are in 2017 (the latest year in the data).

Is that graph set to keep the republican median constant and the rest relative from there? The associated link tells a much more nuanced story that I don't think really results in "mixed" being a fixed center point. But the article and graphic do show a deeply disturbing divide.

> Is that graph set to keep the republican median constant and the rest relative from there?

Nope. You can see the Republican line move to the left in 1999 and 2004 before moving back to about where it started.

Remember that during the Clinton administration the Democrats were pretty ambivalent about gay marriage, signed the 1994 crime bill, nobody in office would have been willing to call themselves a socialist/communist etc.

Now try to think of some issues where modern mainstream Republicans are significantly to the right of Reagan or Bush Senior.

I agree the associated link doesn't really support the infographic, as it shows the changes in party mean, not the heterogeneity of views held by individuals. That said, it makes total sense to me. It seems inherent in the definitions of a conservative/traditionalist party and progressive/change based party.

On an anecdotal level, think about views and behaviors that were commonplace in the 80s and 90s, and how they are perceived today. Values of many on the right would be aligned with the older views, while many on the left have come to reject those views.

> It seems inherent in the definitions of a conservative/traditionalist party and progressive/change based party.

I don't really buy this. Despite parties using those terms, they don't really mean anything when any given thing had been the status quo at some point in history.

Were the people who opposed sodomy laws in the 20th century agents of change, or reactionaries pining for the way things were in the time of the Romans? Roe v. Wade has been the law for generations, so aren't Catholics who want to ban abortion now the agents of change?

If someone wants to cut federal spending as a percentage of GDP in half, are they a liberal (because it's a change from the historical practice since WWII) or a conservative (preserving the thing that existed before then)? Does it matter if the thing they want to cut is military spending or entitlements, when both are the long-term status quo? Is market competition liberal (a change from historical feudalism) or conservative (the existing system)? Is regulatory capture liberal or conservative?

Wouldn't the labels have to switch whenever a law is passed, since the advocates of change who achieved it would then become "conservatives" who want to preserve the change they made?

If the answer is that whatever your side wants to do is Change and any change the other side wants to do is Reactionary then you're just trying to justify a ratchet.

>I don't really buy this. Despite parties using those terms, they don't really mean anything when any given thing had been the status quo at some point in history.

I think that most conservatives don't look to some distant point in the past, but the status quo now, or perhaps some time earlier in their lifetime. If you view all over your examples through this lens, the ambiguity is resolved.

If you look at conservative views and values, they are more consistent through time than liberal views. I think the data presented a few parent threads up clearly supports this view.

I'm not saying there is a moral high ground in being more resistant to change or less resistant to change, but in my mind, it is clearly part of political reality we live in, and a valuable lens to understand the current political divide.

If you don't agree with this view, what alternative do you propose? Are conservative and progressive values and interests random? What values inform the positions they take and how they change over time?

> I think that most conservatives don't look to some distant point in the past, but the status quo now, or perhaps some time earlier in their lifetime. If you view all over your examples through this lens, the ambiguity is resolved.

Is it? So a 45 year old Democrat is a "conservative" for opposing abortion restrictions because Roe v. Wade was decided before they were born? Or would become one later in life as people born before the decision die out, just from the passage of time and no change in policy? Someone who wants to cut federal spending is a "liberal" because it has been this high a percentage of GDP as long as anyone currently alive can remember?

> If you don't agree with this view, what alternative do you propose? Are conservative and progressive values and interests random? What values inform the positions they take and how they change over time?

The terms themselves aren't very useful because they're poorly defined. Trade tariffs are an ancient idea that have been enacted and repealed more than once in living memory. Liberal or conservative? I'm not sure it even makes sense to ask the question. It's more like populist vs. globalist.

The one dimensional axis only comes about as a result of the two party system. So what you're really asking is where the positions of Democrats vs. Republicans come from, and then the answer is a lot more obvious. They're political coalitions.

Ask yourself what abortion has to do with minimum wage. Basically nothing, right? You can try to come up with some kind of justification, like maybe having fewer people competing for jobs would lead to higher wages. But then you would expect the pro-abortion party to be the anti-immigration party. Oops.

It's not a coherent philosophy. It's a patchwork coalition that yields enough support to have a majority in the legislature about half of the time.

They change when the math changes. For example, some combination of the falling cost of renewable energy and worldwide efforts to fight climate change are probably about to devastate the oil industry, a major Republican constituency. They're not just going to resign themselves to a permanent minority, they're going to find some way to get back to 50%.

That means either stealing some constituency from the Democrats or taking one of theirs off the table. They're in a decent position right now to take out the teachers unions through school choice programs, for example.

Then the Democrats have to decide whether to let them or fight. If they let them, their platform changes. They don't have to be subservient to the teachers unions anymore, which could have knock on effects for other positions they couldn't previously take because the unions didn't like them. In a lot of ways that helps them, and all it costs them is the votes they won't need if the Republicans simultaneously lose the oil industry.

If they fight there, the Republicans are forced to take some other constituency instead. Maybe they push harder with the economic populism that won them the rust belt in 2016, and take it from the Democrats permanently. That could be worse for Democrats than dissolving the teachers unions; those are some important swing states. The Democrats would then have to find a way to win them back or win some other states instead.

So one thing changes and you get a chain reaction that reshapes the positions of both of the parties. It's not ideology, it's pragmatism.

I still think we are talking past each other.

My main point was supporting the validity of the relatively static republican position in the PEW data you introduced and later defended.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...

I see your claim that all political parties seek change, and agree with it. Political parties are inherently a mechanism for enacting change (or denying it)

My claims, formulated more specifically are as follows:

1) I think the trend in the figure you presented with a smaller shift in median republican views shift less than median democrat views from 1994-2017 is realistic.

I think you agree.

2) I think the slower shift in mean republican views is because individual republicans are slower to change their social views.

2A) I think republicans are slower to change their views because. This is associated with respect for "authority" "traditionalism" in the framework of moral foundations theory [1]

2A1) I think there are real differences in the average moral values of republicans and democrats. Neither group is homogeneous, but on average, individuals gravitate towards one party or another based on the moral framework they view the world through. I agree this is a two way feedback, were party affiliation and media consumption can also shift ones moral framework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

That looks like they trust approved media and distrust disapproved media. It's not a measure of trust in media, but a measure of media affiliation.

Media has been fully untrustworthy since Operation Mockingbird.

Operation mockingbird never ended.

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-...

That article makes it look simply like journalists doing normal cultivation of sources and due diligence by runningg things by a major source as a secondary form of double checking their reporting. If I was a national security reporter I'd certainly tap contacts in the government to at least run things by them as part of my process, albeit with a a fair few grains if salt taken with anything they say.

Yeah, I went into the article expecting some damning link where the CIA has been planting questionable information into major media pieces, instead it just sorta seemed like a handful of journalists being somewhat sloppy in talking to the CIA.

There didn't seem to be any real substance to it.

In the weirdest twist of the 21st century, it turns out that the postmodernists were right and that deconstruction is an important tool in every citizen's kit.

The media has always been biased and plenty of mistakes have been made along the way (Hearst et al.) But I'm going to give more benefit of the doubt to organizations that ostensibly try to be neutral.

In this media bias chart it's interesting that virtually all the most reliable reporting is either in the center or a bit to the left of it: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2...

In the end it does require having multiple sources, and a willingness to not let one's own biases get in the way.

> In this media bias chart it's interesting that virtually all the most reliable reporting is either in the center or a bit to the left of it

This is almost definitionally true given that "bias" and "unreliable" are approximately the same thing. Also notice that it isn't that the slightly right of center publications are more unreliable (Daily Mail being the exception), it's just that there aren't as many of them.

8 years? I’m old enough to remember Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

What happened in the last 8 years? In 2003 there was the war in Iraq. The fallout from that was probably the lowest trust I had in journalism at any point in my life. I can't recall any significant events in the past 8 years that are even close to that failure.

Thank you. I can’t believe how quickly people forget. Trump is the tip of the iceberg. The Iraq War. The plight of the Palestinians. Russians. Go look at the coverage of these issues, the bias and outright abandonment of facts — it’s disgusting and disgraceful.

Donald Trump happened in the last 8 years.

He did two major things.

First, he relentlessly attacked the media ("fake news") and regularly called them out on false or misleading stories. (Then the media regularly complained about him eroding their credibility, without admitting that his criticisms were often valid.)

Second, he was incredibly good at manipulation. His signature move was to tell a big fat lie about an issue that he wanted everybody talking about and where his general position was a popular one. The media hated this, because their choices were to let him get away with the lie or to start a conversation about the issue Trump wanted everybody talking about. But then they let their hatred of him become so transparent in their coverage that it undermined their credibility.

I really wish Trump hadn't made attacking fake news become associated with Trumpism. Makes it much harder for people to fight back against fake news without losing all credibility due to the association.

All credibility with whom? The news media? They are always going to associate people who attack them with negative things.

The right calls it fake news and the left calls it misinformation. Everyone has a rhetorical mechanism for attacking stories they think are factually incorrect.

Unfortunately this was Trump's impact on a few issues. Immigration immediately comes to mind.

I go to cnn.com when I want to see the latest draft of "1984 v2.0". It's really that bad.

Glenn Greenwald explained that when he asked his US journalist friends why they only parrot leftist narratives, they replied they had to or they'd lose their job and all their friends.

One of the NY Times editors "resigned" because he said burning downtowns should be countered with the National Guard - in other words stopping an actual insurrection in progress for months. Where do you go from there?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/07/new-york-times...

The NY Times editor who "resigned" didn't say burning downtowns should be countered with the National Guard. He approved the publishing of an op-ed from a US Senator that approved of sending in the national guard. The editor was attacked for allowing "hate speech" in the paper and forced to resign.

I would also argue strongly against this. When you have at least once in your life been on the side of a news story where YOU generated the truth and you see it completely twisted into whatever narrative the news outlets are currently trying to push, all trust in these organizations is lost.

Headline, abstract and URL edits to NYT are tracked by @nyt_diff on Twitter, it can be very interesting to see: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff

Not sure if they only catch front page article changes or what.

Newspaper article content is a big game that’s worth tracking, but what’s more difficult (probably nearly impossible right now) is local television news. Tons of news is pushed through to a wide audience and then it’s gone as quickly as it came with any damage due to errors or omissions being done instantly and probably permanently.

The Internet Archive captures both television and radio news, though obviously it's only a fraction of the total. https://archive.org/details/tv and https://archive.org/details/radio

That looks like a great follow, thanks.

Speaking of Twitter, their "trending" section introduces yet another level of possible editorializing/bias. They have started to try and summarize trending topics in a digestible way, but this introduces the perceived authority of their interpretation. I haven't seen anything particularly egregious on their part, but it's definitely something to be aware of.

Seems weird that every post is in image. Yes changelogs with text would be challenging, but you can't search/etc images.

Because Twitter sucks and let you post lots of text in images but not in text. It's awful.

Also no rich text so it would be difficult to indicate what text was removed, added and unchanged in a readable format without the image.

>Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.

The switch from printed to online distribution changed the game completely.

If you are selling printed copies, you are physically limited in how much text you can cram into a single issue. So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues.

With digital ad-sponsored distribution the competition is about churning out as much low-quality clickbait as possible. If you spend time researching the topic and validating your sources, while your competitor hires 5 fresh graduates to write 5 slightly different nonsensical articles on the same topic, you will quickly be out of business. You don't care that most of your readers will forget what they read in less than an hour. You don't care that the most clickbaity articles end up being the most divisive. You are now competing for 30 seconds of attention from 10 million of readers, and that's the only way to win that competition.

I dont think this exactly applies to the NYT and the New Yorker which are subscriptions based.

I do think subscription based journalism can be just as pernicious. The most profitable route now is to find a niche group and produce content that they want. In general people "want" the objective truth, but its so much more tantalizing when it's spun to confirm your biases. There's likely a point where people will pay to get 90% of the truth and 10% confirmation bias, and if that's the most profitable route pubishers are going to report in that way (hence the left lean of NYT in particular, and right lean of other publications).

Or 30% truth and 70% confirmation bias, as the case may be....

> So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues.

That is true to some extent, but it forgets the second half of the revenue of all newspapers, which has always been advertising, or direct injections of capital by a rich owner looking for a mouthpiece.

Which is to say, newspapers have always needed to be advertiser friendly, even if it meant avoiding certain topics. But you're right that this has become even worse in the move to the internet.

Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy. And this is healthy, in a way.

No it's not. The NYTimes engages in journalism, which is a particular way of gathering and presenting facts. Which to say, among other things, they rely on publicly available information, gathering facts on the ground and sources. Sources are people with information, often but not always powerful people. They check facts/claims but according to their viewpoint. Often they're a conduit for the powerful people they like to present their story, sometimes a true story, sometimes not. Which is to say they'll take claims that look like obvious bs and are actually bs stand IF these come from the sources they like and if they can't be clearly and directly be refuted. And smart, powerful people can craft such claims, indeed enhance their power by crafting such things.

I mean, I can see the comments are filled with places the NYtimes got it wrong. I think my link is good for showing the dynamics of how they got it wrong.

"Russian Bounties!!!" and all that jazz[1].

Edit: also should note, the over-the-top claims for "objectivity" of the OP is transparently full-of-shit. Just so you know I know. "Retraction bounties" - NYTimes may have it's problems but that's never how journalism worked.

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/bounty-tales/

Welcome to postmodernism! Nothing anyone says can be taken at face value! Deconstruct everything!

:-)

That attitude has always existed about news, post-modernism just tried to wrongly apply it to literally everything.

Why did you say that?

Because your comment, while clearly a joke (that I did enjoy), somewhat insinuated that postmodernism sort of invented the idea of doubting sources and looking for their biases, or at least that's how I perceived it.

I think doubting sources based on their expected motivations and biases is a part of human rationality since time immemorial, and that postmodernism simply applied this way of thinking to some of the areas where it was traditionally not applied, like science and literary analysis.

In my opinion, the biggest problems with sources is that journalists often fail to provide them.

They will often make sure assertions without named sources to back them up. And they will fail to provide citations and links when the source is present on the internet, so you can confirm and verify it.

This is sometimes the case for things like scientific research, where you're just expected to know which specific paper it is they're talking about, or where to look for further information.

Journalists don't provide sources because sources would face retaliation if journalists provided their names. Sometimes this is appropriate if the source is providing information in the public interest and sometimes it's corruption if the source is providing misleading information to benefit themselves. Journalism overall has a long tradition of sometimes benefiting the public and sometimes benefiting those in power - both these help maintain the institution (for good and ill, naturally).

Linking to document on the Internet is a different issue, I think, one I wouldn't comment on.

When a journalist uses an anonymous source, then they are putting their own reputation on the line, rather than that of the source.

Unfortunately, as we've seen, there are no consequences for journalists that manufacture outrage and misleading or outright false facts.

...and so consequently, we've seen many many examples in the last decade of journalists citing "unnamed sources" to deliver "facts" that turn out to be utterly false.

...and so the ultimate issue remains that journalists are rewarded for traffic, not accuracy or truth.

One of the problems with trust is that people see corrections and admitting ignorance as signs of unreliability and confidence and stubbornness as signs of reliability.

I can't count the number of times someone arguing with me has dug up a correction or retraction page on something unrelated as proof that a source is nonsense.

If they did issue a pile of corrections and changes, this post would instead be "the thousands of errors the NYT has made."

Instead of trying to engineer trust, why not actually be trustworthy, admit your mistakes and become better?

Because for many people, the making of mistakes is what makes you unreliable and untrustworthy.

Superficially, they have a news agency with seemingly no errors in one hand and one with a thousand corrections in the other. Unless you are willing to consider that the errorless news agency is just not admitting it, one seems nice and consistent and reliable and one seems clumsy and stupid.

This is only the case until it comes to light the one not admitting mistakes has been making them, at which point all trust is lost.

But people are getting their information from those sources, so how would it come to light for them?

There probably are outlets out there doing that rather than engineering trust. It's just that you haven't heard of them because guess what...definitionally hardly anyone trusts them!

> If they did issue a pile of corrections and changes, this post would instead be "the thousands of errors the NYT has made."

Which would still be valid, because making tons of mistakes is still a sign of unreliability regardless of whether or not you admit to them.

Nobody is infallible but a larger number of mistakes is worse than a smaller number. And it is by no means impossible for a publication to have higher standards or a better record.

What exactly is the "Save Journalism Committee," and what's it's agenda? The link "What is the Save Journalism Commitee" at the bottom of their pages brings you to this nothingburger: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/about, https://archive.is/pY8rd.

The author's Quora profile describes him as a "Messaging Consultant" (https://www.quora.com/profile/Jeremy-Arnold-4, https://archive.is/ch3uz), which sounds like PR to me.

From his Quora profile:

"In support of making the internet less wrong, I happily encourage and reward all corrections (details and past examples here)."

Last I checked, major American newspapers barely run corrections anymore.

Anyway I've watched Jeremy Arnold do this project for a while and I really do believe his heart is in the right place.

> Last I checked, major American newspapers barely run corrections anymore.

I'm not so sure about that, I see them fairly often and I'm not even looking for them.

I read a few of his articles after seeing this one. He seems very even-keeled to me.

"Even so, never once has that led to a public correction."

It's not just you, the US government has this same problem with the NYT where the Times publishes false and damaging (damaging to the public, not to the government) information. In one case I heard of the NYT wouldn't so much as add a link to the government website where people could get the help that the article denied existed.

If you are student of grammar and journalism, do your self a favor and follow @nyttypos. I was stunned by the large number of mistakes that professional journalists make, that their editors miss, and that they refuse to correct.

Here is an article about @nyttypos and his/her obsession...

https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/18/21372181/nytimes-typo-tw...

I find that the NY Post has a better grasp of written copy - their writers are often cleverer and a cut above the Times even though they're writing for a worse paper.

The NYP has to be entertaining; the NYT is just a reliable guide to what people are supposed to believe.

This comment is a prime example of Muphry’s Law (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law).

That's great, thanks for sharing that! I am not a professional journalist but @ntytypos does make mistakes when pointing out errors in Times, but of course they are corrected, unlike what takes place elsewhere.

For most news organizations in our new world order it's not an error if it's intentional bias. Those are called lies. Lies have a purpose. We need to ask, "Why lie?". And then use the answer to fix the news.

I don't think it's quite as nefarious as that.

Like most humans journalists have opinions, and they are more likely to listen to things that confirm their opinions.

Most people are not likely to ask "Is this really true?" of things that align with what they believe is probably true.

Professional journalists are supposed to know about these kinds of biases - because if they do not they are professional only in name.

Further, if someone was repeatedly making these kinds of mistakes in their job, you'd be right to call them incompetent, because they literally are.

For some reason it appears to be taboo to say these journalists are bad at their job. However that isn't very helpful because it doesn't encourage them to change their behavior. Even the article here appears to dance around the bush.

So here it is:

The NYT and The New Yorker are unprofessional, incompetent, and their reputation is in no way justified. They should be ashamed, apologize, and vow to do better. Where they stand in relation to other outlets doesn't even factor into it.

And the above goes for any group of journalists who played their part in the inversion of the profession's reputation in recent years.

Anyways, that's my take on the matter. I don't think the vast majority of journalists who make these kinds of errors are intentionally lying - they are just bad at their job.

Don’t be too hard on them. The Internet destroyed most reporting, because now all the primary source material is available to anyone. I say “most” because there is still plenty of space for deep investigative work.

Somehow that same effect has made it in many ways harder to find the primary material. A million secondary sources (and search engines that recognize that most people just want secondary sources) means that instead of unavailable, now it’s a needle in a haystack problem. I think a deeper problem the internet created was that you’re just as likely to read the New York Times as your local paper now, hurting your local paper. Or if not NYT, then something else brought to you by the non—local Twitter/fb/Reddit/apple news/HN/etc aggregators. That and the whole expectation of freeness that they have to compete with.

The NYT is nothing more than a den of yellow journalism at this point, calling it a tabloid would be giving it too much credit. A complete waste of time. Aaron Schwartz was prescient in his disgust for the mainstream media, if only he could have seen how much worse they’ve gotten..

About a week after the US invasion of Iraq happened, something which New Yorker editor David Remnick heavily pushed, the magazine ran a 10000+ word hit piece on anti-war critic (and theory of computation Chomsky Normal Form creator) Noam Chomsky

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/the-devils-acc...

To pull one thing from this long article - one of the thousands of petitions Chomsky signed over the years was one regarding a French professor named Robert Faurisson. The piece's author wrote:

"Robert Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon-2, in France, who had been suspended from his teaching duties after a mob of students protested his denials of the Holocaust."

This is correct, but something is left out. Faurisson was threatened with prison as well. In fact he got a suspended prison sentence. Chomsky said at the time people should not be imprisoned for publishing books. The piece's author excluded this information from the reader. "He is against governments imprisoning people for writing books" doesn't have quite the ring of the two paragraphs the author wrote on the topic.

These sorts of hit pieces from formerly respectable media have, more than anything else the traditional media have done, chipped away at their credibility for me over the last 2 decades. It has now become my operating assumption that they're lying, to the point that it's difficult for me to communicate about current events with people who look to newspapers for a source of truth. Our operating assumptions are so different.

I am skeptical that venues which exhibit a pattern of repeated "mistakes" with a common slant are in fact comitting simple accidents.

If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary.

> If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary.

For the record, that is completely impractical for reasons so obvious that it's surprising people suggest it with the frequency they do.

Take science reporting, for instance. You think science reporting makes too many mistakes, so you're going to just go to the source and read the raw papers instead (a suggestion I've seen dozens of times). Well, there are so many of those that even scientists don't read everything related to their specialty, and at best only read everything related to their sub-sub-sub specialty. How the hell are you, as a layman, supposed to wade through that stuff to stay informed about science? You can't, since there aren't enough hours in the day. It's a recipe for ignorance.

Reading inaccurate information and taking it all seriously still leaves the reader ignorant, it just gives a false illusion of being well-informed.

I try to take everything I read with a giant grain of salt while remaining humble and recognizing my own ignorance. If a topic really catches my interest I'll try digging into it by going through primary sources, but otherwise I try to not hold very strong opinions about things I haven't researched extensively. Even after I've done a bit more research on a subject I try to remain humble since there's often many concepts with which I'm unfamiliar.

With social media you can now follow many real experts on a wide variety of subjects and they'll happily help explain new and interesting developments in their field. Although even in that situation it's still important to exercise caution, since the illusion of expertise is often abused as a means of advancing some political or financial agenda. Another possibility is that the person explaining the topic might not actually be that well informed or they might've even misunderstood certain parts.

I'd recommend reading Epistemic Learned Helplessness [0].

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

> Reading inaccurate information and taking it all seriously still leaves the reader ignorant, it just gives a false illusion of being well-informed.

> I try to take everything I read with a giant grain of salt while remaining humble and recognizing my own ignorance. If a topic really catches my interest I'll try digging into it by going through primary sources, but otherwise I try to not hold very strong opinions about things I haven't researched extensively. Even after I've done a bit more research on a subject I try to remain humble since there's often many concepts with which I'm unfamiliar.

I think that's a reasonable attitude, though it has the tradeoff of being maybe too indecisive.

> With social media you can now follow many real experts on a wide variety of subjects and they'll happily help explain new and interesting developments in their field. Although even in that situation it's still important to exercise caution, since the illusion of expertise is often abused as a means of advancing some political or financial agenda. Another possibility is that the person explaining the topic might not actually be that well informed or they might've even misunderstood certain parts.

There still aren't enough hours in the day for someone to do even that with any breadth. It's also worth noting that activity is basically journalism with an audience of one.

My general thrust though is to argue against the individualist rejection of institutions, which seems to be really common and I think is pretty misguided. While those institutions always have flaws, there's also good reasons for their existence and use, which are often weirdly forgotten. The reaction to those flaws are often individualist ideas that have even deeper flaws, and often don't actually correct the flaws they're responding to. To make an analogy: it's like a novice programmer reacting to seeing a few dozen Windows bugs and declaring they can't trust Microsoft anymore and they're going to write their own OS instead. That's a huge project, way bigger than one person, and a novice programmer is unlikely to actually do a better job than Microsoft (dispute its flaws and mistakes).

Is it impractical to read the cited sources in order to validate the science writers interpretations?

It's not uncommon for scientists of comparable prestige to arrive at two very different conclusions while looking at the same data set.

Do you also cultivate a network of informants and leakers to find out what is happening in the corridors of power or secret organizations? Do you travel the world to find out what is happening in the major cities? Fly to war zones to get appraised of the situation?

Not to mention, primary sources are often far, far more biased than journalists. A competent journalist will not simply report on one primary source, they will research several sources, cross-check them, and produce a story that incorporates information from all 3. Even if they can't or won't control their personal bias, they are likely to have much less skin in the game than the promary sources on anything.

NYT last Feb had published article encouraging readers to go to China amidst the pandemic, the logic being that China is safe and our xenophobic bias might be responsible for us considering China unsafe.

Sounds like an opinion piece.

> Why does random newsletter guy have a better system than two “we care a lot about the truth” news corporations each worth billions?

Because the news corporations are solving a very different (and much harder) problem. It's the same reason the rationalist community was ready for the pandemic weeks or months ahead of the general populus. A small entity (such as a newsletter) has the slack to actually optimise for truth. A large entity must instead optimise for power. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-... and https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/why-i-am-not-in-char... .

> "Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy." ~ a journalist.

Hah. Reminds me of that funny quote: "I always thought as fact that my brain is the most important organ in my body. Then I realised who was telling me this."

What happens when the NYT makes mistakes is they don’t admit fault, defend their work like zealots, market it broadly to the point that schools adopt it, and then they quietly edit their work so that it is less visibly flawed but still fundamentally flawed. Behold the saga of the 1619 Project: https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memo...

Seems like it would be easy to have a change log at the bottom of every article that tracks edits. There’s probably three free widgets like this on GitHub that would work just fine.

I've seen articles on NPR and Reuters that have brief summaries of edits at the bottom. Stuff like "Edited to correct affiliation of Dr X. The article originally and incorrectly said she worked at Y University." They'll also put an "edited at" time at the top.

More often they stealth edit to remove evidence of their inaccuracies or lies, though.

Source?

https://twitter.com/jerrydunleavy/status/1308586151771549698

https://twitter.com/JerylBier/status/1239624136118468608

That's just dishonest stealth editing. Reuters in particular has been known to spread intelligence/CIA propaganda (particularly during the Turkey coup).

Yes, those are good. But it would be so easy to have a GitHub-style change log, and/or a Wikipedia-style “talk” section where rationale for changes is discussed.

It could increase attention and time on the site as well, good for the bottom lines at the outfits too.

It’s not just knowing the edit history, however. When journalists make mistakes their retractions and corrections must be given the same exposure as the original content, to correct the record meaningfully. Otherwise the damage has already been done and people will take the initial content with them forward, shaping their opinions accordingly.

Good luck finding a fix for that problem.

Better to focus on something that’s actually actionable, like adding a change log.

"And it’s not like any of those outlets are pro-Trump! And neither am I!"

What is spectacularly frustrating about today's climate is that one cannot criticize the extremely poor, biased coverage of Trump as illustrated in the article without discussion-ending accusations of being pro Trump and even a Russian asset.

This quoted qualifier needed to be in there or else people would forever henceforth refer back to this article as evidence that the author supported Trump.

As I said elsewhere here, hit pieces more than anything else have eroded the credibility of traditional media for me, and the last 4 years have been unending, overlapping series of anti-Trump hit pieces. Speaking as a non-supporter of Trump, I found their coverage disheartening

Everything potentially controversial seems to need an “As a ____, ...”

Indeed

Okay, so they have problems. Let's say that I am convinced, and I will be looking for a better source of journalism. What would that be?

I don't think there is such a thing and I'm not sure why. It seems like everybody that writes something does it to convince you of something they believe, insteading of providing a neutral informed review of the facts. You just can't trust reporters to be honest or to know what they are talking about.

The best bet seems to be finding subject matter expects with opposing views and listening to their arguments and the evidence behind them, then coming to your own conclusions. I.e. a lot for work.

I use RSS feeds for Reuters's business section for business and finance news and the AP for general news. I guess I don't know how either of them handle retractions or updates but I like my news to be as dispassionate as possible and I think Reuters and the AP are as close to that as you can get. I'm sure the journalists for both have their biases but at least they aren't as obvious as other outlets.

Didn't Reuters kill off their RSS service? How did you set it up? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576022

I've been cycling through free services that create a feed from a webpage. The latest one I'm using is PolitePol.

https://politepol.com/en/

The free version of it meets my needs perfectly.

Independent analysts on Twitter collated with your own common sense developed by reading broadly for general knowledge and history. Go back to basics and learn the fundamentals of informal logic and conversational implicature, to help discern between logic, rhetoric and opinion. Allow for multiple interpretations of the facts. Compensate (incompletely) for narrative bias through valuing first-hand sources (if it's admissible in court, even if it's inconclusive, it's still evidence). The key questions to ask are, what's missing? what's being emphasized? Who benefits? Where are the contradictions? Why not use an alternative phrase? What's simply a lie? Why do so?

In the "post-truth" era, everyone needs to become a diet version of a counterintelligence operative. The point of post-truth is that all sources of credibility are no longer impartial. They are instead persuasive media looking out for different interests through errors of omission and commission. As such you are not left with any ground to stand on other than the relative inconsistency of different narratives. No story can be taken in its own right – it has to be contextualized in a greater fabric of understanding and information and experience such that what is bullshit and nonsense can be ignored without harm. The good news is that there is much literature in the field of deception, counterintel, language manipulation, power plays etc to work this angle. The bad news is that it's work.

At the risk of irony in providing an unsourced quote:

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

― Mark Twain

I appreciate this article is about how bad the NYT is, but let's never forget their most epic correction of all time: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/movies/room-237-documenta...

> It wasn’t just Twitter that pointed out how misleading this framing was. So did Politifact. So did Vox. And The Washington Post did so rather scaldingly.

> And it’s not like any of those outlets are pro-Trump! And neither am I!

I can't remember where I first heard it, but there's a general sense that journalists view themselves as a 'priestly class' that perform a sacred role not only to report, but to shape the narrative.

The idea that author should have to state they don't support Donald Trump (which has no bearing on the facts) to counteract potential heresy charges for pointing out the NYT's mistakes seems to fit well with that.

Cannot compete with The Big Hack by Bloomberg, LOL

The death of Brian Sicknick by a fire extinguisher at the capital riots is false.

It is still uncorrected on the NYT.

It matters because it might have been due to irritants used inside the building and we need to know this stuff.

But NYT won't risk passing blame.

You don’t know it’s false. However your comment made me curious and I was amazed that it’s still inconclusive what caused his death. And why was that...

> on Wednesday, pro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support. He died on Thursday evening.

- NYTimes

> He died the day after he was <overpowered and beaten> by rioters from the mob at the Capitol.

NYTimes now links to the above article when referencing the incident.

> Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, 42, a 13-year veteran of the force, died as a result of injuries sustained while engaging with rioters. The exact cause of his injuries has not been made public, with investigators lacking evidence that could prove somebody caused his death.[349] Reuters reported that Sicknick suffered a thromboembolic stroke[350] and collapsed after returning to his division office

- Wikipedia

So the cause is not known yet, there is no evidence, and he wasn’t rushed to hospital after immediately sustaining injuries but instead returned to the precinct and then felt unwell. Also texted his brother that he was maced twice but felt fine.

NYTimes is such bullshit, I can’t believe how brazenly they do this stuff. If someone is “beaten on the ground and rushed to hospital” you don’t really question that or feel you need to fact check - because it seems like something that would be easily falsified if it weren’t true.

Yet the NYT manage to do it.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

NYT and New Yorker and other establishment media outlets are corporate businesses. Their only interest is to push their propaganda narratives to further their own interests and protect their owners and other corporations.

Good resource from the comments: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff

When and why did NYT turn to trash? It feels like they completely sold out for clicks. As if someone was watching the revenue above all else. At the same time evolved into a liberal echo chamber.

Was it a leadership change or an owners strategic vision or Trump or just a sign of the changing times.

And what do they do now Trump is gone ans there is no more outrage to sell if they were after clicks.

I haven't used it much myself, but Newsdiffs [1] seems like a good way to track these sorts of things. Unfortunately it is limited to a handful of outlets. Fortunately these are some of the most-read.

1: http://newsdiffs.org/

And not only that, those news organizations often stealth edit their articles months or years after the fact.

It's odd to call out the New York Times and New Yorker here. Most news outlets have well documented systemic bias. Given the statement at the beginning which suggests otherwise, I would lump this piece into the same bucket as other media outlets : biased with an agenda.

Want to know what the NY Times thinks of the NY Times' trustworthiness?

https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1311088158516195328

It would be more helpful to correct for bias than to have quick turnaround on fact fixing.

For an ordinary citizen, is there any real benefit in following 'the news?'

I stopped reading after the extremely misguided first line. I work with, live with, and generally am surrounded by “educated” people. I don’t know any of them who would agree that the premier news outlets are mostly trustworthy.

Educated people understand what pays the bills for the major news outlets and it sure as hell ain’t trust.

Nothing. They’re mouthpieces of the establishment and they have to retract nothing.

The NY Times can be just as bad as any other online rag. They're incentivized to publish hit pieces, stories to spark outrage, anything to get clicks. Seems for many at the NYT, journalistic integrity is just some antiquated notion.

Take this admission, straight from the horse's moouth [1]:

> I’ve made my way up as a reporter in the time of social media and most-read lists. I know what will make a piece pop to the top of that list as soon as I write it down in my notebook. No one has ever pressured me to get clicks, but I’ve been praised all my career with euphemisms like “really knowing my audience.” I can see on the site when my story is above someone else’s. I like it when it is. And I love the warm embrace of the social media scrum.

> One easy path toward the top of the list and toward that embrace is communal outrage. Toss something (someone) into that maw, and it’s like fireworks. I have mastered that game. For a couple years, that desire for attention — to feel the crack of my byline hitting the conversation — propelled me more than almost anything else. I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon. I learned how to weaponize charm, which everyone does, but I do exceptionally well. I would call some stories kills. Resisting virality when you know exactly how to get it is like resisting a cigarette (I love smoking but do not smoke). When I wanted another viral story, I would talk about needing a hit.

> Stirring outrage can be good. It can very well be the right thing to do. I won an award for working on an investigation series into predators using social video games to groom children. I’m glad that series made people mad.

> But it’s extremely hard to control this tool. I would other times thrust a massive spotlight onto a person who would suffer from it and for no good reason. As an intern at the Chronicle, I got a man fired because he talked to me for a story, and some part of me knew it would happen. The story was a completely silly one, about private women’s clubs in the city, and he was a sweet and gentle man. I still feel sick when I think about him. And I think about him a lot.

> In becoming increasingly driven by the pleasure of attention and conflict, I was sharpening my cruelest edges. The roar of Twitter on my side meant the kill was justified and good. I was using the tools that had been gifted to me — my love of people, my ability to write — but pursuing only attention, which is just the affection of the mob.

> I do not want to cultivate sociopathy in myself. And cultivating sociopathy was exactly what I was doing.

[1]: https://chosenbychoice.substack.com/p/learning-how-to-and-ho...

What happens when substacks make mistakes?

Someone starts a competing Substack and steals their subscribers. It's much harder to do that with the NYT and New Yorker, which are big institutions with all kinds of privileges and insider access.

Sometimes they correct it in a tweet or follow up substack and no one reads that one, the previous one confirming their biases was much more entertaining.

Doesn't matter because most of substack isn't really journalism - it's punditry and navel-gazing. It's basically disrupting the op-ed page.

And op-eds, even in NYT, have been full of factual errors across the entire political spectrum of personalities who write for it.

Nobody cares, because Substack isn’t treated as the “paper of record”. The problem is not that NYT etc. needs to be perfect, but that these news outlets are privileged sources that are used in crafting “evidence-based” arguments about all sorts of important things (but especially public policy).

I would say that on hn it very much is treated as such.

When "a" substack who knows, from the TFA:

> Purely for comparative purposes, a two-bullet rundown of my own corrections policy:

> If a reader points out anything untrue or unfair, I (i) pay out a bounty, (ii) make in-line and end-note edits to the original, (iii) update my public corrections log

> If the mistake is serious, I also publish reflections on where things broke down and what I’m doing to limit future risk (example) > [...]

> On June 10th they wrote, in reference to LA teachers going on strike, that “the average classroom had forty-six students”. (This was in the lede, where the author was setting context for how upset the reader should be.) When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an average across a large sample? Never.)

...Except the figure given was obviously in context of Los Angeles, not the entire US. Here's the context:

> On Monday, January 14, 2019, Los Angeles’s thirty-four thousand public-school teachers went on strike. They demanded smaller classes (the average classroom had forty-six students)

However, finding out actual figures for LA schools is hard, as you have differing figures published by differing sites, based on sources who are on either side of a dispute that involves class sizes. That said, based on this one I found, it looks like the average isn't 46, that's more of an outlier, but neither is it in the "most have a number of students that start with two. More rarely it's a one or three".

https://edsource.org/2019/class-size-conundrum-at-the-heart-...

> Science teacher Michelle Levin has only 33 kids in each of her classes — which makes her fortunate. That’s not because a class of 33 is “small.” Levin’s class sizes at Daniel Webster Middle School in West Los Angeles are larger than national averages for similar middle schools, which range from 26 to 28 students. But Levin says 33 students is small by L.A. Unified School District standards. In most LAUSD middle schools, the largest core classes have 37 kids — and can sometimes be as large as 46.

Noted caveat - this is only for middle schools. Other caveat - I really can't find any non-partisan figures on this.

However, I am happy to contend the author is taking claims out of context in this particular instance to make a point, and backs it up with tweets, one of which is no longer available, and the other is from someone who works for a right wing think tank.

So... yeah. Qui custodet custodes? If you're publishing from "savingjournalism.substack.com", perhaps try to properly source (Cato Institute associate scholars are a biased source on union disputes for obvious reasons) the objections you're making. And treat the claims you're 'debunking' in context, please.

The New Yorker themselves corrected it from "the average classroom had forty-six students" to "as many as forty-six students". They published a "fact", in the lead paragraph, that they themselves eventually agreed was wrong. How is that "taking claims out of context"?

Did you read my comment?

1) Author contrasted claims made to _national_ averages, not _LA_ averages.

2) I agree with you that they got it wrong, I even said as such:

> However, finding out actual figures for LA schools is hard, as you have differing figures published by differing sites, based on sources who are on either side of a dispute that involves class sizes. That said, based on this one I found, it looks like the average isn't 46, that's more of an outlier, but neither is it in the "most have a number of students that start with two. More rarely it's a one or three".

However, the author's assertions of _how they got it wrong_, are, from a cursory reading, also misleading.

I don't see any assertions of "how they got it wrong" in the article, at least about the class sizes. The article states that the number was wrong, that it was obviously wrong, and investigates how the mistake was "corrected". The article is not concerned with "how they got it wrong" at all, only "how they corrected it".

The obviousness of the error is brought up because it's relevant to these bullet points: "Both correction notices are notably vague as to how bad the errors were" and "They don’t seem to have reviewed the teacher strike piece for other mistakes".

The original text, before you clipped it out of context and framed it, says "When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an average across a large sample? Never.)" This is accurate, as is the claim that The New Yorker's figure of an average of 46 is completely off base. As your own figures clearly show.

> someone who works for a right wing think tank.

This kind of bias contributes nothing and makes good-faith discussion impossible. It's openly insulting and can only produce a flame war.

Edit: Reworded to be a little nicer.

Yes, and these are some of the most reputable and accurate in the business.

Imagine the tripe with places like OAN, the gateway pundit, epoch times, etc...

From the NYT article this blogger is upset about: “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi”

“Mistake” he’s highlighting: “ The Sanofi portion of those holdings totalled a max of $1,485”.

Sounds like accurate reporting. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it’s something, and it has the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Edit: before you downvote me, please consider that politicians have historically been held to account for the _appearance_ of conflict of interest, and that this is a good thing for a democracy. They have historically avoided this in high office by divesting or placing assets in a blind trust, something Trump did not do. NYT has a journalistic duty to report this conflict of interest and did so while saying it is small.

The article further explains:

"HCQ is a cheap generic drug that was widely being given away for free

Pharma firms don’t benefit much from picking one generic over another

Sanofi was never going to make meaningful money on Plaquenil

The disclosures in question were already over a year out of date

The disclosures actually show net sales of the Sanofi-related fund

(More sourcing for all that here.)

It wasn’t just Twitter that pointed out how misleading this framing was. So did Politifact. So did Vox. And The Washington Post did so rather scaldingly.

What is misleading about saying Trump “small personal financial interest”? That seems pretty clear cut and truthful.

What do you think a “small personal financial interest” is to a billionaire?! A few million? A few hundred thousand?! Not less than $2k. C’mon man.

It... doesn't matter? The criticism that the statement is wrong isn't right if the statement isn't wrong.

Because there's an obvious implication that Trump is pushing the drug because he has a financial interest in pushing the drug. But if his financial interest is so small that he stood to gain hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands at most, then implying he's doing it for financial reasons is extremely dishonest.

There's a big space between "implying he's doing it for financial reasons" and "reporting on the presence of a financial interest". It would be worse reporting to _omit_ the financial interest rather than include it.

I probably have a proportional exposure to SNY via index funds as what Trump is reported to have, compared to his fortune. I would say that there would be very little value in reporting that interest in any context. Certainly it would tend to make most readers think that the financial interest may serve as an improper motivation, when there is no likelihood that that is the case.

Mr Trump also holds a “small financial interest” in the McDonalds Corporation, having once purchased a hamburger.

Imagine that Alice's net worth is an even billion dollars. Alice buys a tiny stake, $1000 or so, in ACME Industries. This is financially immaterial to Alice. It's 0.0001% of her net worth. But the purchase gives her access to all of the information which must be legally shared with investors, and is a common way investors keep tabs on publicly-traded companies.

Now, imagine that Bob's net worth is $10,000. Alice's investment is equivalent to Bob investing a single penny in ACME Industries.

The headline "Alice and Bob establish a small financial interest in ACME Industries" might be technically true in the most stringent sense, but it doesn't really align with how the phrase "financial interest" is used in common speech.

It's not even relevant information about either Alice or Bob.

This is one of those things that barely skates along the line of honesty. It's like a company that says "We Don't Sell Your Data!" in large type with a tiny asterisk on the end. When you read the fine print attached to said asterisk, there are all kinds of exceptions for "trusted partners" and "quality assurance". To all intents and purposes, that company does, in fact, sell your data.

This just isn't how you establish or maintain trust.

>But the purchase gives her access to all of the information which must be legally shared with investors...publicly-traded companies.

Publicly traded companies must share this information with the public.

Not all of it. As a shareholder, you get access to shareholder meetings (not public), can vote on certain issues raised by the board, etc.

I don’t know. The term “small” made it sound — small. You can argue the other points of the article, but this doesn’t seem like a real mischaracterization.

$1,485 sounds extraordinarily small! Sanofi is the 70th largest company in the world [0]. If you have even a few hundred thousand dollars invested in a diversified way, you probably have more Sanofi exposure than that.

So yeah, if Sanofi makes money, Trump's thousand dollar investment pays dividends, but he was actually underweight in it. It would be more meaningful and equally truthful to say "Mr. Trump has a financial interest in Sanofi's competitors".

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-...

If someone worth a million dollars had a $1.50 stake in some venture, would that be worth mentioning?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com