WHO scientists: NYT misquoted us to fit a prescribed narrative | Hacker News Reader

WHO scientists: NYT misquoted us to fit a prescribed narrative

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79 pointstomtung69 comments

Seeing a lot of evidence of late that NYT Journalists arent playing fairly. The Greenwald article which despite its problems points out bad faith on the part of Taylor Lorenz(I think that is her name) and now we have WHO scientists claiming that Javier C. Hernández and James Gorman have bent the truth. I wouldnt be as bothered by this if it were possible to call out bad journalism without being dismissed as a "fake news-er".

What news organizations can we really trust now?

Do you have a link to the Greenwald article in question? It sounds interesting.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...

I would guess it is this one: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...

It basically describe the now pretty common practice of trawling social media sites and forums for something which can be made into news, conducted by very large news papers like NYT.

In my view its a kind of low effort data mining when there is news droughts. Nothing to report? Then go and look up the all the employed truck drivers in the nation and see if you can find one that does not have a driver license (it most likely exist one or two). It does not ask if the portion of truck drivers that have lost their license is higher than the overall population, or provide any insight into the profession, but rather just want to attract reader attention by highlighting something which look controversial.

This is the one. Thanks.

I get your point but this one article of many written by Glenn on the topic of crappy journalism and a lack of accountability, even among the reporters at the NYTimes.

This article is about a social media post, by a journalist at the NYTimes, accusing a highly visible person of using a slur that never actually happened. And once corrected, this reporter basically hides and asks why everyone is attacking her.

He’s using this event as an example of an on-going issue.

Maybe I'm way off here, but it looks like you may think the person you're replying to is saying that Greenwald's article is "a kind of low effort data mining when there is news droughts" (etc)

I believe they are agreeing with Greenwald, and saying that the Times reporter is the one in the wrong.

Or this is just a vexing parse for me

No, you are correct! I completely misread that.

None by themselves. Every news source has an agenda; no exceptions. That’s like asking: what’s one food I can eat forever and stay healthy? Our only recourse is to consume a varied diet of news sources.

One tool we do have now is the ability to subscribe to youtubers and similar people who try to make a living from telling you about the news. The benefit here is that you have them search through news for you and then give you a summary or analysis.

Obviously I won’t mention names because someone will immediate chime in to start an argument. You’ll have to do your own digging.

In addition you also should be informed about the food you are eating - how many carbs, fat, protein etc. The same with news sources.

Just to add to the list, Noam Chomsky has long maintained that the NYT has a very strong agenda regarding Israel which manifests in any and all related coverage.[1]

Such an idea ran contrary to my long held sentiment for the NYT as rational and unbiased but I am seeing it more and more.

[1] Chomsky writes about this in Understanding Power.

Noam Chomsky has an agenda himself, I would not use him as a factual reference for any such perceived bias.

Chomsky is transparent about his agenda, and that's the best you can hope for from anybody.

And what does NYTs coverage of Israel has to do with the issue on hand?

Go to the facts. Journalists check facts all the time. Most reporting is always inaccurate to insiders, so don't blindly trust what is said by anyone.

The New York Times of 2021 is NOT the New York Times of 1960.

Trust is lost very quickly, but it takes a long time to earn that trust back, once lost.

I class the NYT of today in the same league as CNN, Washington Post, and Reuters; other formerly great news media companies that have lost all my trust. I doubt greatly whether I would ever live long enough to believe in any of these four companies again.

Other formerly-great media companies that are borderline as far as I can tell: BBC and the (Australian) ABC.

Other media companies that have never held my trust: All of the Rupert Murdoch stable. (Including Fox, Sky News, WSJ, News of the World, etc)

I wish I didn't agree, but I really do. I find myself looking abroad for news about the US. One must go through multiple countries as each have their own bent towards the US. Lot's of extra work, but definitely worthwhile for newsjunkies like my SO and me.

EDIT: words fixed

Which US news sources today stay on the neutral/journalistic path in the US? Everything will have a slant of some kind of course, though hopefully there are outlets that are far less egregious.

Edit adt'l: a question appears!

How did Reuters lose it?

When you have a broad range of news sources and you can compare them over a longish period, you start to see patterns and biases.

Reuters was one of the most surprising, for me, losses of trust. I always had Reuters 'way up there' in truthfulness, but I was forced to change my mind. These days, they stick to Establishment points of view, not necessarily the truth.

They’ve always had an agenda; sway opinion and leverage that power.

I wonder if they’re less trustworthy or you’re more aware of their untrustworthiness?

At this point the NYT is a tabloid.

Agreed. Used to respect the NY times, but now it's just borderline far left propaganda

You have never seen far left if you think the NYT is far left.

No true Bolshevik.

Words have meanings.

Not any more apparently. Fascist, socialist, communist, alt-right, neoliberal, etc. just mean whatever they need to quickly slur someone with them. Hell ever Marxism seems like it doesn’t actually refer to anything Marx or his contemporaries ever said anymore. Did you know Bloomberg is a Maoist?

Fascinating how the site obsessed with their pseudo-intellectual superiority can’t add anything other than downvotes.

I agree. Unless we are talking about avowed actual Nazis or card-carrying Communists, much of this extremist labeling can be reduced to identify ‘enemy tribe members.’

Imagine a discussion board where you could not use any -ism.

But meanings vary depending on region, education, political background.

Science, direct experience, is about as concrete as it gets.

No. The NYT has a liberal bias. Not a left bias.

Well what's "liberal" here? As someone not from the US, liberal means to me what people in the US call "libertarian" or "classical liberal"; and I thought "liberal" is what you call people from the democratic party, who are left-leaning statists AFAICT. Are you just saying they aren't communists? Because communism is what's normally called far-left in most of the world.

The US is a very right wing country. If you're not from there then there's a good chance that the Democratic Party is more right wing than your countries major right wing party.

Exactly. Other countries' liberal will match the NYT.

Really we need a venn diagram with like 10 different circles to describe the distinction between what is meant by liberal and what is meant by left here.

Liberal, in this case, when contrasted against the left usually describes the politics of the neoliberal and neoconservative (and often a mixture of the two) wing of the Democrat Party. In other words, liberals are considered a sort of right wing - pro-market/pro-capitalism - of the Democrat party. On the other hand, you have the “real left” which represents anti-capitalist and pro-labor ideals (this is a smaller faction and it’s more of a gradient that leans toward democratic socialism than full abolishment of capitalism). There are certain cases where (parts of) the neoliberal and left wing align - for example the various identity issues. That’s the “progressive” part of the party.

But yes this is all very confusing because we have only recently developed language in US politics to describe these differences and they have not really hit mainstream political discussion. That and we have one mega party that represents many different views.

> we have only recently developed language in US politics to describe these differences and they have not really hit mainstream political discussion.

Well, we are just rediscovering the language used in the rest of the world the whole time, as we fix one side of the Overton window while the other side of it stretches like crazy.

What would you say are the three biggest policy differences between right and left or democrat and republicans?

Policy differences are kind of hard to track and it gets abstract. Are we talking about the superficial policy differences (i.e. the ones we see in CSPAN performances) or those that represent the the interests of the corporate backers of each party? Sometimes the performative stuff aligns with the backers’ interests (e.g. democrats and immigration).

At the end of the day I’m mostly checked out from US politics. There is how I think things ought to be and reality. Reconciling the two will probably take many more years of reflection.

Mostly my interest in politics at this point is the internecine conflicts that arise in the various subcultures of political thought online.

I ask because I can’t remember the last time I heard of a policy disagreement debating the merits of two approaches to the same problem. Both sides don’t even see the same problems.

Will be interesting to see what policies Biden goes for I guess.

I am using the proper international definition of "liberal". The NYT certainly has a very US ideology, but it best fits liberal in the rest off the democratic world.

The Guardian is left of the NYT, for example.

> In the United States liberalism is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of the Democratic administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereas in Europe it is more commonly associated with a commitment to limited government and laissez-faire economic policies (see below Contemporary liberalism).

https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism

Do you agree with this?

It's the contemporary, mostly inoffensive brand of leftism: the one that obsesses over vague and all-explaining systemic issues like gender, race and climate change, while never questioning the government-fed narrative on geopolitical issues, conflicts and alliances. In other words a lot of critical posturing on the surface and a complete alignment on the deep themes that really matter.

If NYT is far left propaganda to you, then what is Jacobin, Nonsite, and/or wsws.org?

To me, those tend to be honest about their bias, and better at reporting facts.

I wish NYT was far left. How does the NYT mispresenting WHO scientists to push the story that China was hiding COVID constitute "far left" to you? That is a dead on Trumpian conspiracy.

#cancelcovid - it will totally work

Have you read about China? Hint: they are not like us.

American readers are now realizing what NYT's international readers knew years ago. That they make up their minds first and then write articles to fit that narrative. Their international reporting has been biased crap for years and now the domestic reporting has caught up.

It's worth noting the original tweet is from Peter Daszak, who has been president of EcoHealth Alliance which has for 15 years worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology studying bat coronaviruses[1][2][3]. He's been on record many times at least since February 2020 saying the ideas of lab break were "crackpot theories that need to be addressed" else they might harm our cooperation with China.[4]

At the very least that seems like a conflict of interest and perhaps the WHO should be sending investigators to China without longstanding professional ties to the lab whose name they aim to clear, who weren't already on record with their conclusions a year before they were sent to investigate their colleagues.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-coronaviru...

[2] https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11...

[3] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j....

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/coronavirus-ch...

Not surprised you are getting immediately down voted. My post is as well. There seems to be bias HN users as well, no amount of facts or historical reference is enough to correct it.

Probably because it would mean having to side with Trump on something.

Adding on the above comment, Daszak’s role in promoting the contentious theory of Covid spontaneously developing in wildlife is widely and credibly documented.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

Even if you agree with him, it’s fair to point out he had a strong point of view before he ever went on this mission to Wuhan.

It’s also worth pointing out that in at least one way the linked tweet lends credibility to the nyt report: it acknowledges “heated arguments” on the WHO mission.

Finally, if you read the NYT report you’ll see it is building off recent reporting on the WHO trip by WSJ and the Australian Broadcasting Company. The issue of possible (accidental - not engineered by govt) lab origins for this sort of virus, in the past or future, is also a real and widely covered credible issue. There are a lot of comments here alleging an nyt agenda. Maybe you can argue the mainstream press has one, but this coverage is not particularly unusual, either on the WHO trip or Wuhan. (Also, it can be argued the MSM under covered the possible lab origins of Covid for months, scared of being lumped in with people who were saying the Chinese govt made it on purpose.)

I think it would probably be worthwhile for the WHO to send over as their investigator the president of the microbial threats forum from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine -- the collective scientific national academy of the United States of America.

Fortunately, they did. His name is Peter Daszak.

https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/

"In an interview after his return to New York, Daszak said that the visit had provided some new clues, which ALL of the scientists, Chinese and international, agreed most likely pointed to an animal origin within China or Southeast Asia. The scientists have largely discounted claims that the virus originated in a lab, saying that possibility was so unlikely that it was not worth further investigation."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...

This seems like a pretty non-denial denial. I don't see any real substantive disagreement about facts. Just whether or not heated arguments over access to documents should be viewed in a good or bad light.

The NYT story is indirectly linked via tweets. It is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...

or https://archive.vn/vZzdd if you would rather not give them the visit.

Things are tending towards extreme sensationalism nowadays.

The news media has to compete with the internet for eyeballs.

Honey boo boo on the learning channel was the beginning of the end.

“Chinese officials urged the W.H.O. team to embrace the government’s narrative about the source of the virus, including the unproven notion that it might have spread to China from abroad, according to several members of the team. The W.H.O. scientists responded that they would refrain from making judgments without data.”

‘“It was my take on the entire mission that it was highly geopolitical,” Dr. Fischer said. ‘

“lack of detailed patient records both from early confirmed cases, and possible ones before that.”

‘“We asked for that on a number of occasions and they gave us some of that, but not necessarily enough to do the sorts of analyses you would do,” said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist on the W.H.O. team, referring to the confirmed cases.’

‘In the end, the W.H.O. experts sought compromise, praising the Chinese government’s transparency, but pushing for more research about the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019.’

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...

After following this for over a year, witnessing China manipulating or withholding information, reading the article in question, and reading all of the associated tweets, it is clear every team involved has inherent biases.

The WHO investigation team is just as much political as it is scientific. The team needs to seem cooperative in order to get more information, which they desperately need. The team said they would not come to any outcomes without all of the data first yet they did exactly that by saying, the virus likely came from food that was imported and it is not likely that it came from the lab. China is clearly still trying to cover up. The US is still trying to investigate any possible origin story, but don’t seem particularly keen on a lab origin story. It’s mostly far right Republicans like Tom Cotton who originally proposed and perpetuated the lab origin theory in the first place, not exactly New York Times’ bread and butter butter customers.

NYT does not have a prescribed narrative of a lab origin story. WHO scientist have a very strong interest in continuing to gather information from China through cooperative means. So I’m not surprised they would throw shade on a New York Times article saying that they were greeted with lots of hesitation from China. The only part of this I don’t understand is why there is a the Hacker News post with links to scientist’s tweet that all but confirms the bias and intent already illustrated by said NYT story.

TLDR: WHO scientist are not happy to see themselves being quoted as having difficulty working with the Chinese, as they need to continue working with the Chinese. They would probably like the New York Times story redacted, so they are claiming to have been misquoted... nothing to see here folks, moving along

I’m curious why the NYT hasn’t been the victim of a large scale hack/infiltration/leak/exposé. With all the shenanigans their staff seem to pull and the enemies they make, you’d think their communications and files and finances would be a big target. Is their op-sec really that good? Do they get help from the intel community?

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