Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor Its Writers | Hacker News Reader

Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor Its Writers

greenwald.substack.com

126 pointsdnh4439 comments

It is amazing how journalists from mayor outlets and even institutions have so much contempt for independent substack journalists. They think it's beneath them because somehow only working for those outlets gives their reporting legitimacy and a form of entitlement to publish therefor they try to demonize substack and delegitimize its writers because they are independent. I saw it being labeled as "onlyfans for journalists". That's mostly coming from mediocre journalists who probably secretly envy substack writers for their huge profile.

Matt Taibbi recently wrote a piece about it that's worth reading https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack

A lot of journalists have gone down a very tracked and credentialed path, having gone through prestigious institution after prestigious institution to end up in another prestigious institution.

To see someone bypass all the gatekeepers and yet become more of a success than them must really grind their gears.

I doubt they care. I'd never hard of several of the "special substack successes". Who has time to go out searching the world for journalists who write things they like? I read newspapers in part because I don't want to search the world. I'm aware that no one is perfect. Just like I don't say cultivate the best people on twitter to follow. Who has so much time to waste on that? I'm sorry but all this comes across as people just searching for someone who tells them what they want to hear.

  "I doubt they care"

Jealousy and envy is often what's behind bitterness and resentment

I like both Taibbi and Greenwald on occasion, but what they do hardly qualifies as journalism.

Let's be honest, substack is just another editorial page. These guys don't have fact checkers and seldom do more than cursory research themselves. The ultimate goal is to generate clickbait. All of which places them... well, just about exactly at the same level of rigor as the editorial pages of the NYT or WSJ.

Editorials are a dime a dozen. They can be fun when they tell you what you want to hear, or introduce you to an interesting new concept, but they're purposefully held to a lesser standard than the news departments.

I see here obvious misunderstanding of what fact-checking is in media biz. F-c is not some sort of tool, or pre-requisite for truth. Neither it's a part of imaginary high standard for reporting. It's a corporate defence line to reduce the risk of an unscrupulous, or just stupid employee damaging corporate brand. In one-man gig such as a Greenwald does, he himself cares for his reputation because unlike majority of journos employed by big media who are names in bylines covered by ad-propelled brand identity, he is brand himself, and cannot make an oopsie, and then find a job in other place after a short vacation.

But it also means that his allegiance is to the brand, not the truth. People who like his brand are consuming it for the brand, and are not necessarily seeking out alternatives. Errors that would harm the reputation of an ordinary journalist don't do anything to a journalist who can simply reiterate false claims to build their brand.

I'm not speaking specifically of Greenwald here. Just pointing out that independence is no guarantee of trustworthiness, either. People love news that affirms them, regardless of the truth, and sometimes rigid, prominent rejection of the truth can be very good for the brand.

There's a lot in your comment I can agree with, but it all sounds as if corporate media brands make journalists acquire allegiance to truth while small/personal brands do not. In real world both don't. Such allegiance as well as preference for truth from readers' side is rather rare thing in general, not because everybody's bad, but because group allegiance, and comfortable biases usually trump moral rules. Typical news business model is not about pursuit of truth, or guarding democracy. It's about catering to tastes of a particular audience. And all media - big or small - has a strong incentive to skew things to pleasure their readers (and let's not forget inciting tribal outrage which increases loyalty to a brand). This naturally at times leads to rigid, prominent rejection of truth. And fact-checking observably doesn't stop it - because it's not its function. No difference in this field between big, and personal brands in general.

Oh, I'm certainly not defending corporate media brands. I have stopped reading the news entirely. In large part I've found that even proper news really isn't as important as it's presented[1]. Even before news media became a nightmare, most national and international news simply isn't relevant to me.

You can still get something a lot like the old, boring news from wire services. When I need it, that's where I go. But it's boring, so I don't keep up with it. Real news at that scale would be expected to be boring.

I should pay more attention to the local news, which has long had the same problem -- the motto was "if it bleeds, it leads". Local violent crime is at least a little relevant. But the important stuff is often even more boring: plans for a new park, a forthcoming road closure, a report from the school principal. Relevant and dull, just what I want.

There's still plenty of room for tribal garbage, but at least it's easier to put into perspective.

[1] I feel weird writing that in a rare period where the news actually contains actionable information -- though that's partly because it happened at a time when the government should have been giving me the information and I should have been able to trust it. But I'm setting aside pandemic as a rare case, hopefully to not be repeated soon.

I'm not sure how much you've read WSJ editorial pages, but many of their pieces involve a lot of research. As a recent case (I forget the exact article), but I was listening to a podcast of a man that recently had a commentary piece in the WSJ opinion section, and as part of it he had interviewed around 20 people for the piece (talking with various state governors about their covid policies). Just because they don't dive deep into each interview, many of their pieces are backed up by lots of research.

I personally value opinion very little. For me, the quality of a news source is my primary concern, both in factual correctness and minimizing bias. With a collective such as traditional news organizations, at least historically they lived and died by their reputation for quality. Fact checkers finding a single poor article affected the reputation of everyone writing within that organization. This makes it much easier for consumers to figure out which institution to trust.

Now with the internet, anyone can publish. Unfortunately it has become infeasible to fact check every single person. Even fact checking one individual often doesn't pay off, you spend a ton of time checking them, only to get a very small stream of information.

This is the primary problem with self-publishing. Because of this I've pretty much given up on reading most self-published material. Unless the author comes from a well regarded institution or otherwise there is an easier way for me to judge accuracy I'm just not interested.

No doubt this viewpoint will offend most people here, but to me this is the biggest problem society now faces. Probably even more dangerous than pure opinion, is content that is mostly factually correct, but contains a small lie. This sort of biased content or intentional misinformation is both very hard to identify, and the very effective at propagating lies.

These days I mostly use academic journals, as peer review is at least some form of quality checking. I do also use a few select large news sources, though with less trust. I've given up on medium articles and similar.

Lack of fact checking on the Internet is a bigger problem than nuclear weapons or anthropogenic global change? I doubt it.

And who checks the fact checkers? Just 20 years ago the news media landscape was very different, the outlets had so much power, so much in fact, that they played a vital role in convincing the american public to go war. Totally unchecked. Now the lost their monopoly and therewith their power and they don't like it.

I would love an automated way to submit articles to googlish fact checker. Something that auto categorized opinion from facts and provided links to support fact classification from a user selected list of sources.

It is, because misinformation is the biggest factor in stopping humanity from addressing these big issues.

There used to be a time when editorials were the insights of people who had spent decades in the news business. They could reasonably be thought to know more than the average person on the subject. A newspaper should offer facts, but it offers only the new facts, not the history needed to judge the facts. They just can't; there's too much. That's for textbooks.

Editorials were supposed to provide a leg up on that. They were journalists working in the field, who would often know even more information than appeared in textbooks. They would have spoken to all of the major players and knew not just what they'd said and done, but what their personalities were like.

It wasn't supposed to be a substitute for your own education and judgment. But it could provide a counterbalance to it. It puts perspective on what your own education and experience amount to. It provides a convenient checkpoint against Dunning-Krugerism.

Unfortunately, editorials no longer serve that function. Opinions aren't even a dime a dozen; they're a dollar per thousand impressions. Young journalists don't get the experience to become old journalists and then editors.

Which kinda leaves us stuck. Academic journals are great if you can read them, but they assume even more background than newspapers. They're the cutting edge of a field, written for others at the cutting edge of the field, and simply don't address anybody who isn't at least working towards a PhD.

On YouTube I now watch all sorts of self-created producers. I stopped watching Netflix, etc., and just watch the self-made people. Substack is hosting the self-made journalists, and kudos to them (and Glenn).

I lost interest in TV and movies more than a decade ago But, a few years back I found youtube producers and have been watching them almost every night since.

It is odd that individuals and small groups could consistently make more engaging, interesting content than organizations with vastly more money and people.

I just recently created my own substack publishing account. I wanted to blog something, former medium user from years ago, and i thought, i heard substack > medium let me try that. And I definitely got that "self publishing" vibe I remember from years ago trying to publish books. I mean don't get me wrong the substack experience was flawless. With just my twitter account I had the same type of thing my hero's blog from! But, at the end of the day I knew this was just like medium but a better deal for the writer. And I knew this was a website, where anyone can sign up. It's so weird that stigma of "being self published" was a real thing in 2005, 2006, 2007... somewhere around 2019 it faded away. Now serious writers are self published too.

Just like making money from software requires every product have an artificial scarcity feature, so too does making money from journalism. It makes sense that journalism-for-profit businesses would want control over not only their own stories and content, but some degree of control over what other's say, as well. It's not clear what leverage they would use, apart from attacking "fair use" doctrine.

AFAIK if you learn something from the NY Times, you're allowed to tell others about it, and talk about the event. (right?) But haven't you also economically harmed the NY Times because in your tweet noting some fact you learned from the NYT, say, you've provided most of the value of the NYT (a factual report) to your audience for free? This presents the interesting problem of "copy-writed facts", which would be a terrifying world to live in!

Facts cannot be copyrighted. Only the literary expressions surrounding them.

The two big tells for me are how hard people flip-flopped on Greenwald and how he has to 'defend' himself with his past accomplishments.

Leftist Twitter was a huge Greenwald fan when he was breaking the Snowden story. Then when he does something they don't like, suddenly he was just "handed the story" and people are acting like he was always a subpar alt-right grifter who just got to where he is by luck. "Bah, we never liked you anyways!" has the same feel as "We have always been at war with Eurasia!"

And yes, in their eyes, it doesn't matter if you're a gay reporter exposing government secrets and vocally supporting progressive candidates, if you wrote one article which could be seen as supporting Trump, you're out of the club, full stop. Years of progressive reporting don't matter once you've got the Black Mark.

This was a beautiful takedown, if a little bit overdramatic.

> if a little bit overdramatic.

This is an apt description for Greenwald. I’ve read his stuff for many years, and is par for the course.

Isn't that what editorial journalism is about? Injecting some drama and sentiment into otherwise flat events: "mainstream journalists are being hypocritical".

So will this be Greenwald's last post?

can't wait for his testimony before congress tomorrow about saving the free and diverse press.

When faced with people that demand silence: keep speaking and laugh in their joyless, authoritarian faces.

This is an emotional take that's ultimately just as destructive as whatever your perceived enemy is doing.

Lol what? Speaking when someone attempts to censor you is just as destructive as censorship?

Holy false equivalence, Batman!

I wasn't addressing the person being censored, nor did I criticize the act of "speaking". It's deeply ironic that you're using the phrase "false equivalence".

I think this is a fairly predictable spin on what is a far more fundamental issue than "big tech" being some kind of well-organized conspiracy against independent thought.

Either you regard journalism as benefiting from collective effort or you don't. Some people don't like working with others, and I think Greenwald has fairly clearly demonstrated that he's not interested in the slightest bit of oversight of his work. I don't personally see a problem with that but the idea that individual contributors can benefit from being part of a larger institution is equally valid.

Whether or not a given institution is a net benefit to the output of its workers is of course extremely context-dependent, but in this case I'm old enough to have seen both sides of this story. There was a time when it was common for journalistic institutions (back when they had a profit model) to station reporters all over the globe and coordinate efforts on covering news. Obviously on substack I can follow Greenwald to hear about whatever Greenwald is interested in but it's up to me to find a sufficient diversity of writers to cover all the places and topics that I care about, which was traditionally one of the services that news editors at big news bureaus provided.

The drawback to a horde of independent writers self-publishing is that it's easy to get dragged into an echo chamber. I don't think that is the case with Greenwald so I'll invent a reporter: let's borrow the film industry's Alan Smithee. Alan Smithee might spend five years doing excellent reporting and build a substantial following. What happens to that following when Smithee's family is taken hostage by a state actor and he is forced to start producing propaganda for that state? What happens when Smithee is presented with a tremendous amount of money to advocate for a certain cause? This is one of the circuit-breakers that institutional oversight can provide; a collective effort can mitigate the value of coopting a specific contributor. Without that institution, we're all going to have to not only construct our coverage piecemeal from these independent operators, but remain vigilant that the quality and veracity of their work stays consistent, which is even harder to do on one's own.

Obviously the same can happen if someone within an institution gains sufficient political capital within that institution, but there are of course ways to structure an institution to prevent that as well. Oversight boards and ombudsmen are some examples of that.

I personally suspect Greenwald's distaste for editorial oversight colors every single thing he writes, to the point that I place less weight on his reporting now than I did some years ago. I don't think he's lying or otherwise behaving unethically, but I don't think his personal priorities align with mine the way they did back then. It took me a while to come to this conclusion, though, and even now it feels uncomfortable to "admit" that I don't really value his work as highly any more.

So, I'm too involved in the tech industry to be convinced that there's some computer-nerd conspiracy to "control the narrative," but I can clearly see that there are people who prefer to work independently and there are people who value those institutional 'circuit breakers', and I think that's the real root of the debate here.

> to be convinced that there's some computer-nerd conspiracy to "control the narrative"

Yet here you are spinning a narrative...I'm happy that I don't need to consult somebody like you whenever I plan on expressing myself. This freedom of being able to speak directly is quite liberating, compared to having my speech filtered by a committee with unknown vested interests.

Having experienced the alternative, I don't like living in a society where people can't tell the difference between journalism and self-expression.

I think it's right to trust big institutions with storied reputations more. I read indy stuff s lot but more skeptically. (I like to believe I'm skeptical about everything I read, but there is after all only so much time in the day to double-check one's sources.)

I honestly can't say I have a lot of sympathy either for the mentioned mediocre journalists at mainstream institutions, or for the substack crowd for several reasons.

One is that this entire thing, from both sides has devolved into essentially neverending meta-commentary on journalism, rather than well.. actual journalism.

I have sympathy for people who go independent because they want more freedom and the bosses at the news outlets were breathing down their necks. But people like Bari Weiss, or even Greenwald nowadays are not better. It's nothing but victimhood and uninteresting internal journalism drama between the renegade journalists and the establishment. At the end it seems like they all just profit from the noise.

I have serious issues with the state of mainstream journalism but this antagonistic patronage based system where readers have parasocial attachment to their substack heroes is also terrible. Editors, fact-checking, investigative journalism and so on need resources, at the end of the day most of substack seems to devolve into blogging to a fanbase. There are some nice niches, for example I've been following China scholars on substack who report on the internal politics of China in a way you won't find in general media outlets, but a lot of the most popular people on the site right now seem to try to capitalise on the political environment.

There's no way you could classify Greenwald as only having written meta-commentary on journalism unless you've never read anything else by him in his entire storied career.

there is indeed no way I could classify his whole career like that, which is why is used the qualifier 'nowadays'. I am very aware of the amount of investigative journalism he has done. But the point is, that takes institutional support, it cannot be done with a bunch of fans online. And in recent times he has almost exclusively written about nothing else but the online drama surrounding his persona or other journalists.

It’s almost like you didn’t read the post, which while a meta commentary on journalism also explicitly calls out recent non-meta articles he has written.

I did read the post, and I actually also read the articles in qestion, which also themselves are basically about how the press reported on this or that drama of the week.

With the additional bonus of throwing in increasingly strange and deranged attacks on the Democratic party in particular, probably because it sells well with his newfound audience. This is not 'adversarial, bold investigate journalism', he was allegedly promoting at the Intercept, now he's writing op-eds on the news headline of the week and whining about NPR in every other article.

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