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Comment by chroem- | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of focus on recent events, but surely I'm not the only one that remembers when the New York Times almost singlehandedly started the Iraq War based on false reporting, right?

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I think your example helps illustrate how ineptitude is the problem that bias is perceived to be.

The NYT's involvement in the Iraq War was not ineptitude, but the intentional passing on of administration claims not only without criticism, but while also excluding and attacking critical voices as borderline seditious.

It was also editorially consistent with the NYT's positions before and after the fact.

Painting Judith Miller and her coworkers as a hapless accident is defaulting to excusing an outlet you identify with. The NYT was not doing good, badly. The NYT was doing bad, knowingly.

> the intentional passing on of administration claims not only without criticism

This is ineptitude.

> excluding and attacking critical voices as borderline seditious

This is also ineptitude.

Most people read ineptitude to mean lack of capacity/skill rather than cynicism. If you knowingly do something that leads to a (generally) unwanted result, that's quite different from wanting to do something else but clumsily failing.

The NYT also had information on what Snowden leaked about NSA activities as far back as 2005, but declined to publish any of it.

This is a pretty solid example. Edward Snowden dragged the US press into reporting on US Gov's surveillance misdeeds. Before, revelations like those from Mark Klein got a huge yawn from the entirety of the US Press Corps.

The most likely reasons for news orgs refuse to publish damning evidence about US Gov malfeasance are collusion and/or ineptitude. I feel that showing unearned deference to US NatSec state implies the latter.

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