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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

> There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments. Before the Facebook News deal, the Times famously published an op-ed titled “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” by Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook turned critic. And since the deal, columns from Tim Wu and Kara Swisher, among others, have been similarly critical. In December, the editorial board welcomed a lawsuit calling for Facebook to be broken up.

It's kind of a throwaway passage in the article but it feels like a crucial point. Maybe I'm wrong but "buying off" to me strongly suggests something along the lines of a bribe. We're going to give you this cash, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe that negative stuff you print about us goes away. My question is: is this actually happening?

The core conflict here isn't new, surely. Newspapers have taken advertising money from news-making companies since time immaterial. The question has always been whether that money affects coverage. And so far it seems like "no", or "not yet". And there's a very worthy debate to be had here, much as there always has been about advertising in news media, but the headline doesn't do that debate justice.

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> It's kind of a throwaway passage in the article but it feels like a crucial point. Maybe I'm wrong but "buying off" to me strongly suggests something along the lines of a bribe. We're going to give you this cash, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe that negative stuff you print about us goes away. My question is: is this actually happening?

My question is: Do you really need to ask that? Human nature is human nature; there's little doubt that it's happening to some extent. Virtually impossible that it's not happening at all.

The problem to me seems quite similar to campaign contributions in politics. Yes, it's indirect, and all parties can say it's innocent, no strings attached, the elected representative is not "required" to do anything. Those are words that help people ignore the reality of human nature. Money is influence.

This is why the business side and news side of (quality) news papers have been historically kept separate. It also leads to perceived "weirdness" to readers when they see a paper taking money from a corporation to run an advertisement alongside an article critical of said corporation.

This isn't to invalidate your point completely, but to give some insight to those who are not aware of how this conflict of interest has been generally handled.

Yes, of course, I agree. And it doesn't invalidate my point at all. I would say that you're pointing out the problem that people don't understand how important it is to avoid conflicts of interest, and that we need systems in place to minimize it.

The case of Donald Trump is a perfect example. He had conflicts of interest galore, didn't even deny them, in fact he flouted them, and many people seemed to think everything was fine.

We need to be aware not only of the existence of conflicts of interest, but also of (1) how corrosive these conflicts are, and (2) the crucial importance of designing systems to minimize the bad incentives and effects that arise from conflicts of interest. Systems, in other words, that minimize the harm that -- because of human nature -- inevitably flows even from well-intentioned people when conflicts of interest are tolerated.

> My question is: Do you really need to ask that?

Yes, you really need to ask that. When accusing someone of misconduct you really do need to ask if it is really happening and not just hand wave about human nature and make judgements based on untested assumptions. You really really can’t just go along with whatever fits your biases.

Well, I would say that if you want to accuse them of misconduct then the main thing would be to ascertain intentions. Certainly, if there is no bad intention on the part of the actor, then it makes no sense to accuse them of misconduct. So if you want to accuse them of misconduct, definitely, yes, you need to ask questions about their intent.

On the other hand, regardless of intent, it does still make sense to say that the system is maladjusted, that the system is designed in such a way that even actors with good intentions are incentivized to do harmful things. And the question regarding the system really is clear: Does a recipient accepting money from an advertiser tend to create in them a more positive opinion regarding the advertiser than if the recipient received no money at all? To that, the answer is yes. It doesn't mean the recipient has committed "misconduct"; more likely it's just that the recipient is a well-intentioned actor in a maladjusted system.

Surely something being misconduct or not is independent of someone's intentions? All kinds of people do bad things with good intentions.

Yes, we've got to make sure we're talking about the same thing here. In general, we don't morally censure a person who does bad things with good intentions. For example, in criminal law there is usually a requirement of ill-intent, called "mens rea"[1], which means the actor is aware that what they're doing is wrong.

If a person does something wrong but is not aware that what they did is wrong, the general reaction is not to "accuse them of misconduct", but rather to explain to them what it is about their action that's wrong, after which (if they in fact have good intent) they will no longer do that action.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

Mens rea is subtly different, I think. It is intended to allow a defense that you really didn't want to break the law and did so unintentionally. It isn't quite about the self-perceived goodness of your intentions. That is, stating "I knew I was breaking the law but my actions were good and I didn't realise people would think I'd done something bad, therefore I don't have mens rea" won't work. Knowledge that it was illegal was sufficient. And mens rea is also not a defense that allows legal ignorance.

It's also worth noting that quite a lot of broad crimes are strict liability these days, especially in America. For example money laundering is a strict liability crime, along with more obvious ones like speeding.

Misconduct though is not normally a criminal law term anyway. More like a code of conduct for an organisation.

Not really. I'm a lawyer so I have a decent grasp of this stuff. Mens rea is closely tied to intent, not really to whether it had anything to do with intending to break a law (ignorance of the law is generally not a defense). Think of the difference between someone who commits premeditated murder, someone who commits manslaughter through gross negligence (e.g., a drunk driver), and someone who by complete accident is responsible for another's death (someone runs out in front of your car). In each case a person's actions directly cause another person's death, however we attach different levels of culpability to each. We're getting a little bit far afield from original issue, here, though. Anyway . . .

This permissive admitted towards public corruption is a fairly new development in US politics.

Jimmy Carter put his struggling peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid the appearance of corruption. This has become a punchline today, but was standard at the time.

Frankly, the corruption of the Clintons, who generally took turns raking in cash while the other performed duties as a public servant, sent the dominos crashing here.

Because corruption is incredibly easy to hide and obscure, it is correct to cultivate a culture of transparency accountability when, for example, tens of millions of dollars change hands between powerful institutions for no apparent reason.

GP wasn’t permissive towards corruption. Rather, he/she was demanding about evidence.

The AP's NORC Center for Public Affairs Research recent report on Trust in American Media shows no one gives a fig what the NYT thinks, especially what its critical of - https://apnorc.org/projects/a-new-way-of-looking-at-trust-in...

The public's perception isn't what's important. It's what people in DC think. And they read the NYT op-ed page.

Politicians in DC think, voters in DC are the last people asked.

Could you justify that claim a bit more? I downloaded the report and the phrase New York Times doesn't seem to appear in it.

The whole report is actually a bit odd. It talks about the "five core values of journalism" and claims only super-liberal people support all of them, but the list of values appears to be basically a list of left wing priorities and worldviews, e.g. the last two values are "giving voice to the less powerful" and "social criticism". Factualism is defined not as an absolute value but merely a tradeoff, given that "the truth is more than just the matter of adding facts and this emphasis on factualism can mask bias". So that would appear to be tautological - all they've done is ask a bunch of journalists what they feel is important, got a bunch of left wing priorities, discovered that only left wing people agree with the full list, and the only thing people across the spectrum agree in is that facts are important. Surely these findings are true, but so what? It's just a dozen different ways of telling people things that are already obvious, rephrased in terms of Haidt's moral foundations theory. US journalists are much more left wing than the population as a whole, that's a widely published result for many years already. The fact that the AP felt a need to do a research study to prove it is sort of indicative of why the media has such deep problems.

The final section is quite telling. They do an experiment where they take a test story and rewrite it to be less left-biased and contain more facts. They find the resulting story appeals more to everyone, not just conservatives. It's a sad indictment of the AP that this is actually presented as a novel finding.

In the info tsunami conditions we live in, what news orgs think or push constantly get diluted by literally thousand other sources every second. They have great faith in their ability to capture the attention of the herd, but since everyone else is great at it too, there is no great value to it.

Therefore it doesn't matter what the NYT does in terms of critique, what they think or what they want people to think. Or who they take cash from. Be it Facebook or anyone or anything else.

Thats what the AP study reinforces for me. The NYT and its critics and fan clubs overestimate greatly the value of the NYT or any other mainstream news org in the current info tsunami environment.

The only contribution or "value" left for news orgs in an info tsunami, is surfacing new data through their networks and that the AP study calls facts. This is what google search bots do when they scour the network. Beyond that news orgs play no role, but they haven't realized that yet. And that wastes everyones time.

They would be much more useful to society if they acted more like search engines or gathering points for info exchange on the network and shed all the other baggage.

>The core conflict here isn't new, surely. Newspapers have taken advertising money from news-making companies since time immaterial.

And if you can find a viable alternative to this, your company will be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars[1]. The internet has killed the classifieds business and commoditized news to the point that most people won't pay for it. Accepting advertising from potentially news-making companies is hugely important to keeping news organizations afloat. Vilifying it whenever it happens is potentially dangerous and we should really wait to level these accusations until there is actual evidence of wrongdoing.

[1] - https://www.axios.com/substack-andreessen-horowitz-newslette...

“If you don’t take money from companies you have a conflict of interest with, it’s dangerous! Think of the children!” I’m sorry but I may have exaggerated for humorous effect, but your line of reasoning I reject outright.

There are ways to do this effectually. This is not that way.

This is the New York Times we are talking about. Literally everything is within their reporting purview. Who can they possibly accept money from that won't present a potential conflict of interest?

Not freaking the Evil Empire of companies would be a great start.

NYT provides national coverage. By only accepting and showing regional or local ads this problem can be avoided.

National stories are also often regional and local stories. I just pulled up the NYT website. The top story is the Derek Chauvin trial which is certainly also a local story in Minneapolis. The second from the top Opinion piece is about the NYC mayoral race. Does that mean that NYT shouldn't be able to accept any advertising dollars from those markets?

What is great about the regional model is the large number of regions which removes the need to not accept from a regiin. In your example Minneapolis is one of many cities the pressure local ad dollars never makes it's way to the editorial board.

Their readers and only their readers otherwise no trust should be given to their reporting. News is worth what people pay for it, and if no one is willing to pay for it then we won't get any real reporting.

Sounds you have beef with the readers for not paying enough, and with non-readers who freeload off investigative journalism's social benefits, and with and plagiarizers like Business Insider. Has a major paper ever not been ad-supported?

I've re-read your post a few times and I'm sure it wasn't your intention, but it keeps reading to me like "bad things have become the normal and people should stop pointing it out". Whether or not there is a better solution, I think there are clearly dangers inherent to monetizing news with ad revenue and I think there is value in keeping a careful eye on them.

Yes, I agree that there are dangers. However is there any evidence of the dangers being a reality in this instance? The article directly says there is no evidence. If there is no evidence, why is this story specifically about the NYT and Facebook?

There is also danger involved in shaming the NYT for accepting ad money and in turn having them cut coverage in response to decreased revenue. There are plenty of examples of that.

I am more concerned with the danger we have evidence of rather than the one we don't.

> However is there any evidence of the dangers being a reality in this instance?

Are we specifically talking about a news organization softening its coverage on a sponsor? There aren't any examples which spring directly to mind, but there are countless examples of other organizations doing this. Politicians being bought-out by businesses and lobbyists is nothing new. Platforms like YouTube have crafted and modified content policies specifically to appeal to their sponsors.

News organizations benefit from maintaining an appearance of trustworthiness. If they modified their content for the benefit of a sponsor, they would obviously try to be very discrete about it. Is it a stretch to imagine it has or could easily happen? Especially if people stop worrying out it? Other than reputation, is there anything else to counteract that motivation?

> If there is no evidence, why is this story specifically about the NYT and Facebook?

As for the NYT/Facebook thing in particular, it doesn't strike me as being inherently worse than any other sponsorship deal. I'm not worried about it in particular so much as I am generally concerned with how dependent news is on ad revenue in general. I'm not vouching for the credibility of this story, but I'm worried that your comment is too dismissive of the broader subject.

> There is also danger involved in shaming the NYT for accepting ad money and in turn having them cut coverage in response to decreased revenue. There are plenty of examples of that.

I don't know about this. I think whenever an organization is dependent on another for revenue, they risk appearing less impartial towards that organization. I see HN comments accusing Mozilla of appearing to be less impartial towards Google because of their relationship all the time, despite Mozilla directly competing with and regularly speaking out against Google.

News outlets benefit from an appearance of impartiality and revenue partnership they form with a third-party comes with a risk of damaging that appearance. It's up to the NYT to convince readers they can be trusted with the partnerships they've made. Frankly, I think they've probably built up enough of a reputation that this particular deal wont hurt them much, if not benefit them.

> I am more concerned with the danger we have evidence of rather than the one we don't.

I'm also more concerned with the dangers we have. That doesn't mean I can't keep an eye out for the dangers which could be. Even if this particular danger hasn't yet manifested, there is clear motivation for it and precedent for it in other markets.

>There aren't any examples which spring directly to mind, but there are countless examples of other organizations doing this. Politicians being bought-out by businesses and lobbyists is nothing new.

This specifically is a great jumping off point to highlight why this is less of a problem in journalism. In politics, the person accepting the money is the same one who is acting. The politician shows up the oil industry fundraiser one day and is voting on climate change regulation the next. Bias will exist there even if it isn't conscious or intentional.

It works differently in journalism. From the outside we see the NYT as a single entity, but that isn't the case from the inside. There is a strict firewall between the business and editorial staffs at any reputable news org. The people who sell the ads or count the money are not the same people who choose what is covered or write the stories (this can change at smaller outlets and blogging changed some of this online, but the basic premise still holds). Anyone who has been to journalism schools has been taught the importance of this separation. Most journalists feel very strongly about this separation and they often speak out when it is violated.

That is an excellent point. I wasn't aware there was a distinct separation like that. If a news outlet can demonstrate that their publishing arm is organizationally unaffected by influence from their business arm, that would alleviate a lot of my concern about the ad revenue model. I do think it will fall on the organizations themselves to demonstrate and advertise that separation, though. If they can't/won't do that, I don't have much sympathy for any loss of reputation which comes from deals like this.

The internet destroyed newspapers ability to milk classified ads so we should look the other way when journals get in bed with the newsmakers? Wait until we have overwhelming proof because the system isn't working?

But things are working for the Times not so much for regional players. How does this help us?

>Wait until we have overwhelming proof because the system isn't working?

Where did that word "overwhelming" come from? I want us to wait until there is any proof rather than screaming "WOLF!" at a mere shadow. I will highlight this from the originally linked article:

>There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments.

The lack of a frontpage story since the deal on the evils of facebook today is proof that they are not publishing the same type of articles.

If you are waiting for smoking gun evidence by the time that comes out we won't care. We will be conditioned to accept it as the norm by then. Now is the time to speak up.

I have paid for news, even going so far as to buy a printed newspaper, but frankly most of it is worthless: crime reports that doesn't matter, a bunch of opinions by people, etc.

Online most are just reprinting Reuters.

I would pay for insight that I can use and exclusive (relevant) news, sadly investigative journalism is too expensive.

Have you tried pay for business intelligence reports? Those are still "news" and they have a strong financial incentive to tell the truth

What news source are you referring to? That doesn't describe most publications, online or offline, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Monthly, where the OP article is published. It doesn't describe many local publications I know of.

Certainly there are some publications that fit the description, but we have many, many alternatives.

> Vilifying it whenever it happens is potentially dangerous and we should really wait to level these accusations until there is actual evidence of wrongdoing.

Everything makes sense except for this. The fact that a business model being broken has caused standards to slip isn't a reason not to point out slipped standards.

Also, the fallacy that there will always be some physical evidence of corruption has to die. Every single business or agency I have ever worked for has formal and informal policies about what can be spoken about in media that has a retention policy, especially if they were liable to FOIA requests. The only way you get evidence of that stuff is through making secret recordings (which is why people don't talk on the phone about this stuff either.)

It's the appearance of corruption that should be penalized, not the ephemeral evidence of it.

>The fact that a business model being broken has caused standards to slip isn't a reason not to point out slipped standards.

What "standards" are you referring to here? Is it standards of the quality of reporting? Has that actually slipped? Where is the evidence for that? If not, is it truly a problem if the standards of appearance have slipped while there is no actual change in the quality of the work?

>Also, the fallacy that there will always be some physical evidence of corruption has to die.

Who said the evidence needed to be physical? I don't need a smoking gun email or a covert recording. Verbal testimony is evidence too. Where are the anecdotes from former NYT journalists about being told to kill stories about corporate partners?

Miramax was over 10 percent of the ad spend in the NY Times in the early 2000s. They conveniently killed the story of Harvey Weinstein (head of Miramax) then:

https://www.thewrap.com/harvey-weinstein-new-york-times-bill...

The news/reporting side of the organization and the Opinion group are very very separate.

It's important to look at the news gathering side. Reporters don't take to being told to 'go easy on this group cos we have business ties' - that usually provides the opposite response.

This x1000.

Although on HN, the core message is "media bad, cos good" so I doubt that people will want to understand how media orgs actually work.

As someone who was raised in a news media household by two editors, "writers calling the shots" is exactly not how media orgs actually work.

Sure, reporters don't like it, but it doesn't matter, because editors decide what ultimately gets printed.

I think we shouldn't be naïve about how money works to influence actions.

Proving the quid pro quo is hard, but just the knowledge that the money is there and can go away at the whim of a private actor will having a chilling effect on the sort of content you report on.

Journalistic entities have an incentive to project an image of an unbiased, principles institution untouched by the private business world, but as someone who was raised by two editors, that narrative is more mythos than reality.

No idea why you are being downvoted but this is quite well known and acknowledged.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/27/media/bloomberg-news-wells-...

This can be seen easily via pharma adds on major news networks. It's not like anybody's ever asked their doctor after witnessing the list of side effects scroll by.

Pharma ads as the #1 advertiser on major network news channels is purely to reign in negative press.

The very idea of consuming news wherein the primary funding comes from a third party is absurd, but it's what people are used to.

These discussions often miss the point and get bogged down in trying to prove or disprove individual instances of bias or censorship.

The problem for me is prior to all of that.

If the New York Times (say) lacks financial independence, then it will always be structurally indebted to whoever foots the bill. It's just a matter of fact built into the nature of the relationship between the two entities.

Facebook executives may not have established the relationship simply to "buy off" the Times. I imagine most of them have a real commitment to "fixing the news" in their hearts. But it doesn't matter.

If news agencies depend on organizations outside of themselves for the basic necessities of their existence and reproduction, then they aren't independent. They are dependent on those organizations, by definition. What they can report on now has conditions and limits. I want to emphasize that this is a restriction on what it is *possible* to report on. It might not ever produce a distinction that you could easily measure. This is a different, and worse, problem than Facebook purchasing some flattering reporting. Facebook now (obscurely, tacitly) sets the structural conditions (without having to explicitly state any rules or appear to be a bad guy in any way).

It's not hard to think of an example of reporting which could become impossible under these conditions. Imagine if the Times, due to some public outcry, or for whatever reason, took a major rhetorical turn toward combating digital surveillance, just like they did in the last year with racism and issues of cultural morality. A sudden "moral clarity" emerged around topics that the paper used to try to be neutral about.

Whether you like those developments or not, I imagine most people will agree that the employees of the New York Times, not executives at Facebook, or anybody else, should decide the course of the Times' reporting. An existential financial dependence will of course condition all reporting on the maintenance of that dependence.

It doesn't. This isn't how American media is made; this is just another money grab by desperate media outlets who are used to getting massive revenue that isn't going to be there in a 10 years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NetflixBestOf/comments/dob8pq/discu...

The headline is provocative, as headlines often are.

The article also focuses heavily on the Times but mentions that FB has these deals with other publishers too. To the extent that there’s ire in the article, I think it would be better focused on Facebook.

The ad-supported business model of newspapers has always been problematic. In theory there’s a firewall between the business side and the journalists, but my faith that this is the case is reduced when orgs like the NYT get rid of their public editor.

The NDA between FB and the publishers is really gross. It shackles the NYT from covering itself and keeps the various orgs that have this deal from reporting about it on each other. It’s not a good sign when the NYT can’t hold the WSJ accountable. This part is weird tho:

> Facebook has been funneling money to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019. [...] The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year...

So the WSJ is reporting on the deal despite signing the NDA?

>"My question is: is this actually happening?"

I think what is happening is they are buying their ability to publish news. Once accomplished you will see plenty of those "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" I think.

How does it seem like "no" or "not yet". We will never know what even worst news would've come up if they weren't getting bribed.

>"And since the deal, columns from Tim Wu and Kara Swisher ..."

Those two individuals are both Op-Ed writers. The Opinion section in a paper is not the same as regular news reporting and so not beholden to a newspaper's editorial policy.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed

Really? Tom Cotton might beg to differ.

The question of whether money affects coverage is among those which are incredibly difficult to find evidence for without a smoking gun. There's no direct proof in whether a given story supports or hurts a financier. I'm stretching for an example but there is circumstantial evidence the interactions between various macro ecosystems push conditions of earth's biosphere toward homeostasis, but suggesting this is deterministic is not substantiated by any known directly testable phenomena. Until we decode latent genetic algorithms, it'll remain speculation. Likewise we're left only with speculation in the absence of an explicit, "run story or we pull funding" type memo.

That said a lot of economics tends to make sense when examined through a lens of incentives. There has been an observable shift toward radicalization of news content since this article indicates FB began funding its news feature. Opinion pieces seem to often displace primary stories based on whether they suit a dominant hyperbolic narrative. Whether by FB design or simply a natural response to the soaring appeal of hyperbolic click bait favored by social news aggregation is anybody's guess.

I will say I am appalled by a lack of accountability the Times has had over the last year. For example regularly publishing summary statistics without acknowledging significant sampling problems, figures any self-respecting statistician would never consider submitting for academic review are still regularly passed off as fact. Moreover discourse regarding what constitutes effective policy, consideration of cost and benefit, or even determination of what society's goals are let alone whether they are realistic has been contemptuously derided as conspiracy and dogma of the Trumpian cult. Without rational discourse there is little hope for progress, and in that regard I arrived at my own foregone conclusions, that the hyperbolic nature of news media is one of the most significant barriers to positive change we face as a society.

On that note, if you find yourself buying into a fear of outsiders you might want to reconsider the fact most people share the same fundamental values and our differences between one another is often negligible. Believe it or not beyond the lazy opinions about issues scantly related to every day life, the average liberal and conservative have exactly the same amount of love for their friends and family. We often simply disagree regarding the means to similar ends. As a single global society we all face the same problems, but our biggest problem right now is spanning the distance we've created between coming together socially as friends and colleagues.

Tech blogs are regularly bribed for good coverage, and tech companies are known for doing it. Nobody bloody cares about integrity of journalism.

The Verge has historically been very favorable to Apple and Google. Why? They get exclusive interviews with Google and Apple executives. An interview with Sundar Pichai is worth millions in ad revenue, and if a blog is too critical of a company, they won't get interviews. Offering an interview to a news outlet is really not significantly different from cutting them a check.

Apple has been known for pretty much cutting out any site that dares to step out of line. I think whatever is left of Gizmodo is still banned from Apple events after Gizmodo reported about getting hands on a prototype iPhone.

This is what is referred to as ‘access journalism’ and indeed, it’s heavily prescient in technology - as it is in music, showbiz, sports, as well.

And politics and international coverage

> Nobody bloody cares about integrity of journalism.

There's a gigantic difference between tech blogs and the NYT or WaPo.

Nobody expects tech blogs to exercise journalistic independence/integrity.

People do with the NYT and WaPo, and loudly cancel their subscriptions when the believe that's violated.

Tech blogs are about as independent as news sources get, so no, they are very much expected to act that way.

They’re also very small and therefore more easily bribed or crushed, whichever tactic is needed to get them in line

The fact they’re small means they’re more easily abandoned, though.

? In what world? Tech blogs seem to have the most obvious industry ties of most media

Of course they're obvious -- that's good. With larger players, you have no idea who they're being paid by (as shown, for instance, in the crux of this article). In contrast, with "new media" (e.g. a podcast), I can be reasonably confident they are only being paid by a few key sponsors, and that's public knowledge on account of them having purchased ad space.

> Nobody bloody cares about integrity of journalism. >> People do with the NYT and WaPo,

For me neither of those newspapers have integrity at all.

Edit: there is ample evidence of both "newspapers" flat out lying; what I would call straight out propaganda as if they are part of an agenda. I doubt downvoters will want to debate me but if any of you have the guts please reach out. It'll be an easy win for me.

>People do with the NYT and WaPo, and loudly cancel their subscriptions when the believe that's violated.

Nowadays, they mostly cancel their subscriptions when they get to read some opinion they don't like.

That seems a little too optimistic. Nowadays, they cancel their subscriptions when they get to read some fact they don't like. For example, back in the run-up to the 2016 election there was an utterly nutso, completely nonsensical conspiracy theory about Trump using DNS as a secret communications channel with a Russian bank and, for some reason, a US medical clinic which the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate. After that demand went viral on social media, the NYT pushed back in the gentlest way possible by saying the FBI had looked at these claims and concluded all the evidence was likely the result of normal mass marketing emails for Trump hotels. (This is also what most experts concluded regardless of political affiliation. Other problems included the fact it would've made a really awful communication channel and wasn't even remotely under Trump's control.) Some time later, there was such a pushback against this including a campaign of cancelled subscriptions, that the Times basically ended up apologising and saying they wouldn't do it again.

To this day, the only part of this that has been called a conspiracy theory by any mainstream publication is the idea that the whole thing could be an entirely technically unremarkable result of ordinary mass marketing emails for Trump hotels.

Is this the case? The NYT seemed much more reasonable on the Russia stuff than say, most cable news.

> the Times basically ended up apologising and saying they wouldn't do it again.

This did not happen. I'm assuming you're referring to this passage from an article two years later:

> The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph.

> A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts. But the article’s tone and headline — “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” — gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning.

> Democrats say that article pre-emptively exonerated Mr. Trump, dousing chances to raise questions about the campaign’s Russian ties before Election Day.

> Just as the F.B.I. has been criticized for its handling of the Trump investigation, so too has The Times.

This is not "apologising and saying they wouldn't do it again."

I agree that the term "conspiracy theory" is not used in a balanced way. Mainstream democrat theories that turn out to be without merit just stop being reported on (such as the Steele Dossier), whereas theories from either left or right fringe generally are called conspiracy theories.

I kinda disagree with the idea tech blogs aren't real journalism or shouldn't be held to the same journalism standards. Especially with revenue on print media declining as much as it has, I'd say smaller blogs tend to do a lot of the deep original research online that many news organizations would've traditionally done. A blog like The Verge is often the original source of major revelations about tech companies and their behaviors.

Furthermore, while one might consider tech blogs a niche area, we consider Amazon, the world's largest retailer, a "tech company", so as "tech companies" start dominating major traditional verticals, "tech news" starts to just... be "news".

Here's the difference as I see it: major fact-based independent news outlets like the NYT, WaPo, etc. are essential for democracy. We rely on them for essential reporting about war, corruption, scandals, everything we need to make informed decisions at the voting booth. We expect them to report "both sides of the story".

Industry news is different. We often expect blogs, authors, etc. to be openly pro- or anti- on certain subjects, to be given favorable treatment by companies, etc. We expect them to be "editorial". Such journalism can be openly one-sided.

Reporting on the war in Afghanistan is fundamentally different from a review of the Oculus Quest 2.

That isn't to say tech blogs can't report unbiased, hard-hitting news. They sometimes do, and that's wonderful.

But I do believe that our general societal expectation is that industry news sources are free to (and often expected to) editorialize without a hard wall between news and editorials, while independent objective news outlets are expected to maintain that hard wall.

> An interview with Sundar Pichai is worth millions in ad revenue,

Uh, say again?

Let's guess at a CPM of $10, and "millions" to be "2 million". That would be 200 million hits. You seriously think that an interview with a tech CEO whom few normal people will have heard of is going to have double the audience of the Superbowl?

I'd bet that in reality interviews with tech execs do horribly when it comes to generating traffic, but are done for the prestige of publishing something that looks like traditional journalism.

There are reputational benefits that are hard to quantify. Getting interviews with big names legitimizes you, which probably increases views on other articles

I don't know if it's really "worth millions", but I think you're missing aspects besides CPM. Having an interview with such a well-known person gives your blog a lot of credibility that you can leverage, e.g. when making deals with sponsors.

Anybody know of a good news source that doesn’t fall into this trap? I hear the economist is pretty good.

Move to purely user funded media.

One of my favorite yet least controversial is: https://congressionaldish.com/

But it's not hard to find user funded media for all manner of topics.

Edit: Also https://reader.substack.com/inbox

Then the publication has to please its readers, not telling them news they don't want to hear. Imagine a user-funded source publishing negative news about the GameStop mob.

The Economist has a history of lies and falsehoods by omission when it comes to foreign policy and international coverage. Anywhere from their Bolivia, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela, Syria, Chile (the editor openly boasted of delivering the coup) and so much more. They are often a bit more nuanced compared to coup and regime change lovers like Fox, Washington Post, and the NY. Times.

Can you explain more about the 'history of lies and falsehoods by omission'? I am not familiar with the specific articles about the countries you listed. Can you give a few examples? Ideally if we could compare/contrast articles with other outlets you think are more credible that would probably help!

Here is a recent one on Bolivia. They mangled the textbook definition of a coup. Faux news would be proud:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/16/was-there-a-cou...

The funny thing is that you can be openly pro coup without resorting to lies. John Bolton and his crudeness will be missed. Although a Yale law graduate he refused to use sophistry of The Economist etc. for violent regime changes and attempts.

John Bolton on a Fox TV interview talking the advantages of a coup in Venezuela and how to take over Venezuelan oil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_yHo9efvO8

“We’re looking at the oil assets,” Bolton said. “That’s the single most important income stream to the government of Venezuela. We’re looking at what to do to that.”

“We’re in conversation with major American companies now,” he continued. “I think we’re trying to get to the same end result here.”

“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela,” Bolton admitted.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/us-coup-venezuela-oil-cor...

The Verge regularly publishes pieces critical of apple and google? this is from less than a week ago: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/13/22370158/google-ai-ethics...

I would say I've seen more critical pieces lately. I think over the last couple of years, a lot of this has broken down because of just how egregious corporate behavior has gotten. But especially around 2015-2016, it was palpable how much Verge was holding their tongue in articles especially in the months around Sundar Pichai interviews.

I actually stopped reading the Verge because of how relentlessly negative they were about everything related to tech. Which for a tech blog is sort of weird. So not sure what you mean about favorable coverage there.

> Nobody bloody cares about integrity of journalism.

To offer a bit more nuance: consumers care about enough integrity; and powerful institutions (public or private), who stand to win or lose based on press narratives, care about enough "fairness" to their own perspectives (and interests).

Looking purely at realpolitik incentives, journalistic institutions can straddle that line and hit well over 50% on both fronts. Not to pick on the guy, but my poster child for this phenomenon is Daring Fireball's John Gruber: he's built a longstanding personal brand of integrity, covering Apple-centric tech for 20 years, and is frequently critical of the company and its products. And yet, he's frequently given preferential treatment by the company and its executives, because that same history has also signaled a (heartfelt) bias to being sympathetic to Apple's values and motives, meaning execs have a high confidence that reviews will be fair, interviews will be free of the scariest "gotcha" questions, etc.

I would pay for high-integrity tech journalism, and I'm surprised that many more don't do the same. Many of our businesses depend on that information.

You can't know what they didn't publish. So how can you know there's no influence? How do you know the NYT doesn't use theis bad coverage as leverage in some negotiations? Your attitude is very naive.

>It's kind of a throwaway passage in the article but it feels like a crucial point. Maybe I'm wrong but "buying off" to me strongly suggests something along the lines of a bribe. We're going to give you this cash, nudge nudge, wink wink, maybe that negative stuff you print about us goes away. My question is: is this actually happening?

All the time. Using both direct bribes to journalists, friendly favors to the owners of the newspaper, and more often than not advertising money (which can be open from the company looking for favorable coverage itself, or through 1-2 layers of subsidies and shell companies which nobody can/will track).

> so far it seems like "no", or "not yet"

On the contrary, it does indeed and has been known to do so for many decades [0,1]

Indeed, in Citizens United, SCOTUS in the concurring opinion claimed the founders intent in the 1st amendment was to allow monied interests to own and influence media for political purposes.

The question is not whether distortion exists but how prevalent it is.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#News_media_and_pr...

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