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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Doing good journalism is hard. Yes, the NYT sucks, but they do good reporting too. And this article is very good, so if you want to complain about how bad the NYT is maybe reserve that criticism for those times when a bad article from the NYT hits the front page.

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I have the same reasoning. The NY Times has done some awful things, and they have some biases that are offensive to me.

But I am a paid subscriber! (As I am with the WSJ). Why? It's a much better source, even with the faults, than all that "free" journalism that the Hacker News people seem to like so much.

You get the future you pay for!

Maybe so, but the future we don't pay for is splogs, misleading websites, paid "astroturf" efforts, etc.

I'd rather have the devil I know.

I'd not like to see this response go unanswered; I'm the first to attack these organisations for the damage they do and I've long abandoned reading them, having written them off for the damage they've already done.

But I can respect honest acknowledgement of the bad while arguing the good side is worth staying. You'll (obvs) have a better perspective as a subscriber and given you can approach the thing with nuance I'm willing to go with your take on it.

And I guess you get a future full of clickbait in the race to the bottom that is journalism that no one pays for.

Nah, a reminder of how bad the NYT is, is always a good reminder. NYT isn’t guilty of making mistakes, they are guilty of spreading lies. To frame their deception as an honest mistake, is deceptive in and of itself.

I wish these kinds of vitriolic posts cited some specific instances and sourced their claims. Otherwise I'm left to Google "NYT bad" to try to corroborate any of it.

And imagine if Google is in bed with corporate media, vice versa? Good luck searching for examples.

So what you're saying it that's it's utterly essential for the posters complaining about The NY Times to source their claims? Why don't they do it then?

Oh no. I was just making a random philosophical point. Nothing really to read into. Just that it would be difficult to find examples of organization x criticism, using organization y, if both x & y are partners.

They do, however those comments with links to evidence all seem to get flagged for some very strange reason.

It’s common knowledge amongst most educated people. Sorry if you had to find out by googling. Probably a sickening feeling if you’ve been a subscriber or passed along any of their retracted news as fact. I too used to trust the nyt, but “show me incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

The "common knowledge amongst most educated people" is this: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

Bari Weiss's resignation letter from the NYT is probably the best place to start https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Matt Taibbi has a good article on this too https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...

Glenn Greenwald talks about this on his Substack a lot, too, and the malpractice of the larger media as a whole. This recent and highly topical Twitter thread is one of many examples.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/138376788266898...

Bari Weiss was an opinion writer. Maybe this explains Fox News's success, but are you unable to tell the difference between opinion and news?

But yes, when an opinion writer has unpopular opinions, they are often let go.

news is ultimately someone's opinion that something is 'news' in the first place. i went to mcdonalds earlier - is that news? i guarantee you vice.com could come up with some kind of news story about bored 30-somethings with nothing better to do during the pandemic than go to mcdonalds as a way to take a break from the internet. does that make it news though, just because a news site says its news?

something can be news somewhere [0], and not news somewhere else [1].

[0] https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/OQYuZve.png

News is news wherever it is. No one credible talked about the non-story you mentioned.

Trend stories (like you talked about with McDonald's) are considered "soft news" and is filler.

Meanwhile, the person we are talking about was published on the editorial page. That's not "discretion about what news to publish". That is literally "this is opinion only"

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