Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In last months I've started wondering why do I even pay my internet bills
60% of the reason I still do it is that I need internet for my job
the rest is HN, two or three subreddits, music and some video games, wiki/google/maps and the fact that I still need to learn a lot in order to advance in career.
It's insanely hard to avoid that main stream media content (celebrities, dramas, dramas, dramas and $bad_stuff/propaganda) that affects the mood, even when I don't use "normal" social medias.
If you stop sending strange servers requests for unwanted data you'll feel much better :-)
As someone who grew up while the Internet was just getting off the ground (mid 30s), I remember the absolute joy of exploring the net, and for the most part, it could feed me as much interesting content as I could stand. I felt this reverence for it, like I did for great libraries.
It’s not really possible to use the Internet that way any more, and that sucks. Yes, it’s still a gigantic library, but the ability to explore unbounded is no more, at least if you want to avoid the problematic parts.
And this is where the grieving part comes in. Your advice to use the net more carefully/intentionally is good, but is also a stark contrast to the way things were. It makes me sad.
As a person-in-therapy for upwards of 4 years now, I'm not seeing the connection.
'What you’re saying absolutely makes sense. The difficult part is that it requires intentional habit changes and quite honestly, a grieving process at the same time.'
While I have no personal experience with CBT, I'd guess some form of that is needed, if you don't manage to change that behaviour on your own.
As in learning to let go of what is stopping your 'flow'. Or simply overcoming bad habits.
edit: While I don't know your personal situtation, and don't want to be rude, or 'diss' you in any way, 4 years seems harsh. I would long have quit that, because it would seem ineffective to me. Like talking to a wall, parking meter, or something like that. Maybe change therapist?
My general point was: the Internet has changed, so if you're still using your old habits, you'll probably need to change those. If a person finds they cannot muster the will to do so, perhaps then they should see a therapist and consider CBT, but this also doesn't need to be that complicated. Sometimes awareness is all that is required.
> While I don't know your personal situtation, and don't want to be rude, or 'diss' you in any way, 4 years seems harsh. I would long have quit that, because it would seem ineffective to me. Like talking to a wall, parking meter, or something like that. Maybe change therapist?
I've seen a few therapists during that time, and each has been really instrumental in my progress. I'll probably be seeing someone for the majority of my adult life.
I've spoken about this openly in other threads, so feel free to dive deeper into my comment history if you are curious, but I'm working through deep seeded issues stemming from complex trauma that spanned the entirety of my childhood.
One does not unravel decades of trauma in a year, or four years, for that matter, and I'm eternally grateful for the trauma-aware therapist I'm working with now - someone who I will probably continue seeing for many years to come. I'm a very different person than I was four years again, or even a year ago. These things take time.
Please take this in the sprit it is intended, but I would recommend not handing out recommendations related to mental health without understanding the situation. I'm concerned at where this thread started (mis-application of CBT) and is ending. Again, please don't take this the wrong way, but I'd be careful not to derail others who may be earlier in their journeys, not yet sure how to navigate all of this.
HN is the only bright corner of the internet that hasn’t changed.
[1] Not even joking, this is an actual reply.
No, you just seem to be unwilling accept that reply that argued that we worked less than today - which is true. So your suggestion that the "natural state of nature" is struggle and hardship fell flat.
Any survivalist will tell you how much of their downtime is around tool prep, shelter setup, clothing repair, etc. etc. Some future archeologist might conclude tech people only work an hour or so a day because that’s all the time spent actually typing code, but that’s not to say your work hours were truly limited to that time period.
It’s true that the weeks spend huddled in a cave, when it’s snowing outside, without a good source of food and water, and absolutely nothing you can do about it, counts as “not working” but it’s not clear that means leisurely frolicking and fucking.
an annoying trend is that, over time, almost every webpage or program controlled by corporate interests will come to include a "feed" that tries to lure you back into the modern news/outrage cycle
e.g. opening a tab in microsoft edge, clicking the weather widget in windows 10, "pocket" in firefox, the "keep with the times" inlined video section on youtube, of course social media sites like facebook and twitter, the list goes on
it's not enough to have a wide-reach product, every company needs to put a feed in it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_weird_trick_advertisements
Now it is, "Every program attempts to expand until it can read Twitter. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”
There is a world of difference between those.
Really? I spend a not-small amount of time online. I'm typing this at work right now. But I don't feel any pull to celeb culture whatsoever. Then again, I do not use facebook/twitter/Instagram. I watch YouTube but haven't ever commented or liked a video. The only real internet "drama" I am following currently is the Blizzard-Activision thing, and then only because NerdCubed put out a video about it. But I haven't really played let alone purchased a AAA title in a long while. (I think the latest game I bought was Subnautica 2.)
The internet is as bad/good as you want it to be. If you don't like the content you are exposed to stop exposing yourself to it. Go read something else. There are lots of horrible books in this world, far more bad than good, but few people talk about abandoning reading.
Short answer: Until a celebrity or pop culture story hits the BBC New front page, it isn't worth my time.
Oops
It's f---ing trivial: don't visit sites that traffic in it.
I mean seriously, show some willpower.
there's always some politics or stuff like covid
I personally do not have this impression. I truly do not give a flying fuck about "mainstream" (whatever that means) and just read what I want.
>It's insanely hard to avoid that main stream media content
I can honestly say that I haven't seen an ad in years, let alone any form of divisive content. But I also might just not visit many websites where they show that stuff. The best solution to that is to avoid those sites if possible.
It's enough of a connection to satisfy the small amount of internet that I still use.
The downside is that if I torrent a lot of files I can theoretically reach the 30 GB limit.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
And related 'Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse':
People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.
> Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.
...
> But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.
> What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.
What's ironic is that this attitude was described in the quote hobs responded to:
> If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.
My thoughts exactly. The other thing I find so frustrating is that people online will assert that bias is a terrible thing and that people should be open minded. But they also assert that it is a bad thing to be an "enlightened centrist" and they immediately become dismissive of anyone who utters the term "both sides". It's maddening.
> They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
I am so tired of this trope. Nothing is ever 'true leftism' and yet everything that opposes 'the left' is automatically binned as authoritarian, fascist, hard-right, *-ist, etc.
Yes that happens, in the New York Times. It's wonderful for a center-right organization like Democrats to pose as leftist in their party organ. Rational people, including rational actual leftists, are less likely to try to "de-platform" anyone.
I personally lost the last of my faith in the USA over the pandemic and the Trump era. We needed a vaccine agains News Corp about twenty years ago. What we got instead was normalization of “alternative facts,” and now everyone is worried about cancel culture or some other b.s. while I’m over here watching the end of the age of reason.
It really is turtles all the way down with the media and political parties. It's time to remove the artificial divides in your mind and fight these issues from a more party-agnostic position. We need your help.
What is the relationship between more trust in a mainstream source and susceptibility to disinformation you are implying here?
For example, IIRC Rush Limbaugh's audience gave him a lot of credibility and was less informed because of that.
For example Russian Today is often a great source for all non-russian news. But its a propaganda tube for russian news.
My point is if you want to hear about BS happening in your own country you'd probably read about it from foreign papers/sources first.
Those have no incentives not to bash your homeland, as oppose to local sources that have to balance not pissing off government (for access to interviews, news, sources) and ad revenue by reporting on the sensitive topics.
Your esteemed Main stream does not have an army of jurnos running around the world, they are throwing hissy-fits on their tweeter feeds and article about article and opinion about opinion - the circular reference of their own in group is mind boggling.
Suppression of real News and exaggeration of the mundane to make a political point is the biggest problem.
It is up to the individual to go to rich sources of information not shallow ones like news papers.
1) The mainstream news media is under enormous economic pressure, because the internet kneecapped their economic model: people got used to getting things for free (including bread and butter stuff like classified ads), and "engaging" crap (e.g. ideological hot takes) can be produced far more cheaply than valuable journalism (and is far more "viral"). That means the media often literally doesn't have the resources to even cover the number of stories they used to, let alone everything they arguably should.
2) It's important to be specific about what stories you think are being omitted. Are they actual stories of import, or ideological smears that happen to tickle your biases? We can't know unless they're specified.
Unfortunately, we appear to have something towards the opposite - large media outlets that aren't good, aren't trusted, and are trying to manipulate the market (à la Youtube with it's now completely useless search and its nefarious recommendation algorithms) to stop people going to competitors who might actually be doing a better job.
Until more people actively seek out more objective news sources and are willing to fund it with something other than ads, I don't see the situation improving.
Because they drive clicks.
As soon as gossip and unedited "news" blogs started appearing with rumor and unsubstantiated claims, it was a race to the bottom.
Why? Because the majority of people prefer mindless trash to the idiosyncrasies of a local county commission meeting.
I don't have a good answer because media companies have to make money to stay in business. Making them backed by the state is an even worse idea.
>I don't have a good answer because media companies have to make money to stay in business. Making them backed by the state is an even worse idea.
An excellent point. Local media outlets (in the US at least, not sure about elsewhere) are few and far between these days.
We need local news that focuses on "county commission meetings" and other happenings of local concern.
Unfortunately, unless you're in a big media market (NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Boston, etc.), odds are that your "local" news is written by folks hundreds of miles away, with no real understanding of local issues.
Here in NYC, we have dozens of local papers, blogs, independent news sites and local TV news outlets. As such, coverage of local issues is quite good.
But the days of small towns/counties having their own local newspapers and TV news are long gone in the US.
Anyone not living in a big media market will likely get only the broad-brush, zero nuance reporting that comes from national/regional news outlets.
That's a big problem for small towns, as there's no one with "skin in the game" watching the goings on of local and state government actors.
I don't have a solution (sadly) for this issue, because local news outlets in small media markets had a hard time staying in business long before the Internet, and the loss of classified ads in those small markets killed local journalism.
And so we have big national players like Fox, CNN, WSJ, NYT, USA Today, etc. that provide coverage of national issues and very limited (and inferior to real local reporting) coverage of regional/local issues.
This leads to really poor governance at the state and local levels and a lack of nuance about regional/national issues as they relate to local populations/economies.
More's the pity.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...
If you don't care about most of the decisions, and the people who make them, that directly impact your life, then no.
But if you care about the legal, civil and societal issues in your local area, like land use, taxes, local services, etc., you might have some interest.
Having answered your question, I'm starting to wonder if it was rhetorical or not. Not sure which I'd prefer it to be.
I am in the UK and I cannot trust any of the outlets at all. They lie by omission in many cases or simply do not cover it.
e.g. We've had massive anti-lockdown / vaccine passport protests in most of the cities in the UK this weekend. There are protests in France from what I understand around vaccine passports / health pass as well.
Not a mention of it at all on the BBC. Instead I find out about it via "Right Said Fred"'s twitter account. Who are "Right Said Fred"? A 90s one hit wonder band.
of course I'd love to hear how you determine rush Limbaugh listeners to be uninformed, especially since 90% of his show was reading/playing and then responding to mainstream news articles.
There's a difference between legitimate criticism of a publication, (which nearly any publication would deserve to varying degrees) and lazy, automatic dismissals of the news as "broadly untrustworthy."
(To be clear, and at a personal level, I don't particularly like the NY Times. Their headlines are often politicized and the editorial section is completely awful. However if you get off the front page and just read some of their in depth reporting, you'd be crazy to write them off as wholly biased or untrustworthy.)
And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing?
The most effective misinformation tells the truth, but not the whole truth.
> And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing?
All editing is selective, that's pretty much definitional.
I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The alternative to the NY Times (and similar publications) isn't some ideal publication that gives an accurate picture without distortion, it's talk radio and other opinionated sources that give pictures that are even more distorted.
The NY Times is like a plate of food with a fly in it. There are salesmen out there that spend a lot of time talking about the fly, reminding you how gross it is and how bad they must be for it to get there, etc. Then they'll offer a plate of dogshit as a substitute, and distressingly a lot of people will take it because they've been successfully fixated on that damn fly.
Uncritical acceptance of any source leads to mistakes like believing the Steele dossier and claims about collusion between Trump and Russia, whose claims even the NY Times itself now admits "have never materialized or have been proved false".[1]
That was one of the biggest pieces of disinformation in the last five years, and the NY Times pushed it wholeheartedly for many years. Their mistake here is summarized well in their own article:
> To learn from the dossier episode, news organizations would have to examine their ties to private intelligence agents, including why they so often granted them anonymity. But as long as the media allows private spies to set the rules, journalists and the public will continue to lose.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...
Real people who are actually engaged in the business of participating in society--holding down jobs, going to school, being citizens--don't have the time to effectively "research" every important issue, and, as a corollary, those who do tend to be cranks.
For sure nobody should engage in "uncritical acceptance", though to me this seems like a straw man. The test of a good newspaper isn't whether you can read it uncritically, but whether reading it critically leaves you more or less well informed.
* A distinctive phraseology which, as detailed in "Pale Horse Rider" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQS4DYQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...), goes back to at least William Cooper and the 1990s, but has recently come to be used for things like vaccine skepticism and QAnon.
A phrase that I didn't use. If you're going to put words in my mouth, don't try to overanalyze what they might have meant had I said them.
As you said "there's a lot of valid criticism to be had". All I'm saying is to be aware of that and seek out that criticism. And don't believe everything you read, even in the NYT.
Not having time for in depth critical reading is understandable, but if that's the case, recognize it and adjust your confidence level appropriately.
For sure. :) My point was only that there's a weirdly fine line between asking readers to be critical--which I think is valid--and the crank-laden calls to "do your own research."
I think that's kinda right, but I have some quibbles. Basically, I feel the attitude that they're not trustworthy and distorting the truth leads to a kind of paranoia, feelings of helplessness, or succumbing to the trap letting an uncritical indulgence of one's own biases dictate what's "factual." I think there's a better way to say a similar thing:
You can trust the members if the mainstream media to try their best, but realize they make mistakes for understandable reasons and have their own biases, so you need to read with those biases in mind and try to correct for them with a measure of skepticism (e.g. a grain of salt, not a boulder). Realize that they're all sharing a part of the truth, dig deeper, and withhold judgement. The news is a first draft of history, written before all the facts are in.
> “What I’m saying is that our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told his staff in a town hall on Monday.[1]
No doubt some members of the media are still trying their best, but look how many of the best have left the media for Substack or other independent pursuits, because the climate in the big media organizations no longer permits the pursuit of truth over politics.
1: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-m...
So what that they're partisan? It's a myth that a good journalist must be personally detached and disinterested, since that's frankly inhuman. They should strive to act that way in their work, but they're not going to be perfect at it, and they'll still have their personal opinions. It's one of those things to understand and correct for.
> No doubt some members of the media are still trying their best, but look how many of the best have left the media for Substack or other independent pursuits, because the climate in the big media organizations no longer permits the pursuit of truth over politics.
I haven't been following Substack, but the format only seems like a good fit for self-important pundit types and maybe few name-brand journalists that cover a few narrow but particularly popular topics. Honestly, IMHO, the op-ed section (where the former live) is the least valuable kind of journalism (but it's unfortunately the only kind of journalism a lot of people pay attention to).
So it's led them to uncritically publish lies time after time.
They claimed "Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage", but the medical examiner found no evidence of injuries, and a thorough review of the tapes found no event that would have caused his death.
They pushed the Steele dossier, whose claims, even they now admit, "have never materialized or have been proved false" and which was the work of a "renegade, billion-dollar [private spying] industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news."[1]
They said “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church” but a thorough investigation by the inspector general, published under the Biden administration, found that “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.”[2]
Something that claims to be the "newspaper of record" should have higher standards and not just run with any story that suits their partisan agenda.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...
2: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/yet-another-media-tale-trum...
If you don't want that, wait a year or more for someone to publish a definitive history after all the investigations are done.
And you're seeing that process in action: the NY Times wrote about the Steele dossier in a timely fashion and later wrote about how it was false after new facts come to light.
Worse, the attitude seems to be "so what if they're partisan", as you said. Neither they nor their audience have learned anything from their many mistakes.
And that's being generous by allowing that they were mistakes. One would expect mistakes to happen in both directions, but as Glenn Greenwald said of the media in general, "The most notable aspect is that they all go toward promoting the same narrative."[1]
I suspect what's really happening here is that the standards for publication are drastically, catastrophically lower when the story is both powerful and politically convenient. That is not a mistake; that is prioritizing politics over truth. That is a publication that's in the business of propaganda, not journalism.
1: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-w...
That doesn't match my recollection. For instance, I recall the reporting I read about the Steele dossier reported that it existed and made claims X, Y, Z, but it did not endorse those claims. And that's not just me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier:
> The media, the intelligence community, and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations...
On the Lafayette square thing, I don't recall how tentative the exact language the stories used was (and I certainly didn't read every one), but the the timeline of the events makes it very clear that crowd clearance and the photo op were closely coordinated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._J.... Which does back to my last point: it looked like a duck, it quacked like a duck, they reported it was a duck, but after a year of investigation and a battery of DNA tests, it turned out it was a mutant goose.
I wouldn't draw too strong conclusions from Greenwald's list. And frankly if those things are embarrassing he should be embarrassed too, because the "Havana Syndrome" story (#6) isn't over, yet he jumped the shark to claim it's been debunked. He honestly seems to be cherrypicking to support his narrative, which is one of those things you have to correct for.
> The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.
That's an op-ed, but it's making a factual claim, so it's doubly dishonest: it's misinformation and it's pretending factual allegations are just "opinion".
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-2016...
Wow, this quite possibly is the stupidest thing I ever read on NH. No, there is no trade off between accuracy and timelessness! If you can’t guarantee accuracy then you can report that “a questionable pice of information that can’t be easily verified says X’. So that people who are into gossip can get their fix, while people who are only interested in undisputed facts do not. And yes - undisputed facts are where 99% of all people agree that this is a fact, rather than 49% or 53%. I also understand that it would eliminate 90% of news and stories, which admittedly is the point.
- https://www.nytimes.com/section/world/middleeast
- https://www.nytimes.com/section/business/economy
- https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/nuclear-energy
- etc.
I'm not suggesting that these stories are all perfect. But, my claim would be that they don't suffer from the same problems (or at least to the same degree) as the very loud Trump vs. Biden bias that may exist there. It ought to be possible to say something like the following: "The NY Times probably has a measurable slant when it comes to reporting on the major US political parties, however that particular bias does not directly bleed into all other areas of their reporting."
That's always seemed rather strange to me. When I see that a newspaper isn't trustworthy on one subject, I think it's reasonable to doubt them on all subjects.
I'm not saying they're always wrong; sometimes they're even right about Trump. But no one should trust something simply because they've written it.
I don't think being wrong on one subject damns a whole paper.
I would agree in general. A paper that was consistently wrong about sports might still be trustworthy about science.
But almost every story touches on US politics, so misleading the public about US politics casts doubt on all of the stories. They're probably still trustworthy on sports and celebrity gossip, but politics influences science, medicine, business, economics, international news, etc, so their bias in politics is likely to infect all those other topics.
Quoth your link "The shift coincided with the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, when trust in the media was often juxtaposed with trust in Trump’s presidency."
The problem the media has is that it can't please everyone's biases. If it's appropriately skeptical of Trump, the people who hate to see Trump criticized will be unhappy (and in that case there's an ideological media alternate universe willing to capitalize on that unhappiness and turn it into mistrust). If it becomes a Trump love-fest with either muted skepticism (e.g. Fox News) or hardly any at all (e.g. OANN), then a lot of people with mistrust it (because it's arguably not doing its job).
It's a lot like Congress, actually. People mistrust "Congress" but usually like their Congressman. That's because their Congressmen likely to be ideologically similar, while "Congress" as a whole has people who are very different ideologically (and it may be controlled by those people). And to top that off, the electoral strategies of both parties often play up fear and mistrust of the other side in order to drum up votes (which unarguably helps the candidates most of the time, but hurts the institution).
Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server. This made no sense on any level; neither Trump nor anyone in his circles controlled the mail server or its DNS, they were behind so many levels of subcontracting he'd have to involve a bunch of people he had no reason to trust and who all denied any such thing happened, all to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need some other, undetected, much better communication channel to get any meaning out of it and that was tied to the Trump brand for no good reason. And this was supposed to be a better explanation than other mail systems which had received promotional hotel e-mails merely doing automated DNS requests as a result, like many e-mail systems do.
So naturally, the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate this in a way that implied they were somehow supporting Trump if they didn't, and went massively viral on social media with this demand. The New York Times pushed back against this in the mildest way possible, by saying that the FBI had looked into these claims and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal email systems doing ordinary things in response to marketing emails. (This was also what nearly every technical expert seems to have concluded regardless of party.) Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.
Do you have an actual link to that?
Another problem is that some people have the mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that was timely.
> Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.
Maybe, to make my point more explicitly: the main issue with the media nowadays seems to be many of the people who consume it. And frankly, most criticism of the media's trustworthiness that I see online is the kind that will only make whatever problem that's being complained about worse.
There are some examples I can think of:
- Manifest Destiny.
- Spanish American 1989 war because (Maine sinking).
- The gulf of Tokin incident.
- The Nayirah testimony.
- Irak's WMD.
Does this worries me? Yes, of course. The level of fracture in some societies (USA, UK, for example) is increasing. How could we enact some defenses against them? Don't know.
I mean, critical thinking can cut through a bunch of the garbage, but it won't help with the well-done disinformation - not if there's enough of it.
'The new disclosure revealed that the Post and the Journal each received more than $100,000 per month to run print versions of Chinese propaganda articles. The Times received $50,000 in 2018 to place the propaganda on its website, presumably a small fraction of the revenue it made selling print space to China Daily. The new disclosures also showed that China Daily paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and other large regional newspapers to print copies of the China Daily for local distribution.'
https://freebeacon.com/media/nyt-quietly-scrubs-chinese-prop...
I don't think 100k a month can break NYT journalism integrity (their revenue is 1.7 billions), but not because it's too cheap, they became a propaganda mouthpiece anyway. A high quality one, that makes you believe they're not actually propaganda, which makes it so much more effective. It's easy to see Fox as propaganda, so much harder to see NYT; and they are at roughly the same levels.
Have you actually read the NYT's coverage of China? They're probably pissing it off more than almost any other English-language outlet.
To that end, two brief things. Journalists doing investigative reporting have ZERO interaction with advertising, so the idea that an individual ad bank would have any influence on the work you see from reporters in the paper is really out there. Editors at big papers like that are looking for stories that go hard... the crimes of autocratic regimes are pretty high on the list of shit you want to cover.
You might not believe that! But the other thing is that even if ads directed coverage and could buy press silence (they don't) NYT makes the lion's share of its revenue through subscriptions. Their ad business is cratering. So on an economic level it also makes zero sense.
I really hope substack will get bigger, there are incredible authors with a quality of writing that I have never witnessed even in the heyday of traditional print media.
https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-sca...
As long as I can still pick individual authors and pay them directly, I don't care much who Substack chooses to editorialize. Just because someone writes full-time doesn't mean I'm interested in their POV. The authors I follow have built up their own audience over years on Twitter. They suceed because of their unique insights and erudition, not because some Medicis decide to push a narrative.
Most defense and intelligence agencies have been, for the past two decades, calling the internet the most important conflict space of the 21st century. Why no one took them seriously is beyond me.
What this didn’t touch on was the availability of likes/interactions for money. This seems to be the much more pernicious attack vector, because you don’t need to write fake content and risk exposure to any serious extent. There are already plenty of people saying antivax (or insert your favorite conspiracy theory) things, and it’s much easier to just hand them a megaphone instead of creating your own content. Any possible message you would want to spread as a state actor is almost certainly out there, and it’s better to find natural occurrences of it and simply amplify those voices.
Apparently it only took 12.
> The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas, culture, history. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We've always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols, from tablets to books...
> But not all the information was inherited by the later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really. That's what history is. But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading. Always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. Raiden, you seem to think our plan is one of censorship.
> The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than those of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. "Be nice to other people." "But beat out the competition!"
> "You're special. Believe in yourself and you will succeed! But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed...
> All this rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and VALVe systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever 'truth' suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulged in 'truth'.
> And this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
> We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species.
I think no one took it seriously because it's always hard to take a threat seriously until it has caused some damage. Nuclear power seemed safe and environmentally friendly until a lot of nuclear disasters happened. With a world where we seem to be facing new existential threats every day, it makes sense that people hit the attention saturation point some time ago, walled themselves into their internal social networks, and landed us here today.
As a partial aside, the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us. This, in turn, limits how much we can actually care:
As an (likely fictitious) example:
> "Russia is hacking our critical infrastructure"
doesn't have quite the same ring as
>, "On 12/28/2018 Russia initiated an act of cyber warfare and remotely destroyed electrical switching equipment responsible fo rthe power outage and downtime in Middleton Ohio from 0100 GMT to 2119 GMT on the following day. The residents of this area have been notified via mail and SMS . . . ."
These agencies have huge conflicts of interest in that their funding depends on how afraid the government is of the threats they're tasked with defending. So the more afraid they can make politicians, the more funding they'll get.
What makes their claims even less credible is that they're basically professional liars. They're trained in deception and have a long, sordid history of deceiving the public: often quite consciously and deliberately.
"the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us"
Even if they did tell us we could never know if they were telling the truth, as the public has absolutely no access to their internal records. They tell us what they want us to believe.
Depends on your epistemology, but I'd like to believe that most people could.
At some point you have to draw a line between an unsatisfiable skepticism and believing third party, independent observer. In my example an electric company suffered an outage due to an attack. Certainly linemen, switch operators, NERC-CIP-familiar personnel and other people would be able to testify to the press (or to others) that something strange did happen. Having worked on outages related to that kind of stuff, I myself could testify that when people in my field see strange things on public-sector systems it somehow makes it's way around the community ;). The point here is that it would/will lend credence to the claims that those scary men in black suits make.
But of course, believe what you want. That's always going to be your prerogative.
Secret agencies can pin blame on anyone or any country they like, and there's ultimately no way to tell.. especially when double agents, false flag operations, and provocateurs are taken in to account.
The intelligence field is the proverbial hall of mirrors, and that a spy agency said something or was in any way involved is my cue to give up any hope of ever figuring out what was really going on.
The most frightening thing is that views like this are the ultimate goal of the type of propaganda we're seeing. Convincing you of fact X is secondary. The main goal is to convince you that nobody knows the facts. They want to diminish your belief in institutions, like journalism, education, medicine, and democracy.
This is my first time seeing OPs post on this. I found it to be useful.
Even this example of news reporting doesn't point to a single article/advertisement? Were these articles denying facts about the Uyghurs or were they about the rising popularity of cruises available on the eastern seaboard of China? The article tells me virtually nothing and provides little in the way of actual proof (although I'm inclined to believe they did stop state sponsored editorial advertising).
And reading a bunch of sources and forming your own opinion is hardly an improvement when you read Breitbart, the Washington Examiner and the NY Post and feel like you've done your due diligence.
Which is an attitude that makes one far more vulnerable to the kind of disinformation-for-hire the OP describes (a lot of it is astroturf, fake fact-checking, fake personal accounts of "what's really going on", etc.).
However, many people here aren't discussing the OP, but using the word "disinformation" in the title as an excuse bring up some hobby horse complaint.
Yet the same people saying that now trust everything they want to believe in on the internet.
You really think an outlet receiving $XM from Huawei will post anything negative? Just look at all the China stories that were spiked by Bloomberg because they didn’t want to threaten their bloomberg terminal business.
What a coincidence!
Why is this the de facto response to anything the far left dislikes? Sorry, but disagreement with their strange ideological cultish beliefs isn't always propaganda and/or racism.
What's really frightening is the authoritarian rhetoric coming from their followers anytime someone points out the hypocrisy of these main stream media organizations.
>Are you going to make the same post for every nytimes article?
Yeah that's how you fight disinformation and make sure your point is heard. You just don't like it when it gets used against disinformation you prefer. Why is it ok to post multiple articles on HN about "disinformation" but not ok to respond to them the same way multiple times?
Also, I'm not sure how your comment is still unflagged since it's breaking all sorts of HN's flamewar rules....
Richard Smith, who edited BMJ for 13 years, on the state of health research: "It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary."
It's true journalists often get things wrong. Anybody who has been part of something newsworthy, will learn that what is written is hard to recognize after the fact. Reporting "as it were" is exceptionally hard and requires in-depth research, time and efforts. But that doesn't mean pure speculation and wishful thinking weighs heavier than consensus among experts. By all means take things with grains of salt, but don't fall for con-artists and bullshitters in the name of "skepticism".
It seems to me, on its face, that this argument is laughable. The entire premise of concerns about disinfo is that disinfo is (by definition) deliberately deceptive, typically--as in the cases mentioned in the article--deceptive in posture (claiming to be opinion rather than paid propaganda) and origin (claiming to be from organic sources, like real voters, rather than sock-puppets controlled by political actors).
This criticism is, of course, not applicable to paid advertisements that disclose their source.
When did the decline really start?
Here's one critique in the form of a song: https://slate.com/culture/2018/02/i-am-the-very-model-of-a-n...
Searching for anything relating to NYT and Ukraine obviously gives a lot of more recent results but I found this Huffington Post article[1] that I think has enough background to point you in the right direction if you’re curious to learn more. And I think this[2] is the journalist’s wikipedia article.
Edit: It was Stalin he had a very friendly relationship with, not Lenin.
[1]https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5a15c588e4b0f401dfa7ecce
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...
As someone pointed out upthread, these media take money from foreign interests (China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and quite a umber of others) and it's all good according to them, because they apparently are "good" by self-definition.
They are part of the problem!
If your news source never prints retractions, it's not to be trusted.
And, yet, a lot of the US public opinion is shaped by Fox News...
My impression is they only have opinion programs and no news reporting whatsoever.
Several outlets have been caught scrubbing past headlines that were proven false, but that's more an indictment on them.
I get that. But how do the TV news programs do it? I don't remember them starting with, or including at all, a corrections segment.
Yeah, when there is breaking news it seems there's a ton of speculation and bad information given.
Sign your name, cite your sources, share your data. aka authenticity.
Extra credit for verification, fact checking, vetting sources. aka journalism.
And as you say, earn merit badge for intellectual honesty. Including retractions, updates, followups, listing assumptions, etc.
Times editors have thus far rejected appeals to flag readers when stories are reworked, unless it’s a correction. They argue that making such edits are a routine part of digital publishing — you edit a piece, publish it, then report more or add more context, then republish it again, on through the news cycle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/public-editor/liz-spayd-n...
First, prune out really low quality sources of information, as they perpetuate uncritical thinking. The worst in my life are the Twitter trending tab (I did the "Indian Ocean" hack) and cable "news," especially the opinion section (and there's a lot more opinion stuff on even the "straight" news these days).
Second, spend some time editing Wikipedia articles, and become familiar with their guidelines. They are a digital community that has managed not to become a trash fire. My take is that being a decent WP editor requires a fairly low level of critical thinking - it can be defined as making good tertiary content (encyclopedia articles) from secondary sources, where the goal is simply verifiability rather than of truth. "Real" critical thinking might be defined as making good secondary content from primary sources. But I think the former is an important foundation. Did person X really say Y? If you get this wrong (which is super-common), there's no hope to answer deeper questions.
Four books that helped me along the way are:
How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
The Book of Fallacies by Jeremy Bentham (alternatively, I enjoyed Logically Fallacious by Bo Bennet, and it fills the same niche)
Trust Me - I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday
Asking the Right Questions by Browne, Keil
I hope that was helpful! Enjoy
Thanks to the hero who provided an archive link, so that I could skim this. This article appears to be NYT heroically defending a corporate sponsor against the vile slander of other content marketers. Still speaking truth to power, I see.
I had long since concluded that the NYT was junk, resented the offers, and wrote a scathing denuciating letter to the Publisher ending with I don't want your work for free.
Actually, I was a little too hard on the NYT: On paper it can be used to wrap dead fish heads.
My short recommendation for the NYT and the rest of the mainstream media is, first, to get the level of quality of writing and information up to common standards for high school term papers.
A column is a personal opinion piece, not a news story.
> how this was "worse than Antitem [sic]"
I can't find any columns that mention Antietam from NYT published in 2005. Is there any reason to believe what you're describing actually happened?
Does that refer to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antietam? I can't even put together the comparison.
It makes me trust them more since they're auditing themselves like that. Shows high journalistic integrity.
The NYT retracted the story, which is pretty much all I can hope for in a situation like this.
In 2020, Callimachi was reassigned at the Times and will no longer cover terrorism.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/caliphate-rev...
And poor? Laughable. NYTimes is a high quality source on-par with WSJ.
When the outgroup shows their imperfections, a whole other set of cognitive tools are used.
I've since unsubscribed from NY Times based on how I saw them treat Andrew Yang in the mayoral race. Every little thing he did was sensationalized and take down articles were written. The nail in the coffin was their final piece, when he conceded, and on "analyzing" his campaign it was essentially a final take down article.
The overtly negative items from other candidates were ignored (i.e. Eric Adam's tax evasion, and his plans of implementing 300 students per teacher to save money)
The New York Times has been doing business continuously since 1851, is one of the cornerstones of democracy, a recognized leader in journalism schools across the globe, and to this day regularly fires journalists who are caught lying in a story. Anyone is free to literally walk into its offices at any time without being followed or shot.
It's safe to say there is no comparison here.
The New York Times (along with many other news outlets) has been known in recent years to be biased and untrustworthy to anyone that has been paying attention.
So while it is nice they have been around since the mid-19th century they should not be bestowed trust just because in the past they have may have had good reporting.
They were a major driver of the Iraq WMD theory and thus the Iraq War if you want one solid example.
No good misinformation or politically biased piece includes lies.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...
Internet norms are only internet norms, they aren't everywhere norms. Cade Metz did not "doxx" Scott Alexander, because doxxing does not exist outside of some particular very online spaces. And Alexander even wasn't doxxed by properly-understood internet norms because he doxxed himself long before.
The situation was Scott Alexander was confused to think the norms of his community were controlling in every community, or that he could set arbitrary rules that everyone else would then be obligated to follow, and he has a lot of fans who share those confusions.
Journalism very much has the idea of protecting their sources. The NYT, for whatever reason, didn't feel like protecting Scott.
He wasn't a source, he was a subject.
Think of it this way: if the NYT was writing a story about Trump, is he a source they should protect? No, he's the subject: they might give him a chance to comment, but they're not going to let him dictate their coverage. A source would be (for instance) some White House staffer that gives an account of some non-public discussion Trump was part of, and who could expect reprisal for the act of giving that account.
IIRC, Metz learned Alexander's name independently of Alexander (not surprising because he linked it to his pseudonym himself), so Alexander was not the source and the NYT had no reasonable obligation to him to hide it.
I understand the difference. I'm responding to this line in particular:
> doxxing does not exist outside of some particular very online spaces
Journalists do understand that someone may want to keep their identity secret, which is what doxxing is. While doxxing as a term is particular to the internet, it - at least as a concept - predates the internet.
No, that's not what doxxing is.
Journalists understand the need for anonymity in certain contexts, but like I said, it's often part of a bargain for information. It's not about letting people control stories about them. They write stories about events that are embarrassing or damaging to named individuals all the time (e.g. reporting on the police blotter), even though I'm sure all those people would have preferred their identities be kept secret.
> While doxxing as a term is particular to the internet, it - at least as a concept - predates the internet.
Doxxing is entirely particular to the internet, because IRL people typically use their real names, and almost nobody hides behind pseudonymity.
Good point, but notably that info is literally in the public domain. Journalists aren't setting up sting operations to unmask Banksy, and if they did they'd get rightly criticized for it.
> Doxxing is entirely particular to the internet, because IRL people typically use their real names, and almost nobody hides behind pseudonymity.
You're really, really hung up on the fact that "doxxing" is medium specific, which is why I'm trying to move it to IRL activity. Honestly I think the fact that Metz can't respect the conventions/culture of the medium he's reporting on is another blow against his credability/employability.
ALL skepticism is crucial. Even ridiculous viewpoints should see the light of day to allow them to be investigated or dismissed.
The push to suppress opposing views is really only coming from one direction right now. If someone supports limiting free speech, I can probably guess which political party they identify with.
Like every other attack on rights, the stated goals are always very noble: "limit hate speech", "stop disinformation", etc. Cute. But behind those reasons, we're all aware of the real goal: silence anyone who opposes your views.
Just because you don’t like it or find it distasteful doesn’t mean it isn’t free speech.
How about people who are compensated to promote COVID vaccinations? Should that be disallowed?
The problem is who determines what is “truth” or allowable speech. Do you really want to live in a country where the party in power gets to decide this?
Lying is not illegal.
If any foreign power wants to destabilize a country this is a good way to go. Each time that there it's any stressful event create opposite sides and make them fight.
Of course, there is a degree of 'fallout' where the influence can reach the attacking country. So, the destabilization creates ripples around the world. And all because 'influencers' seem to operate outside any industry self-regulation or state rules. And many people is unprepared to fight against messages send by, otherwise, producers of quite innocuous content.
And the comments, and opinions do not need to make sense, just need to create enough noise so the general population does not know who to trust anymore. Want country inn that state will be debilitated and open for further foreign interference.
I think they many people is learning to see the noise, to see the people screaming nobody can be trusted, but it will take time until we're have good social mechanisms to fight misinformation.
In our fascist mixed economy it is every gang against every other gang. I can't blame the gangs in the society we have built.
Are we really at such a different place or is this something we’ve quietly ignored until now?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/world/europe/disinformati...
If you want to block NYTimes and all contributors on your account, try this: https://www.blocknyt.com/
It's closed source too? The website itself has two trackers installed. What could go wrong?
> The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
Either way, it's no longer a requirement.
IIRC, Trump didn't start blaming China until China started blaming the USA for the spread during the military games that happened during the fall.
I think we can safely discard the notion that Trump would be reporting on anything the IC tells him.
As far as I'm aware, our knowledge of the real-world facts haven't changed -- we're still in a position of great uncertainty. All that's changed is how various commentators are dealing with that uncertainty: they had been downplaying it, now they're acknowledging it.
If the story was “Trump points to Covid leaking from lab in China, evidence is a sparse” then ok cool.
But the story was “Lab leak conspiracy theory has been proven false but Trump continues to claim it’s true increasing Anti-Asian hate crimes”
Then Biden starts to comment on it and like a light switch the theory becomes credible, even “likely”. And all the newspapers act like they had been saying that all along.
You’ve got a very short memory.
Facebook was banning accounts that even brought it up.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/09/groucho-principles/
For example, I could not find much wrong with this from February 2020:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
It does (correctly, IMO) focus on the 'bioweapon' conspiracies rather than the 'lab leak' theory and mentions how the senator ended up distancing himself from the former.
And actually, the original letter in The Lancet might also not be entirely unreasonable? I cannot find fault with it, provided one interprets the phrase 'not have a natural origin' as 'engineered' (rather than 'leaked'). See here:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
You should of course feel free to disagree, but it might be worth reading these sources before continuing the discussion? And maybe there are other articles I missed?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200217083402/https://www.nytim...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210724164846/https://www.nytim...
Also - what exactly is your point? Like the other readers here I could probably be convinced that my example is bad, and you might even be able to make us adjust our opinion of the NY times. But right now I only see a suggestion of criticism rather than the raising of an actual issue. Would it be too much to ask you elaborate?
In this article the author engages in a smear of the anthropogenic conjecture and of Sen Cotton by associations invented by the article itself. It may as well as ask "when did you stop beating your wife" as much as "when did Sen Cotton stop saying coronavirus was a bioweapon."
Truthfully the article never establishes that Sen Cotton claimed that coronavirus was a bioweapon. However, the author does take pain to characterize later statements as "Mr. Cotton later walked back the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon run amok." How does one walk back a statement that was never made?
I went back and listened to YouTube clips of Cotton during the time period [0, 1, 2 among them] and consistently I hear a person saying that coronavirus is bad, travel restrictions and quarantines are needed, and that the Chinese government is lying about the severity, chronology and origin of the disease. I didn't hear him making a claim of bioweapon.
I depended on YouTube's search function and then Cotton's own media appearance list for videos before the article's date of 2/18/2020 so maybe there was some other source where Cotton made a bioweapon claim that could be walked back? I visited Wikipedia's helpful COVID-19 Misinformation page and didn't find anything about Cotton [3]. I then checked Archive org for the same page from the NYT's article's time period and found a few mentions of Cotton [4]. Here were contemporaneous articles from a publication called "The Hill" from 2/2/2020 [5], CNN from 2/18/2020 [6], and Snopes (which excludes archive.org) of 4/1/2020 [7].
The Hill's mention of Cotton comes by way of the Chinese ambassador on a television show "Face The Nation:" Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai criticized Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday for suggesting the coronavirus could have been created in a Chinese biological warfare lab. That is the entirety of it. No link to what Cotton said or didn't say. In the Face The Nation transcript [8], Amb Cui doesn't claim Cotton said that. It's the interviewer that brings up Cotton claiming "And in fact, this week, Senator Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, suggested that the virus may have come from China's biological warfare program." Ok, so the Cotton statement must have been before 2/2/2020? Bookmark that for a moment.
CNN's article focuses on Cotton coming "under fire" for his statements about coronavirus. On Fox News Sunday morning, Cotton suggested the virus did not originate in an animal market as the Chinese government has claimed, but perhaps from another source, such as an infectious disease research lab nearby. While acknowledging there's no evidence the disease originated there, Cotton questioned the validity of China's statements, saying "China was lying from the beginning, and they're still lying today." At no point is Cotton quoted or documented in any way as claiming coronavirus is a bioweapon.
Snopes' writes It is speculative, however, to assert, as U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton did, that these actions were done to cover up a leak from a lab. citing the NYT article, completing the ourobouros of misinformation.
Back to Cotton from before 2/2/2020. Before 2/2 Cotton appears to be trying to raise the alert for coronavirus and advocating for travel controls (and includes exception for Americans, medics and disease researchers) and quarantines. [9, 10, 11]. Again, I don't hear anything about biowarfare.
CNN does link to a 2/16/2020 tweet [12] from the @SenTomCotton account in response to a Washington Post article [13]. The tweet is Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: and subsequent tweets delve into each hypo.
CNN also does quote Cotton with his rationale for speaking out about the wet market claim for the origins of coronavirus "Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China who have published a study in the international journal The Lancet have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market," Cotton said. "The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market."
Let no organization be entirely judged by its worst moments or by uncharacteristic best ones or by the actions of any single worker within it. I had expected to be quickly gratified by some Arkansas senator whose mouth went further than the facts. At the same time I remember Gell-Mann Amnesia [14] enough to not take one article's word for the facts. When I saw the heaps of other articles repeating and expanding on the NYT, I see unshadowed disinformation in action, an echochamber of bullshit.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7roTUfd35w
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT3txmbWxb4
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytGIkcCh7T8
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation
4. https://web.archive.org/web/20200715000000*/https://en.wikip...
5. https://web.archive.org/web/20200804003739/https://thehill.c...
6. https://web.archive.org/web/20210308045325/https://web.archi...
7. https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/
8. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-cui-tiankai-on-face-...
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT3txmbWxb4
10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBsPh1Rq0Fw
11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjWm2GnuDn8
12. https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126?...
13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
14. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
15. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market...
16. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Among other things, I will happily agree with you that the Snopes page is simply not correct. I will not hold the NY times responsible for that, however.
As you have surely seen, in his twitter thread the senator does list "the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis" as a possible option, and also says that "the so-called experts" do not really know any better.
So I can see the viewpoint of the NY times: it is newsworthy if a senator lends credence to a possibility that scientists widely dismissed. As an analogy, a senator who believes that the earth is flat might be equally interesting for a news publication - even if it is masked by phrases like 'we need to keep an open mind', 'the experts might be wrong', etc -- 'the earth might be flat' is simply not a reasonable position for a senator to hold.
But I can also see your point. It was early days of the pandemic and there were lots of unknowns. The general gist of the argument was one of caution and keeping an open mind towards all possibilities, which was healthy. And for a senator it would have been hard at those times to distinguish between something that scientists almost universally dismissed and something that they were still debating about.
Perhaps we can agree that the newsworthiness of the content of the NY times article was not entirely obvious, and the reasons it was published anyway could have been political (even if this was not consciously done). Based on your research it seems that the resulting storm of negative publicity by other outlets was not justified.
Please read the NYT editorial (2/17) [0] and Cotton's tweet (2/16) [1] again. The NYT claimed "Mr. Cotton later walked back the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon run amok." There is no walk back in that tweet. There is a continued questioning of the Chinese food market claims. Bioweapon is placed within the less likely range of different possibilities that start with natural transmission, noted by Cotton as being "still the most likely."
The tweet is in response to claims by a Washington Post article [2], later corrected with the statement "Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term “debunked” and The Post’s use of “conspiracy theory” have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus."
I'd like to visit your statement As you have surely seen, in his twitter thread the senator does list "the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis" as a possible option, and also says that "the so-called experts" do not really know any better.
The full final tweet in the thread is "We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
In your statement it sounds like Cotton is claiming experts aren't a good source for judging among possibilities. I think a stronger text-based interpretation is that he is writing about _transparency_ and that some people who are claimed as experts don't want transparency.
At least two of Cotton's public statements focused on Covid origins cited the Huang et al Lancet article [3] which was authored by physicians on the scene. Cotton didn't lend "credence to a possibility that scientists widely dismissed." He drew attention to the fact that there was authentic scientific disagreement with the claims of Chinese authorities about the origins.
The tragedy in all this is that the hypothesizing the virus' origin wasn't the significant part of the message. It was an example for the broader point that the outbreak was serious and that Chinese authorities were not behaving with candor. The specific analogy Cotton made repeatedly was to the Soviet Chernobyl response.
0. https://web.archive.org/web/20200217083402/https://www.nytim...
1. https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126?...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
3. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Because the bioweapon theory was the prominent one early on (and it was spread at a time when hate crimes against ethnic Chinese were exploding) you can see why it was shut down.
The more reasonable idea of a virus taken from nature, studied in a lab, then escaping, was not the narrative labeled as a "conspiracy" last year.
The "lab leak" theory hasn't actually changed any. Intelligence has the same conclusions as they had last year, they don't know. The only thing that has "changed" is the rabid reporting on the subject, either calling it 100% not true or "highly likely". Both conclusions are false, and any outlet reporting it as either one doesn't deserve your time.
> and some signatories confessed they'd signed it only because Trump had been promoting the theory
Source?
> Cambridge Analytica, the British political consultancy caught up in a huge scandal over its use of Facebook data, has boasted that they ran the successful campaigns of President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2013 and 2017 Kenyan elections. In a secretly filmed video, Mark Turnbull, a managing director for Cambridge Analytica and sister company SCL Elections, told a Channel 4 News’ undercover investigative reporting team that his firm secretly stage-managed Kenyatta’s hotly contested campaigns. [...]
> Cambridge Analytica boasts of manipulating voters’ deepest fears and worries. Last year’s Kenyan election was dogged by vicious online propaganda targeting opposition leader Raila Odinga, with images and films playing on people’s concerns about everything from terrorism to spiralling disease. No-one knows who produced the material. Cambridge Analytica denies involvement with these toxic videos – a claim that is hard to square with the company’s boast that they “staged the whole thing.”
- https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/03/cambridge-analyti...
> An explosive new report reveals how the U.S. government paid a British public relations company linked to right-wing politics and repressive regimes more than $500 million from American taxpayers to spearhead a top-secret propaganda campaign in Iraq.
> Bell Pottinger, a London-based P.R. firm, created fake videos that appeared to be the work of al-Qaida, the Islamist extremist group formerly headed by Osama bin Laden. It also created news stories that looked as though they were produced by Arab media outlets, and distributed them through Middle Eastern news networks.
- https://www.salon.com/2016/10/03/u-s-paid-p-r-firm-540-milli...
> The IRD... played a major role in Western news and cultural media from 1948-1977. It financed a publishing house ‘Ampersand’ and at one time employed a staff of 300. A secret Foreign Office memo in February 1948 described the establishment of the IRD as a response to the “developing communist threat to the whole fabric of Western civilization”. The origins of the IRD lie in the recommendations in a paper put up by the Imperial Defence College.
> In their book on the IRD, Lashmar and Oliver note that “the vast IRD enterprise had one sole aim: To spread its ceaseless propaganda output (i.e. a mixture of outright lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists who worked for major agencies, papers and magazines, including Reuters and the BBC, as well as every other available channel. It worked abroad to discredit communist parties in Western Europe which might gain a share of power by entirely democratic means, and at home to discredit the British Left”.
> IRD fed information and propaganda on 'communists' within the labour movement through confidential recipients of its briefings one of whom is now known to be the late Vic Feather into the media, and into the Labour Party's policing units, the National Agent's Department and the Organisation Subcommittee.
- https://powerbase.info/index.php/Information_Research_Depart...
Etc., etc.
There've been paid liars and propagandists since people got the idea that voting was a thing. Probably before.
But yeah, I don't see that this is novel. There's been both the architecture and the motivation for individual, commercial, and political disinformation since the inception of language. The rise in scale isn't even that alarming, they're probably actually just uncovering activity that started long ago, I mean this is just radical PR or propaganda, which has been around unobserved for centuries. I'd readily agree that the pre-liberal Catholic church, and the clergy under it, were staked so highly in justifying Divine Right that it became a sort of disinformation that had the added benefit of lining the pockets of the Pope down to the parishioner. Dumas and Hugo both had asides in their books, Monte Cristo and Hunchback respectively, both of which expounded that truth is fickle. And if Hugo was being intellectually honest, he had reason to believe that even in the 15th century Paris was rife with disinformation.
It's good to see these sort of things published from time to time, maybe it will breed some more skeptics, but mostly it'll be a talking point.
This is technically true, but the damage unleashed in the past decade is unprecedented, multiplied by social networks that didn't exist in the past. Just from the top of my head, we see the defamation campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, the coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Trump's election and the subsequent erosion of American democracy, the continuous propping up of far-right extremists in Europe and the election of a fascist lunatic in Brazil that caused record-breaking COVID mortality and unprecedented rainforest destruction.