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Comment by ameminator | Hacker News Reader

Ironic that this is from the New York Times, which has (in)famously had several years of poor or biased reporting.

In 2005 I was in a college dorm that provided the NYT in a common area. I picked up one and the first article I read was a column about Hurricane Katrina. The author interviewed a history professor who bewailed the failings of the president and the United States and how this was "worse than Antitem". In other words the esteemed Grey Lady interviewed an "expert" whose expertise has nothing to do with meteorology or disaster response to get a "Bush sucks, haha!" hot-take. Even as a know-nothing teenager (of strong anti-war sentiment at the time), I recognized that "area man says natural disaster proves Bush sucks" is just pablum. I put the paper down, and I have never picked up an NYT since.

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 used to live in New York State and, back before the Internet got very powerful, got frequent offers from the NYT to subscribe.

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.

You used the term "column," which insinuates an opinion piece. All news publications have purposely-biased opinion pieces, and in the case of The NY Times, they will be limited to the clearly-marked op-ed section. And they also offer countering views, in many cases. Very different from news.

> the first article I read was a column

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?

> worse than Antitem

Does that refer to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antietam? I can't even put together the comparison.

This story is about shady companies funded by government propaganda agencies around the world, and which cease operating as soon as you start investigating them.

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.

Sorry I don't care how long they have been in business. Generally, "You are as good as your last performance."

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.

No. The story is about disinformation. Whether someone does it for money or ideology doesn’t matter, lies are lies and the NYTimes is not an innocent party here.

They were a major driver of the Iraq WMD theory and thus the Iraq War if you want one solid example.

That is a "one solid example", it is so. It was a bad practice of them. Does there have ANY others? This one example gets pulled out every time the NYT is mention and never have I seen other, not any.

> fires journalists who are caught lying in a story

No good misinformation or politically biased piece includes lies.

They still employ Cade Metz, who doxxed Scott Alexander.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...

> They still employ Cade Metz, who doxxed Scott Alexander.

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.

> because doxxing does not exist outside of some particular very online spaces

Journalism very much has the idea of protecting their sources. The NYT, for whatever reason, didn't feel like protecting Scott.

> 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.

> He wasn't a source, he was a subject.

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.

> Journalists do understand that someone may want to keep their identity secret, which is what doxxing is.

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.

> 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.

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.

Doxxing isn't a thing anyone outside this website cares about. I agree, that article was a shitty hit piece, but it's not disinformation.

NYT still employs Sarah Jeong who tweeted "Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45052534

Curious, Are there earlier examples of negligence, prior to the episode of "weapons of mass destruction"?

When did the decline really start?

cf Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent_(film))

Does he cite specific examples? I dont reject the thesis but im curious about the evidence.

Yes, for about 400 pages.

This book was life changing for me. I also watched '12 Angry Men' around the same time as I read the book. I sometimes joke that these should be required reading or watching before someone is allowed to post an internet comment.

The answer probably depends on the specific geographic and political distance of the commenter related to the New York Times.

Here's one critique in the form of a song: https://slate.com/culture/2018/02/i-am-the-very-model-of-a-n...

I recently watched “How to Become a Tyrant” and they mentioned a NYT reporter in the 30s, the Moscow bureau chief IIRC, who was more or less bribed by Stalin* to write articles denying people were starving in Ukraine. He even won a pulitzer for the “reporting”. I don’t know that it was the start of “the decline” of the New York Times (and full disclosure: I subscribe) but the WMDs weren’t the first egregiously wrong reporting.

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

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

They recently did a movie on this: Mr. Jones. It was really good. You can probably catch it on Netflix or something similar.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6828390/

There have been some noticeable stinkers that I have been aware of for maybe 20 years, up to and including the Jason Blair affair. However, I have seen a steep decline in quality since 2010-2012.

My opinion of the NYT plummeted when they doxxed Scott Alexander

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...

A personal favorite example of mine was the article “Recycling is Garbage” from 1996 that is chock full of misinformation and continues to do damage today. I wouldn’t be surprised if the article was sponsored by the plastics industry. (I’m speculating with zero proof, it just feels and smells like paid propaganda and corporate interests.) The online version has had orders of magnitude more readers than the excellent rebuttal at the time by the Environmental Defense Fund, but the NYT gave the author another platform to reprise his anti-environmental rants again six years ago, where he repeated the untrue talking points. There are a lot of real problems with recycling, some of them stemming from lack of buy-in and participation, and these NYT articles are fueling the anti-recycling sentiment with myths, undermining the will to improve the situation. The article’s pushing and glorifying of throwing things away is even doing damage to the idea that we should reduce consumption of single use plastic packaging, which is far more important than trying to recycle plastic.

Even credible news sources are bound to have an implicit bias, to a certain degree. There is, however, quite a few other types of media sources ranging from media bias, to fake news, misinformation, disinformation etc. I recommend reading the Cornell university library guides to learn about how to distinguish one from the other.

As a useful rule of thumb, the New York Times prints retractions.

If your news source never prints retractions, it's not to be trusted.

> As a useful rule of thumb, the New York Times prints retractions.

And, yet, a lot of the US public opinion is shaped by Fox News...

Do other tv/cable news networks print retractions? I can't remember any, but maybe they have a specific webpage you have to go to in order to see it? I doubt any of the non-news programs on those networks do, and those comprise the majority of the programming. So maybe it's just hard to find for the little bit of actual news.

> I doubt any of the non-news programs on those networks do

My impression is they only have opinion programs and no news reporting whatsoever.

I'm not sure since I get most of my news online. I thought they had like 2 hours per day that were non-opinion news.

The HN crowd is not the typical Fox News audience.

I don't just mean Fox. MSNBC, etc seems to mostly be talk shows too.

In this very thread they are regurgitating talking points from fox punditry.

This is exactly correct.

Stories online, when altered, are labeled as such with corrections.

Several outlets have been caught scrubbing past headlines that were proven false, but that's more an indictment on them.

"Stories online, when altered, are labeled as such with corrections."

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.

Rarely. Most news isn't "breaking" on TV, even if they do they refer to the online story. So that's where stories are corrected, because that's the official record.

Do they actually refer people to the online story, or do you just mean they are using that story to regurgitate to the viewers? I highly doubt most of the viewers are recieving the corrections if they're only given online.

Yeah, when there is breaking news it seems there's a ton of speculation and bad information given.

As a rule of thumb, no reporting is to be trusted. The only way out is to read widely and read well and come up with your own opinions.

Yes and:

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.

NYT prints some retractions and corrections and also changes stories they have published without any notice.

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...

Version control on digital news stories would be nice to have, but I can't disagree with their thinking on the topic. Putting the most up-to-date version forward is standard digital publishing protocol.

Clearly "standard digital publishing protocol" isn't something that can be trusted.

Generally, I wouldn't rely on any one method - critical thinking and critical reading are skills that each person must develop. It seems a little trite to just recommend the one Cornell guide, even if it is of high quality...

Can you recommend any methods to improve critical thinking and critical reading skills? This seems an era where they are more important than ever.

This is an excellent question, and one I hope others answer. Here's my personal take.

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.

Generally, there is no "all in one" way of doing it. Generally active reading and checking the facts and primary sources will get you far. I don't think there is any substitute for reading lots and from diverse sources.

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

The NYT reporting seems pretty reliable to me. Could you give a few notable examples at least to support that claim?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-cov...

Fair but that also stemmed from their own reporting that their own coverage was flawed...

It makes me trust them more since they're auditing themselves like that. Shows high journalistic integrity.

What do you mean? They did not uncover themselves that the WMDs did not exist.

They shared it with their audience. The standard isn’t always be right, it’s have integrity.

Everybody shared it with 'the audience'. The WMDs were obviously not there, were they? Hard to keep it up.

Everyone in the government was saying they were there. Not reporting that would be negligent. Should NYT have been faster at reporting the truth? Of course. But when the president says there are weapons of mass destruction you report as much.

The NYT retracted the story, which is pretty much all I can hope for in a situation like this.

One way outlets like the NYT slant their credibility into the ground is by always giving Democrats the benefit of any doubt, and never giving it to anyone else. Everything that could be good for Democrats is amplified to 11, everything that could be a bad look for everyone else is amplified to 11 in the other direction. They appear to be a lot more reliable than they actually are.

Your comment is neither an example nor evidence.

Source?

For what it's worth, the NYT was also behind the podcast series Caliphate, which I wept to on hearing the first hand accounts of murder and violation perpetrated in the name of ISIS. It came to light later that their primary source they relied on for the story fabricated the whole thing. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55375277

I believe the NYT also published their own failing there, widely, on its own front page.

Correct. The bar isn't "we never make mistakes". They are human, everybody messes up. The question is, what happens when you do? Issuing a correction is the best standard we can hope for.

Yes, but the author was not fired. Until journalist that fuck up this bad get fired, it's honestly hard to blame people for not taking these publications seriously.

In 2020, Callimachi was reassigned at the Times and will no longer cover terrorism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/caliphate-rev...

Bias is in every source (although I'd give Reuters an AP a general pass there). Being biased is not a "bad thing" just because it doesn't fit your world view, it expands horizons if you allow other views into your narrow view.

And poor? Laughable. NYTimes is a high quality source on-par with WSJ.

Bias is in every news source, but let's not pretend it's a "good thing" - I would rather everyone be less biased and more open in their reporting. I still do occasionally read the New York Times, but I find that reporting from Axios and local news sources is usually superior, because they have less of this bias and seem to stick to clear, direct facts.

"Nobody is perfect" is always true, but also a common intellectual defence mechanism that is only applied to your ingroup.

When the outgroup shows their imperfections, a whole other set of cognitive tools are used.

If your side "owns a mistake" and the other side doubles down on a lie, that's not the same thing. You can't both sides that.

I read both for a while and consider WSJ more reliable and far far less sensationalist than NYT (as of maybe 5 years ago).

I still read both and consider them two of the most reliable sources of domestic journalism. Their non editorial sections are of very similar qualities. Their editorial sections are both political hackery.

Agreed. I believe the lines between editorial and news has become (purposefully?) blurred, or at least many no longer recognize the difference. It can be interesting to see how headlines and emphasis on news stories in both publications can differ for the same topic, but they both follow a predictable standard. As you suggest, the editorial boards are echo chambers, but they both give time to opposing views there, as well.

I had subscribed to by NY Times and WSJ. I felt that reading high quality articles that has a little bit of left and right bias would be the way to go. I tend to avoid editorials, as those are often sensationalized.

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)

Ah, the pot getting jealous of losing influence and calling the kettle black.

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!

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