New collars are already on their way:
https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/145289814620013363...
https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/145289814620013363...
It's a news story about a health patient, yet Naomi seems to expect NPR to act as Martha's personal insurer and care advocate. Would it have been better if NPR didn't publish it at all? Then Naomi would never have been given the chance to virtue signal for exposure. Lose-lose.
In this case plenty of other news outlets have covered her in their articles about Martha: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community
As far as "tech/white/male", you really only have to read the comments people post in any thread about her on Reddit to figure that one out. I can't even imagine what her inbox must look like.
> She has only a handful of collars left. "I really am desperate," she says. "That's the most scary thing in my life right now — is not finding anybody that can make those collars."
Naomi does a lot of interesting work and is snubbed quite a lot. She made it quite public that this was happening and yet NPR still snubbed her.
From the point of view of M.L., she is maybe one of several that promised to help but could do it (not a fault of Naomi Wu of course, but of those that first contacted her for help and then left things unfinished), so it doesn't surprise me that she was not mentioned.
> bringing a Twitter personality into a story that's not really about her?
Wu was already involved in this. Per her comments she'd already sent packages of collars to be tested and altered / fitted.
Hell, mentioning that there was a volunteer / grassroots effort to produce new collars would have been more honest than the article going "collars where?"
It's NPR. There's no excuse for poor sensationalist journalism even from them.
Is NPR obligated to mention all failed attempts to acquire new collars? It seems unlikely they excluded this information because of Naomi's gender or race.
It's great that Naomi donated successfully before and has tried to again, but as you noted she's received plenty of positive media from her donations already.
[1] - "I just could not get anyone to visit her and do final fitting and troubleshooting on the collars I had manufactured for her." - https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/145289590785527398...
It's amazing to me how people will bend their principles because they admire someone.
Dale Dougherty later posted an open letter in apology.
No. She expects a reputable news outlet to fact check their own story, especially since they covered most of the same information the Wired article did 4 years ago - which, naturally, mentioned Wu.
There could be all sorts of reasons NPR didn't mention Naomi. How did Martha get the collars before Naomi's donation? How many years of collar donations/purchases is NPR obligated to mention in their article? Is there anyone else outraged they didn't get mentioned for providing collars years ago?
No I think Wu just expects [0] NPR not to ignore relevant facts to construct a misleading narrative.
> Then Naomi would never have been given the chance to virtue signal for exposure.
Naomi Wu is hardly lacking in exposure opportunities or the ability to exploit them, so even if the basic false dichotomy you propose wasn't false, it wouldn't really be lose-lose for NPR and Wu. (NPR and Martha maybe, since the exposure, even starting in the misleading form NPR presented it, does probably make it more likely that her issue gets resolved, but that's where the false dilemma comes into play, since the story didn't actually have to be misleading.)
[0] in the normative, but emphatically not the predictive, sense of the word.
So yeah, she has a humongous chip on her shoulder, and maybe she gets carried away with that anger, but the chip on her shoulder comes from some legitimate grievances.
Regardless, she has a lot of respect in the maker space because she's one of the few people who says "oh yeah, we can jump in and come up with help for this medical/prosthetic problem" and doesn't half-ass it. She's very specific about that - this is one of those cases where Minimum Viable Product is unacceptable, these items need to stand up to real life and 24/7 contact with human skin.
Even more, Martha herself commented on her video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VKZTmTP7oY&lc=UgyYG8WsY8fN4...
I think it's fair to discuss NPR as propaganda here.
> And of course- when someone does something, but they aren't the right kind of someone let's pretend her name did not come up at the top of the search when you fact-checked this story right @NPRHealth ? Just say you want a straight white American tech bro to do it.
NPR is rife with bias, if you know how to look for it. I recommend reading Propaganda by Ed Bernays & then thinking about why the people who make huge donations to NPR make those donations (IMO, it's because NPR largely exists to reinforce the existing social structure).
At which point you're going to have a serious confirmation bias problem. How would I know that I know how to look for it? Easy: I found some.
"If only you'd open your eyes and look for the truth!" is kinda how that comes across to me.
Can you expound on this? I have come to a similar observation, but would be interested in hearing what specifically they’re reinforcing.
ETA (since I'm rate-limited...):
> Do tell us more about NPR's liberal bias.
Sure. By telling these kind of fables about how global capitalism is actually good for everybody, they're trying to prevent growing class consciousness that would eventually force fundamental, revolutionary change to how we allocate resources.
Oh wait, you thought I was to the right of NPR? Sorry, no, that probability distribution is barely distinguishable from Nazism at this point. Also no one to the right of NPR would ever use the term "third-way" in criticism of it.
YES. I love NPR as a news source, because of the oddball stories they cover. But they are solidly, solidly in the 'bootlicker' camp when it comes to how great and exceptional international businesses are at solving humanities problems.
And yeah, it sounds like NPR should have picked up on the maker community here. Articles which precede this one by years bring up Naomi Wu. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community
Given this, I think it's fair for Ms. Wu to have a hot take on this.
Highly recommend reading Propaganda by Ed Bernays. I saw it recommended on HN years ago, so I bought and read it -- it really helped make me a smarter consumer of news.
How do you fact check whether someone can find something?
Their inability to find something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means that she personally can’t find them.
And the collars didn’t necessarily work either. They were shipped, not installed/tested. So the problem doesn’t seem to have been solved.
Looking at the top google hits and previous stories on your subject[0] seems like the bare minimum fact checking to do?
> And the collars didn’t necessarily work either. They were shipped, not installed/tested. So the problem doesn’t seem to have been solved.
Seems pretty logical that they'd have to be refined given they're made and shipped from china with no access to the iron lung or ability to travel back and forth personally. That's something the NPR journo could actually have assisted with.
[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community
That's not the job of the journalist! Are we to expect our journalists to solve the problems they report on? Should every story also turn the journalist into an advocate - be it legal, healthcare, employment, etc. - that works on their behalf?
I think there's room for critique here though the "assumption of bad faith" runs rampant in this discourse already. Yet critiquing the reporter for not acting as their personal local news network "Problem Solvers" segment isn't the real issue here.
Are you sure about that? Look at the pinned comment on the original video from 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VKZTmTP7oY
Then the accusation that this effort was omitted because she wasn't a white tech bro is out of left field and frankly, very unlikely. NPR regularly goes out of its way to provide viewpoints and credit well outside the "white tech bro" sphere.
Seeing as this is a 2021 story, either Martha did not receive the parts, the parts needed a revision or they did no research.
If the parts needed a revision, you would expect the story to say something like 'an entrepreneur has been working with Martha to create replacements but they are having trouble with final fitment.'
The article: She has only a handful of collars left. "I really am desperate," she says. "That's the most scary thing in my life right now — is not finding anybody that can make those collars."
Makes it sound like noone has tried to do anything. So that leaves someone who has tried to help with the feeling that they are being ignored either by malicious or incompetent.
There is no timeline or context given here. So I don't know who this person is, and what direct interaction they have or haven't had with person in that article. All I can see is that this is a YouTuber, with ~2k Twitter followers and the tagline "It's all about merit until merit has tits". Who is "working on it", but hasn't shipped the parts yet. And who feels that NPR (who probably doesn't know she exists) deliberately cut her out because she's "not a straight white American tech bro".
To me, that thread is Twitter in a nutshell. Off the charts narcism and self-promotion, revolving around race/gender-charged drama. There may be some information that I'm missing here. But if you're starting from a place of NPR being too right-wing or bigoted, then I've seen enough.
A 2017 Wired article https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community states that Naomi was spearheading the effort then.
I deleted my account after I simply asked a question one day in a thread with a prominent startup founder who happened to be a Black woman. Someone else on her thread had stated that she was worried about encouraging her daughter to learn to code because she felt that nobody would hire her "due to the extreme racism that was obviously prevalent in tech." I simply stated that my company was trying hard to hire folks like her daughter, and asked what we could do to make people like her feel welcome and understand that it wasn't a problem at our company. Then the veil was pulled back on the performance. The questioner didn't really have a question. She simply posed it as a performance, and then I was mobbed with statements telling me that I needed to "Listen and let Black women speak." These narcissists aren't interested in solutions, only in gaining status in their silly, secular imitation of evangelical fundamentalist churches. Replace "Satan" with "toxic whiteness" and you have Dana Carvey's church lady on SNL in the 90's.
I think you read this wrong. She's following ~2k people, but she has 185.7K followers (and 1.46M subscribers on Youtube).
> There may be some information that I'm missing here.
Other posters have provided a bit more information that might change your interpretation of why Naomi tweeted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29015822
> But if you're starting from a place of NPR being too right-wing or bigoted, then I've seen enough.
I agree with your assessment of Twitter being mostly self-promotion and race/gender-charged drama, but no-one said "right-wing." I don't think an accusation that any media outlet cuts out facts that don't fit their narrative can be dismissed out of hand these days, unfortunately. I don't have a strong opinion about NPR, but I can see how Naomi _might_ not fit in the narratives they try to push. But I acknowledge that I'm being a bit intellectually dishonest, I'm not bringing any evidence to bear here either.
Yes, I thought "typical Twitter" when I saw it as well. Small bits of interesting information, with a huge dose of identity politics mixed in.