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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

not nytimes. One of the very few places not relying on outrage revenue.

You mean the '1619' project NYT, peddling a fake history of your country by a faux historian as The Truth™, making the author the de-facto editor in chief of what used to be one of the cornerstones of solid journalism? The gray old lady is surely turning in her grave for the imposter which claims her name can not be her.

The '1619 Project' is peddled clearly as an essay project -- quite clearly differentiated from a pure news orientation. The essays were pretty light fare and nothing like overly sympathetic eyewitness reporting from the deck of a slave ship. Perhaps the NYT thinks that the country that unwaveringly holds itself out as the greatest country in the history of history (and the bastion and promise of liberty and democracy, still) can look inward and assess the legacy of slavery and the impacts felt today. One essay touched on whether race had a bearing on why the U.S. never adopted universal healthcare, which at least seems to be a worthwhile question.

American introspection is a notoriously unwelcome commodity by a people much more at home shouting 'USA USA USA!', often as a means to drown out any opposing speech.

There is a big difference between "introspection" and "revisionism". The '1619 Project' clearly falls in the latter category and as such deserves to be denounced for the fraud it is, as does its author. As to it being published as an "essay project", the NYT themselves presented it as [The 1619 project is] a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American Slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.

The gray old lady would never have published this. The current incarnation of the NYT is related to its predecessor in name only.

The stories are in the NY Times Magazine and not the mainline NY Times and are a 'reframing' of historical events viewed in the context of slavery. I get that this is a sensitive topic and often is interpreted as an attempt to make Americans feel guilty about their nation's past. How Germany approaches study of their Nazi history in schools is surprisingly less problematic, apparently because of this history's unequivocal evil.

Still, you suggest that the NY Times is revising history and you call it a 'fraud'. I suppose you wouldn't mind offering some examples of the misstatements made in the 1619 Project stories?

I don’t think the NY Times gets a pass here. Look at some of the reporting they do on tech and startups in particular.

Organisations relying on subscription revenue aren’t under quite the same degree of pressure but engagement is still important to them and journalists that can deliver it will be rewarded.

NYT has its own issues, but you’ll only hear about them from real Americans in Ohio.

NYT only does those kinds of stories when they want to tug at your heartstrings. I always find it amusing whenever there is an article and they have real people standing in these very carefully posed photographs with excessive HDR effects.

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