How prestige outlets get away with copypasta
erikhoel.substack.com
erikhoel.substack.com
> First, there is the practice that undermines any notion their purpose is to inform their readers. Which is that they don’t fucking cite anything.
I generally try and track down primary sources for and "reports" mentioned in material that crosses my desk .. and banner media have gotten increasingly sloppy in the provision of accurate titles, let alone actual footnotes or hotlinks to a source.
"a recent study by german scientists" .. when is recent? Which german scientists? Atleast name the institution and main authors ("a recent study by John Smith et al., from the institute of biochemistry in Berlin..."), but nope, not even that.
What he calls "copypasta", is called print syndication[1] and has always been standard practice in the news. Newspapers purchase the rights to some essay, piece of information or what have you and disseminate it to readers. There's no secrecy or lie by omission here, that's just how it works without anyone hiding it. It's been a thing since the 1800s. It's no different from a TV news channel purchasing the rights to some footage or program and rebroadcasting it. Ever heard of the AP or Reuters? That's what they do.
As to citations, journalistic articles are not scientific pieces. The target audience of the NYT pays them to provide authoritative information, they're not an aggregator for links or a repository of a sort. If that's what you're going for a popular scientific journal is probably what you want, not The Guardian the NYT or some other paper of record whose very purpose is to talk to a general lay audience.
In the Moncrieff case, he says "pawn off the quote as if they just did a bunch of investigative journalistic legwork and tracked it down but really all they did was poach it from another organization".
Nope. A press release is where an organisation puts out a statement _specifically_ for the purposes of reuse. There is no sleight-of-hand or "poaching" involved. If I voluntarily give you £1, you haven't "poached" it from me.
In this case, the press release - as Erik Hoel could have found out, as I did, with 10 seconds' googling - is at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-c... . It has the full Moncrieff quote, verbatim. UCL will have sent it to the Guardian with the expectation that the quote is used.
It is, of course, done because it is far cheaper and easier for a journalist to repackage a press release than to actually do reporting. You are right that it is widespread (which op certainly recognizes, that's their point), and it's not new (not sure if OP recognizes) -- Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) originally brought this practice (and others) to my attention, along with in general thinking about what mainstream journalism actually does and how and why.
(Because it is in large part, as a standard practice, driven by economics, it's possible it has accelrated as newsrooms and reporting budgets have been, literally, decimated. But that's just a guess).
It is still definitely worth commenting on. That what standard journalism actually does, for the most part, even well-respected outlets, is not quite the model most people have of it, is quite a bit lazier and less reliable than the outlets would like you understand them as.
It would really help the fight against fake news.
https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1
The unfortunate nature of modern journalism is its "rebranded" itself (in an Orwellian) sort of way. What used to be rare and shunned is now standard best practices.
If that profession wants to be sloppy, lazy, etc. that's fine. But that's not journalism and the people doing it aren't journalists. It's obvious at this point they're not going to police themselves. It's up to the rest of us to call out what we see, when we see it.
I know for instance in a typical reputable German online news site a journalist on the news desk has to produce 4 to 8 news items per day. Per day! If you are on the investigation teams that is obviously lower but nobody can spend a week on researching a topic anymore.
I certainly understand the nature of that business has changed. However, that doesn't mean they get to be lazy and sloppy and still earn / deserve the title of journalism and journalists, any more than flipping burgers at McDonald's makes me a chef.
The fact that they've knowingly and shamelessly changed the meaning of the word (i.e., they use it well aware of the fact that they don't meet the definition) doesn't make it okay. Repeating a lie doesn't magically turn it into truth.
> Cover, write, and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
When your subject is described by a press release to which you add little more than your byline, you haven't taken that level of care.
The original author, Erik Hoel, is not complaining about the _use_ of press releases, but taking exception to the general lack of attribution and the dishonest way that news outlets incorporate press releases into articles to imply quotations were obtained by reporters.
For a better critique of modern journalism and uncritical regurgitation of press releases and where it leads then Flat Earth News by Nick Davies is great reading.
The level of failure there by the media not copying them goes beyond incompetence, it is clear that there is no interest. None. Not worth a penny. Nothing of interest to the media.
If the article writer wants to play along with the pretend game then sure, the journalists working for the places he lists are just having a little moment of weakness on a path to bettering their practices. No doubt their bosses are staring glumly into their coffee mugs wondering how to get better information out to the patient masses! However the world is going to be a strange place where nothing seems to quite happen the way he expects, if he wants to believe that.
Journalists are creators of new, interesting and original content. That is often somewhat related to things that are factual. But they are not fact distributors.
This is a silly comment. The author just doesn't seem to be aware that "standards" can still be bad and people can legitimately complain about them.
Especially since the "standards" are not some professional legal code or technical protocols that have to be followed, but just common practices.
Doubly so, since, besides some standards being inherently bad, even good standards can go stale over time. For example, newspapers not providing references might have been OK back in the days of print, but it's not in the web era, when a reference via a link to the source is trivial and gives immediate access to it to the reader.
Triply so, since there do exist news outlets that do far better than the "standard": giving actual links, properly attributing, not pulling quotes out of their ass or unrelated interviews, and so on. So it's not "standards" being followed here, it's more like "minimum-effort common practices" being followed. [Heck, all kinds of "dark patterns" are now standard behavior in news outlets too. Doesn't make them ok].
Quadruply so, since "syndication" is not an excuse either. News outlets can (and some do) edit, restructure, and add links or other annotations to syndicated content from news agencies and other sources.
In other words? A typical HN "piss on TFA" comment, promoting bad practices (sorry, standards), and being upvoted for no discernible reason.
I think if you polled a random sample of people you would find most don't actually know this. Or didn't, and don't think it's okay now that they do.
This very forum was started by someone who published an article on it in 2005.
2. copypasta is a cool startup name
- How much does this really matter?
- How quickly could I find a better source?
- When $Source [published the article | made the statement], how authoritative was $Source on the specific facts in question? (The Iowa State Univ. student newspaper is fairly authoritative if the subject is a major building fire on the ISU campus. But on some scientific breakthrough? Maybe, if it's only a biographical fact about an ISU professor who was involved in the research...)
I like reading The Guardian, but I'd generally call them "too fluffy" to cite as a source.
As a semi-regular reader of The Guardian, I mostly regard them as "nice, family-friendly fluff". There are very few angry rants, scantily-clad women, or lurid tales. Their lack of citations & references, sometimes disjointed writing, and generally complete lack of any meta-level perspective (let alone analysis) are pretty clear signals that they have no interest in actually being an authoritative source on any subject whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication
It's a shame Wikinews never really got off the ground, this would at least address the sourcing and linking concerns to some exent.
A related point - The Guardian makes much of the fact that they are funded by a trust fund, arguing that it makes them "independent". I doubt they would make the same argument about other companies or individuals sustained by old wealth.
Obviously that doesn't remove all biases, it doesn't remove all the ways people in the non-profit might still be motivated by agendas either related to wanting to be paid more by the non-profit or to make more money in their other business interests, and it of course doesn't mean they've done the impossible and become a perfect, infallible news organisation.
But it's still a hell of an improvement over the way nearly all other major newspapers are owned.
the answer to this question is well-explained in the post you replied to
It’s a nobody position in 2022, but the Iraq Resolution passed through congress and the senate with a substantial level of bi-partisan support. So really, it was a popular left-wing position at the time.
currently the Democratic party best represents "center" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because their platform better represents most Americans (but not the ones on the right or left) than that of another major parry platform
I think you're also overstating the bi partisan support the Iraq resolution had. Of the Democrats, only 39% representatives and 29 out of 50 senators voted for it. Among the bloc who voted against the Iraq Resolution were politicians like Bernie Sanders, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, Peter DeFazio, et al., who at the time, represented even your definition of "left wing".
If the definition of “left” isn’t “mainstream left wing politics”, and is instead “a small collection of politicians chosen by dfxm12”, then the word may as well not have a meaning.
I'll add that super majority doesn't mean much in terms of "bi partisan support", when a single party (the republicans) nearly had a super majority of the house alone. Even in the senate, the Republicans pretty much all voted the same way while the Democrats split. It's almost as if there was some sub group of politicians for whom this issue was not popular and split from the mainstream, off to one side (plus the regular Americans who did not support the war).
If the definition of “left” isn’t “mainstream left wing politics”
"Left" or "left wing" is by definition not "mainstream".
and is instead “a small collection of politicians chosen by dfxm12”, then the word may as well not have a meaning.
Do please try to post in good faith.
In 2002 the republicans has a 14 seat majority in the house, and no majority in the senate with only 49 seats. The history re-writing going on here is pretty extreme.
maybe, but that doesn't tell you as much as this (particularly since it seeks to obscure the actual numbers):
> Of the Democrats, only 39% representatives and 29 out of 50 senators voted for it. Among the bloc who voted against the Iraq Resolution were politicians like Bernie Sanders, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, Peter DeFazio, et al., who at the time, represented even your definition of "left wing".
as for your assertion that your definition of "left wing" is better: such a bare assertion will not be taken at face value
The graun's reportage is good. Just ignore the editorial.
https://twitter.com/somuchguardian/status/768335723846049792
Does anyone else remember ‘The Sunday Format’ on Radio 4? Was a (audio!) parody of the Guardian’s Sunday paper the Observer.
In the US his holdings are the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record#Etymolog...
By that traditional definition the only paper of record in existence today is the internet itself.
Realistically most outlets feigns independence but demonstrate fealty to particular power centers.
It's obvious how little point there is when you try to "measure" RT on the left wing/right wing scale (theyre pro russia above all) but what applies to them applies equally to all other outlets.
It's particularly galling when the power center is authoritarian/corporatist but wears a progressive mask for sake of fooling the naive.
Would they need more categories, then? Like geo-political orientation and state influence (although the latter would often be close to the press freedom rating)?
This is still too vague even, I think and there are probably complex sub-centres of power (e.g. factions within the democrats) and alliances (e.g. the neocon/democratic party nexus) reflected as well.
All of this gets airbrushed over by the traditional left/right continuum.
It's critically important too, coz it definitely drives both what is reported and how it's selectively presented and is a better predictor than an arbitary left/right designation.
Snowden has also mentioned that he went to Glenn Greenwald, who was working at The Guardian, because he trusted their integrity and he wasn't sure NY Times would work with him or sell him out to the government.
As a former fan of Greenwald, I do think he's gone a bit mad and is now just screaming "I know what I'm talking about, and I know I'm right! Why won't you believe me!!!" instead of presenting the plain facts.
Link to WikiP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_(book)
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/08/the-nixon-gang-s...
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111884157...
The Economist, another prestigious newspaper I am familiar with, this means alignment with the Western neoliberal policies and monetary theory. If it's coming from the Bank of England, ECB or Federal Reserve, it is the truth.
Though I lean the same direction as those two newspapers, it is obvious they don't try very hard to be critical or entertaining alternative viewpoints. It's a big echo chamber, and all these newspapers, left and right, are so close to the centre they are basically spreading the same message.
They're a propaganda tool not for creating extremism, but for creating conformism.
Also, away from the topic of credibility, what about coverage of relevant stories? If you're interested in video game news, are you going to wait for the NYT to finally cover your interests as a reader? No outlet can provide adequate coverage for your interests, so you are always going to be missing out on a story that you care about. Thus news products designed to be your one-and-everything are doomed to fail vs modern aggregators that allow you to have inclusionary and exclusionary lists of sources and topics.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2022/may/17/evacua...
This for example, from the title, the word "evacuation" and even the headline image are a clear example of something that a "prestige" newspapar such as The Guardian should never do.
But then he makes this conclusion which he admits he can't prove:
> And while it’s pretty much impossible to figure out what percent of articles these criticisms don’t apply to (perhaps by tracking, say, the pieces of investigative journalism that these outlets break), there is simply no way that the copypasta approach isn’t the majority, perhaps 95% or more in some places.
Most of the article before this, which is called "How prestige outlets..." has been about these outlets he describes as "the supposedly most prestigious organizations". Well, just The Guardian, but that's how he's describing them.
But I don't think he's actually claiming that 95% or more of their output is this copypasta stuff. Because right before this he's introduced a bunch of outlets that nobody would argue are prestigious, that wrote about a paper he published. IFSL, Gizmodo, iHeartRadio. He wouldn't argue that they're in the same category that he places The Guardian. He's probably right that some of the ones he named are basically all copypasta!
But it feels like there's an unearned conclusion that this is widespread in the outlets he describes as prestigious, when actually he's just given 2 examples a year apart. If he hadn't named any of those other outlets, that nobody would argue are prestigious, he never could have justified extrapolating like that from what he's presented.
Its fair enough if he doesn't like their reporting, but pretending that they are deliberately and dishonestly subverting standards that he alone has invented is nonsense.
The fact that most journalism is aggregating snippets from press releases and recombining them into a particular favored narrative stance is surprising to many and takes away from the imagined value that journalists add.
> That quote by Moncrieff is from an earlier source, which they use without crediting, essentially making it look like they did investigative legwork for the piece when really they just copy/pasted from somewhere else. Here’s the exact same quote, published the day before at a much smaller outlet called Eureka Alerts.
How does he know that they aren't copying it from the press release?
I'm also not sure that disallowing comments is very informative. Small substacks can have intelligent curated comment sections. The comments sections of big newspapers are, as a Daily Telegraph journalist admitted to me, "a painting from Hieronymous Bosch".
By telling or repeating a story, you get to become the reporter in the conversation. You get to become the voice of authority by channeling it. It doesn't matter what it actually says, just the effect it has. The Guardian could be a random number generator, and the game among readers would still be to compete to see who can repeat it more faithfully. I would argue the people who edit the Guardian now believe, "we're the newspaper, the truth is whatever we say it is." Most of the facts Guardian prints can be demonstrated as concretely true, but where they and other media become unreliable is that the conflict they use as a vehicle for their story is often fabricated from ideology. "Dog bites man," becomes, "Oppressor gets his just due, and here's why that's ok."
To someone whose understanding of the world (and even theory of mind and self) operates as just a kind of axis of language and power, this is consistent. What does it matter if something is true if it doesn't alter the balance of power in a relationship or in society? What does it matter if something is false if it does alter that balance in the subjects? The whole definition of "mattering," is whether it has an effect on that balance, and truth and falsehood are immaterial - insomuch as there are no legal blowback consequences. Meanwhile, outright fabricating and lying is not only taking one for the team, it's a necessary signal of your own status and alignment that you can lie in support of the party line, and the impunity you have shows your status to others. A certain economist with a newspaper column comes to mind as the exemplar of this view in practice.
I sympathize with the author, but I think his expectation that The Guardian and other news media are even intended to be faithful representations of reality is the source of his disappointment. He's just not their audience.
I’ve noticed that a lot of Substack authors have embraced these same practices but to a less subtle extreme. In fact, a lot of the Substacks I’ve tried to get into read like they’re just reporting on what actual journalists are reporting on. One particularly popular Substack among engineers frequently just parrots good reporting from The Information (a paywalled source), even including large excerpts from The Information in between summaries of the rest of the article. It feels like I’m just reading The Information but through someone else’s eyes, as shared on their Substack in pursuit of more subscribers.
Generally speaking, I find that I get the best information when I stop reading summary articles and move up a step to the information source. When I read an article summarizing a scientific paper and then read the actual paper, there is almost always some major discrepancy between what the paper authors claim and what the journalist claims.
No mention that a change has been made though.
What a funny bit, of course the Guardian wants to nudge you into staying on their website. Most people will just accept whatever they say as fact regardless, who needs citations.
Gonna be real fun for Grad students studying this time period in 100 years.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having high expectations like this, but I do think he’s being too harsh on them specifically for what is essentially standard quoting practice
It's a major complaint that many banner outlets verbatim echo PR handouts w/out doing any follw up fact checking or much in the way of actual rewriting.
It would also make it much more difficult to create fake news.