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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

And the first tweet here: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1588240007000911873 (I think it’s generally right even though I don’t really like the author)

I think the general thrust seems pretty reasonable: saying ‘we should cover all tech with an investigative lens’ isn’t actually a neutral policy because if you’re a newspaper then you already want to find good investigative stories anyway. Instead it’s saying that the only stories that go through must be critical or uncovering various hidden harms or issues. It doesn’t seem like a good way to learn what is true.

(Nitter links)

https://nitter.fly.dev/i/status/1588231892792328192

https://nitter.fly.dev/balajis/status/1588240007000911873

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> it’s saying that the only stories that go through must be critical or uncovering various hidden harms or issues

Speaking outside my circle of competence. But I don't think it's that direct. When a topic is put under an investigative lens, it's assigned investigative journalists.

These aren't folks who write fluff. They don't resonate with baseless optimism. They're men and women of hard facts. So they sniff, sniff, sniff until they find something juicy. Then they write about it. Everything they're writing is true. (It may also flatter. Underdog stories, for example.) But when the beer fridge was swapped with a gin cabinet, the journalism got noticeably darker. No conscious filtering needed.

Now that I think about it, this may also be happening in political journalism. Positive stories are dismissed as shilling. Writers write to be read. So they stop writing those, and instead write darkly.

I think we have different views about what ‘investigative journalism’ is and different expectations for the competencies of journalists. I also assign a lot of importance to editorial decisions: they are a lot of the selection that leads to selection bias in everyone else. Perhaps you assign less importance to those decisions.

An example totally unrelated to tech is that if some politician spaffs tens of millions of dollars up the wall or tens of billions of dollars, the stories can look roughly the same to readers despite 1000x the money being spaffed in one than they other. I think it leads to people assigning badly wrong importances to the different spaffings.

(I don’t want to suggest that journalists are incompetent, just that they aren’t super competent in the way you describe and that motivated reasoning is pretty easy for any human to do, eg a lot of comments on this submission feel a lot like they’re motivated by disliking big tech and not really thinking about journalism at all).

If you’ve ever had first hand experience with what investigative journalists write, it’s not all true. The better ones do a good job, in the worse ones their editorial opinion shines through.

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