NYT reporters had a top-down directive that tech coverage should be critical
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Some journalists have tried to conjure up "professional standards" that aren't binding, but the fact that they are not binding is why it's not a profession and why those "standards" are just suggestions. Unfortunately, the accumulated cruft of decades of wrongly decided cases grants this pseudo-profession many special rights and no formal duties to counterbalance those.
> it would not be be difficult to get clear evidence of this directive from NYT leadership
Yes, it would be difficult. Do you think the publisher or managing editor is going to admit to it?
A reporter in a position to know is a great source. The news business runs on "a source close to... said" and "a high-placed source said..."
If what the source said seems to contradict other evidence, that's a different matter.
It's legitimate news that some parents do it. It's business news that Apple's trying to make it kid-friendly.
The article doesn't extoll the virtues of giving a smartwatch to your kids. I guess you wanted them to trash the whole idea? They do say in the first paragraph, "The smart watch cost $279, and he worried that its recipient would immediately break or lose it."
At the very least, it's not negative coverage of Apple. Even if you think it neutral coverage (I don't), it's a counter-example to the supposed directive that all tech coverage have a negative tone. And they categorized it as tech news, not business news.
A balanced article would have found some parents who all said, "Hell, no, I'm not buying that for him. He'll lose it inside of a month." There are probably a lot of such parents.
As for "singing praises of that product" -- I think that is totally legitimate. It IS a product that does a lot of stuff and some people might like it for that. Do you expect them to invent some faults with it?
I'd also expect a real journalist to get some numbers on their sales, not just find one user who likes it.
(On the other hand, Walt Mossberg would have tried it for a week and given it a grade, idk what.)
This question can be easily answered with a search for NYTimes and green energy in tech or when Elon initially helped Ukraine using Starlink or any of the multitude of articles on advances in robotics or how new advances in computing help solve problems in healthcare.
How much proof would you be able to find for that? Do you insist an owner speak on the record? "Photographs or it didn't happen"?
So you ask for evidence, and attempt to correlate it.
For the former, some shop owner has to risk his life testifying, or the cops have to have recordings. A newspaper does not and cannot hold to this standard.
That can mean not making judgement based on things which are generally true in cases where it can damage another's reputation or result in the internet mob descending on them.
I wish this exact same method of sourcing wasn't the basis for 95% of journalism these days.
Or maybe we just run every NYT tech story for the past 24 months through a sentiment analysis
That said, Meta isn't the only tech company. Twitter, for example, a place journalists love for the direct-to-consumer style reporting.
"Critical" in the pop sense (making a worthiness judgement) is not altogether avoidable, but it should be marginal in journalism. This is what Opinion is for.
What Yglesias & Piper are saying, in effect, is that the NYT made a top-down directive that tech coverage should be negatively-slanted Opinion.
The absurdity of the NYT crying over big tech for practices the NYT uses all the time ( dark patterns, user tracking, algorithmic curation, etc. ) should not go unnoticed.
> Almost never curious about technology or in awe of progress and potential.
Why does it need to be in awe? that seems like an extreme in an unproductive direction.
> it’s that they’re being selectively critical to propagate their own interests.
where in the thread is the support for this?
Statements are, in the most fundamental sense, either write or wrong. Whether they’re insensitive, irrelevant or hypocritical are entirely orthogonal concepts. People tend to focus on the latter when listening to people speak, and often disregard the for former.
There’s a major difference between banning awe and making it mandatory. The claim is that they did the former, yet you imply the latter.
> where in the thread is the support for this?
The bleeding obvious point in all of this is that tech and news organizations have been competing for the same eyeballs for years now.
Nobody ever claimed they were doing it "to propagate their own interests." The original tweets say this: "Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair."
Ok, define "unfair." Yeah, having all your problems pointed out is "unfair," but that's exactly what journalism is about? Speaking truth to power.
There are plenty of outlets whose only coverage of tech is critical. This sounds like the NYT wasn't interested in articles fawning over tech, which happens all the time and are basically just advertisements.
OK, here you go:
the New York Times
/ðə ˌnjuː jɔːk ˈtaɪmz/
/ðə ˌnuː jɔːrk ˈtaɪmz/
The paper is published each morning in New York and can also be bought all round the world. There is also a large Sunday issue.
annoyingly insensitive or slow to understand
So?
In a republic we need checks and balances. I want all the power centers in the country at each others' throats. I want bankers being critical of oil men. And oil men being critical of big tech. And big tech being critical of politicians. And politicians being critical of judges. And judges being critical of the cops. And cops being critical of the press. And the press being deeply critical of everything. And on and on and on.
NYTimes being critical of big tech is good. We need more of that sniping in all directions. That's what keeps us safe.
The only time we need to worry, is whenever they all speak with one voice. When that happens, I can guarantee we're getting screwed somehow.
Let big tech and the press go at each other, that's only a win for every regular American. In fact if the press is not doing that, then they aren't doing their job as the fourth estate.
What you should want is journalists to be thorough in their fact checking and open about their editorial line and where their interest lies.
What’s annoying me here is that it’s both top-down and covert.
It is highly biased and inflammatory and actually encourages people to be more tribal rather than try to come together and compromise despite their differences. I'm ok with not agreeing with the journalism industry here. I think they had it right 20 years ago.
> from an editorial integrity perspective there's a big difference between 'it's good to write hard-hitting exposes' and 'it's good to have a top-down editorial directive about the tenor of coverage'.
https://www.nytimes.com/section/travel
If you take a look, its not doing investigations. Its just talking about cool places. Tech used to just be talking about cool gadgets.
I believe them when they say it was "top down" but also it was self-evident that this would happen if tech companies went to a small part of the economy to the biggest in the world.
You can talk about the rivalries between NYTimes and FB/Twitter - but ultimately it just seems like they decided to treat it like a serious matter which was predictable/good. If overnight the airline and hotel companies became the most powerful in the world, then I think the travel section would be more critical and it would have nothing to do with NYT trying to get revenge.
Nobody claimed this was happening. Just because the NYT says "we're only doing investigative pieces on tech," doesn't mean that they start fabricating lies. It just means they don't do fluff pieces. This is the preferred approach - for example, I don't want coverage of the cuddly PR that the oil industry puts out, I want investigative pieces that uncover malfeasance.
It's clear to me from the context that the Piper & Yglesias are not talking about this - they're saying there was top-down pressure on journalists to be critical in the popular sense of tone or judgement: ie. negative, carping. That's entirely different. The NYT claims to uphold the traditional news media distinction between reportage and opinion. Directives of the type Yglesias & Piper claim would clearly violate that distinction.
I wish more journalists would be critical, especially where it counts (e.g. interviewing politicians). But for a top-down directive to be negative, regardless of the truth, no - that's unacceptable.
In fact, I'd argue that even before any such "directive" was made, the bias in high-profile papers was already predominantly anti-tech, except in rare circumstances where praising a technology sector or tech company served the overarching political narrative of the moment (e.g., then-nascent social media was a good thing when Obama leveraged it to success; and a toxin when later less palatable politicians did the same).
This is not limited to the New York Times. Even tech-oriented journalistic venues such as The Verge have a decidedly snarky and grim view of many technologies. And they are effective at steering discourse, even among notionally technology-savvy people. Consider, for example, how antagonistic coverage of autonomous transportation by major media outlets has yielded widespread pessimism and doubt. Presently, you have non-trivial numbers of otherwise intelligent technology-forward journalism consumers convinced that autonomy is an unsolvable problem.
I don't think people got the impression that it is unsolvable, but hopefully people understand that it is difficult, and far from solved at the moment. That's not the feeling you'd get if you just blindly accepted tech companies' press releases.
Of course, major media outlets like NYT telling reporters to bend stories away from the reporter's own experience, and slant them towards an editorial position, is disturbing at the very least.
The only thing unfortunate about the coverage is that the media was entirely complicit and exercised no skepticism or pushback against these seemingly impossible time tables for deliveries of such a clearly complicated and as yet unsolved problem. They just blindly regurgitated the tech industry marketing pr around it. Has any single car company ever demonstrated a car that can drive while it’s pouring rain out?
Critical doesn't mean bad, it means taking off the rose-colored and not taking "we're changing the world!" narratives at face value.
As opposed to what? Publishing tech companies' press releases verbatim? Advertisements for apps?
Journalism exists to speak truth to power - you say "anti-tech" but the reality is that tech companies have been trying to convince us for years that what they're doing is some exercise in advancing humanity, "disrupting" industries (read: breaking laws) and "connecting the world" (read: undermining democracy, manipulating psychological triggers for addiction). It's a good thing that journalists have at least managed to remain critical - I would prefer to shine a light on billionaire VCs and the companies they're funding rather than doting coverage.
Except as part of interviews, they should not be speaking to power at all, they should be explaining things to their readers, so they can make an informed decision. Sometimes that means telling them what the powers that be are planing to do and explain it better than they can, sometimes it means digging through expenses and reveal that power corrupts.
> There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story.
> Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair.
A lot of tech people would like tech coverage puffy, un-skeptical, and positive, but that's totally inappropriate for an industry as influential and frankly difficult to understand (for a layman) as tech. It sounds like now they coverage like they cover the government, which to me is totally appropriate.
"Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair."
Of course that will often lead to critical articles, but it is not precise to paraphrase the actual meaning here IMO.
I think this is probably what happened, but without any better source for this supposed directive, it's impossible to say for sure.
> I think it is broadly good to be on the lookout for hard-hitting exposes and write them where you see them, and broadly bad for your ability to do journalism if you have decided the tenor of your story before reporting it out.
Their CEO's/founders are some of the richest most powerful people in the world right now.
As a Technologist, I do find it unfair that there is a lack of "awe" in terms of the technological progress. But I think on a global societal scale, the non-technological impact of the largest corporations in the world and the richest people in the world is more meaningful than the impact of their technologies.
Put another way, the impact that Uber/AirBbnb has on employment, housing prices, and the health of cities and communities is much bigger than the impact they have on my ability to get a convenient ride to a destination, or to rent lodging on my vacation.
This is just the classic short-term thinking on their end. If that directive becomes widely known, their trustworthiness and status as the arbiter of truth in the public eye will not remain as such for much longer.
I tried to analyze News Corp's annual report to find their R&D spending, the same way I did for six tech companies (https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/should-elon-lay-off-all-...)
Unfortunately, their accounting treatments of software are different, so a direct comparison was quite difficult.
NYT sells ads and also subscriptions; Twitter sells ads and wants to start selling subscriptions. Yeah, NYT pays an editorial staff, but they've been downsizing that pretty relentlessly. The hypothesis is that the two business models will be converging.
It's also laughable to watch them do the daily Meta hit piece, pretending they're the good guys and were never advertiser funded. A gate-keeping, deeply-embedded mono-culture of an institution funded by 5M well-off subscribers, going after a platform that 2.9B people use on a daily basis to connect with each other.
It's not that they are doing it, it's that they do it and pretend they are taking the moral high ground.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/opinion/data-privacy-trac...
The twitter thread doesn't mention any specifics, but I've seen self-driving cars mentioned in other comments as something "unfairly maligned" by major newspapers. So far as I can tell, the self-driving efforts of Tesla, Uber, and other startups have failed to deliver again and again on the promise of having a car that can drive itself without human supervision. Is that not deserving of criticism?
Not to mention how Google in particular has gone to war to not pay newspapers a single dime for reproducing their content. Business is business, and a lot depends on interpersonal relationships. Strong-arming somebody usually doesn't endear them to you.
Skepticism of new technologies has been around forever. The way to earn public trust is to actually deliver on things that make people's lives better.
I wonder though if this was fallout from the media's fawning coverage of Holmes pre-Carreyeou, and Facebook's fall from grace with the Cambridge Analytica story.
Perhaps Vox might be worth something if they did, Kelsey.
But the people who put out those press releases, like tech executives and investors, want it just be rehashed press releases. They actually got their wish for a looong time, and came to feel they were entitled to it.
a few years ago the New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage. Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair. Almost never curious about technology or in awe of progress and potential. This was a very deliberate top-down decision. They decided tech was a major power center that needed scrutiny and needed to be taken down a peg, and this style of coverage became very widespread and prominent in the industry.
From journalist Kelsey Piper on Twitter in response:
People might think Matt is overstating this but I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it.
It's shocking to me that the NYTimes would make such an editorial decision, and it's disappointing to hear this about one of the newspapers that I trust the most. Certainly there are many aspects of the tech sector that ought to be criticized and exposed to the public, but I don't think it's good for truth-seeking to take an editorial stance that tech should generally be covered negatively.
It's potentially easier to understand an individual's biases on a per-article basis than something like the NYT, especially if you follow them and their perspectives over time.
Another fun story is this one, from 10 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/04/cnn-internatio...
They had statements in their articles such as "the majority of the funding for the protests came from Canada" when the actual number was 54% came from Canadian sources. Maybe from a strict mathematical definition that is still a "majority" but it's certainly not what anyone imagines when they hear the word. There were many other biases in the form of omissions or wording like this in their reporting too.
Interestingly, a few years ago I did notice that the NYT and also other newspapers started attacking tech companies relentlessly. At the time it really seemed like there was a coordinated intentional effort. Interesting to see that at least in the case of the NYT that is true.
In any case, I no longer trust the NYT as an accurate source that strives to be unbiased. They clearly have an agenda that is more to the right than I'm comfortable with.
edit: Interestingly I also like the Globe and Mail, and people debate whether that is slightly right or slightly left.
It certainly seems like you wouldn't have any bias when discussing this topic as well.
> They had statements in their articles such as "the majority of the funding for the protests came from Canada" when the actual number was 54% came from Canadian sources. Maybe from a strict mathematical definition that is still a "majority" but it's certainly not what anyone imagines when they hear the word.
What non-strict, non-mathematical definition of the word majority do you propose?
Seek the whole truth, don’t settle for media narratives.
It's like the whitehouse, they SHOULD be skeptical.
I mean, that is for sure true.
The tech has been enormous force against freedom, democracy, human rights and science. If it wasn't for Facebook and Twitter, we wouldn't have had Brexit, Trump wouldn't have been elected, antivaxx wouldn't become mainstream stance and millions more people would have survived the pandemic, oh and women in US would still have access to abortions.
Then there's Google and their mission to end privacy. Then there's Uber and Amazon and their mission to end labor rights. Then there's Airbnb and their mission to make cities unliveable. Then there's ... you get the point.
One of the newspapers that I ... might possibly occasionally distrust a tiny bit less than some other inaccurate, biased and misrepresentation-laden newspapers and media sources.
I frequently notice major errors and misrepresentations in the NYT and elsewhere, so I can only assume that it's a general property - even in stories where I lack the background information or expertise to identify them immediately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/style/roku-city-screensav...
You agree that, by your own lights, editorial stances of newspapers are none of your business, yes? Free speech, yes?
Everyone says 'both sides' but that's not actually the case, is it? Shoe, meet other foot.
[EDIT]: typos removed
This article is trending because -- and I'm generalizing here -- HN skews center-right (what I like to call 'business-right'.) As a result, it has fallen prey to the false narrative of corrupt left-wing mainstream media unfairly maligning good honest billionaires.
confused sounds
EDIT: above, read 'FOR EXAMPLE, ....' when I begin to talk about Twitter. HTH
1: "Free speech is important; the NYT should be allowed to say whatever they want, maybe even including shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, whether using their own platform or Twitter's, and neither the government nor private companies should restrict them";
== A pro-free-speech stance
and
2: "the NYT embarrassed themselves by shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, caused public harm, and damaged the trust and reputation that they held with their audience, and I don't think it was wise of them to do so. I'm disappointed, I hope they fix this and do better next time."
== A the-NYT's-editorial-tone-is-within-my-rights-to-criticize stance
(Note: I'm not meaning to imply that a policy of deliberate non-objectivity-skewed-negative in reporting on tech is equivalent to shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre. Just taking the example to the extreme limit, for clarity.)
The NYT is a center right paper that is generally friendly and welcoming to big money (see greenwashing "advertorials" by Shell and many others), it is not the leftist rag that right wing hacks like Yglesias constantly paint it as.
Don't those same people want the journalistic lens used for government to be investigative?
In 2022, I'd certainly give the same directive. Our industry can and should be held to account, just like any other seat of power. (Because that's what we are now, whether we like it or not.)
I take even greater pride in talking about commenting of comments, _contra_ the guidelines, because a rule that you cannot discuss collective moderation decisions is like forbidding your subordinates from telling you that you have spinach in your teeth.
The spinach abides.