As journalists go, Propublica (and their data science team) is the gold standard for verifying such things before going to press.
This review is also very helpful for understanding the specific mistakes, and perhaps even bad faith misrepresentations, that their source made: https://fallows.substack.com/p/on-that-propublica-chinese-la...
In one particularly disturbing case, their translator stopped midway through a sentence, omitting the remaining half of the sentence which completely changes the interpretation.
ProPublica's editor note on the criticism said they asked for independent translations, but contains no support for their article except that the translators found their translation "plausible". The lack of detail is to me pretty telling. https://www.propublica.org/article/editors-note-a-review-of-...
Both the Semafor article and the Fallows Substack report on many Chinese translators who found the translations in the ProPublica article incorrect and misleading. The ProPublica editor note engages with none of their criticisms directly, and only states that they found some translators who all declared their translation "plausible", and that some of the translators agreed with or considered acceptable some particular points of their translation. They make some corrections and acknowledgments of ambiguity and missing context, but without any meaningful discussion of the impact of these changes on the article.
Regarding that, I think it is revealing that the biggest revisions in the story, including a full new paragraph pointing out translation ambiguity with a link to the editor's note, are concentrated in the first few paragraphs of the story, where the "bombshell revelations" are typically broken.
Fallows followed up with questions reflecting the inadequacies of ProPublica's response here: https://fallows.substack.com/p/more-questions-for-propublica
Fallows notes that some of the most problematic aspects of the story went entirely unanswered:
> Why did you dismiss the issue of virtually identical language found in a Communist Party document many months before the alleged “lab leak”? Did this issue come up in the editing process? How was it resolved?
All this said, I agree with Fallows that ProPublica is still very much worth reading, and that it's just unfortunate they won't frankly acknowledge some shortcomings in reporting on a topic that Western sources are inevitably going to mess up. Even in this story, ProPublica deserves credit for transparency, disclosing its original sources in a way that allowed outside critics to quickly and easily reassess them.
[EDIT: if you're only referring to the 2021 "CEOs living off loans against unrealized CG", see my comments below. Any other set of articles? I've seeen some quality work from ProPublica on e.g. the US justice system. You'll never see that from Forbes, or Cato, or Heritage Foundation, or AEI.]
So you can always publish "gold standard" journalism and yet still present a distorted version of the truth.
"You're not publishing full investigative journalism articles on absolutely everything." is not a valid criticism of your article, or a reasonable criticism of the publisher.
ProPublica can't be expected to do all the work of uncovering all sides of the truth. They already do the hardest work: uncovering what the powerful would rather that we not know. They do enough; what are the rest of us doing?
I would agree that it's historically been uncommon for the media to give balanced perspective on civilizational progress, but some good sources for this have emerged in recent years. One of my favorites is Works in Progress magazine: https://worksinprogress.co/
In general, these companies have made enough money that they are insulated from any meaningful punitive action. “Polluting Oil Well 32668 of Los Angeles, LLC” will go bankrupt if sued and disappear once it becomes untenable.
That’s no secret, and being the HN Lorax for oil extraction is both bizarre and a futile effort - the die is cast, and taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.
The result is, some of the sites are kept at minimum operations just to avoid the tremendous shut-down costs.
Avoiding those costs by spining the operations off doesn't really work. The new entity would have to take the risk of shut-down costs, if it is clear those cannot be covered from the get go, it is the original entity that is in the hook. So, worst case, e.g. 3M wpupd have to declare bancruptcy. One common work around is to push those outdated operations down to other cheap skate companies, e.g. from Asia, who can buy them, including clean-up liabilities, for a symbolic price. Then they extract whatever value is left, before reselling it again. As long the overall site, or rather park, is operational this works. Which is bad for the last operator left, he risks being stuck with the bill.
By the way, those costs for clean up are accounted for as potential liabilies in the balance sheets of operating companies. Just putting everything in seperate legal entity, and letting that one go bankcrupt, doesn't really work. Which is a good thing, IMHO.
At least in that case the government gets a lot of land back that can be sold for solar farms or, in higher density areas like Los Angeles, developed into higher uses like housing+parks?
Skipping oil and going to power generation, you have the same thing. Spin off the power generator, leave it with no money, the land has negative value, go bankrupt. This has happened in Oxnard for example, and the city is trying to not have it happen again (good luck).
And they also tend to go with investigations that go their way and those that don’t line up get dropped.
But if one side doesn't bother to mount a defense or do their own individual research, and resorts only to dismissing the other side based on the fact that it's "the other side", they aren't doing themselves any favors.
In the case of environmental review, there's also a multitude of different perspectives with different objectives. From indigenous groups whose land was (typically) stolen, to anti-oil activists, to pro-business democrats (like Biden/Clinton) who want to keep profits rolling at the expense of pristine wildlands, to the various concerns of the right. I know plenty of republican folks who are religiously compelled to take care of the earth and oppose oil drilling. I know plenty of republicans who believe that anthropogenic climate change is "impossible".
Quite frankly, it's not wrong to read a few viewpoints, or read only the viewpoints you agree with and just acknowledge there are other viewpoints. Just don't get lost in believing your viewpoint is the only reasoned one.
No, the question is about their inclination to critically examine a claim made by their side.
All propublica would do (which is sadly “the gold standard”) is check that the research is sound based on what the researchers chose to publish.
Journalists very rarely catch lies by omission, especially when it’s a report that aligns with their preexisting biases.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
In an article titled "How the wealthiest avoid income tax" they sneakily changed the definition of income to include paper gains on assets not yet sold, and then represented the fact that taxes aren't paid on non-taxable events as a method the rich use to not pay income tax. It was a complete miscarriage of journalistic ethics. They lied to their readers to advance a political narrative.
A dictionary definition of "Income" is "money received, especially on a regular basis, for work or through investments". It's not just the narrowest definition, e.g. "only the thing that appears in the Income box on your [US] tax form, under the latest revision of the US tax code". (Like when Mitt Romney in 2012 accidentally shone a spotlight on "carried interest" which allows private equity managers to pay only 15% tax.)
If your unrealized CG is so high that you can live off the loan until you die or retire, then it semantically isn't really a loan, is it.
When US CEO compensation becomes so excessive that it means that something that originally meant temporarily deferring tax in the 1920s now means deferring essentially all income taxes for most of their working life, it does suggest things have gotten distorted.
Sure ProPublica should have been more accurate and said "Here's stuff that is functionally equivalent to income, yet isn't taxed". But if you want to argue that ProPublica isn't entitled to is own semantics, then neither are other people in that debate. For example, we'll probaly see more scrutiny that Clarence Thomas (and his mother) were clearly receiving multiple streams of undeclared "income" or benefits from Harlan Crow. Also allegedly a complete miscarriage of ethics. (Yes that's currently primarily an ethics scandal not a tax evasion one, although it might become that too).
By the way, Warren Buffett essentially made the same point as ProPublica with his famous 2011(?) wager about CEO's secretaries' tax rates being higher. Noone accused him of a complete miscarriage of ethics.
> Capital gains taxes on accrued capital gains are forgiven if the asset holder dies—the so-called “Angel of Death” loophole. The basis of an asset left to an heir is “stepped up” to the asset’s current value.
(Cue the panicmongering 'divide the family farm' story. Obviously Congress and the IRS can't figure out different treatment of stock, real estate, investments, farms.)
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/what-are-cap...
It is, because it gets paid back. What a stupid fucking line to draw “loans” and “not loans” at.
Do you consider people who take out mortgages that don’t pay them back before they die to not be taking out loans? Because that happens all the time. My father took out a 30 year mortgage when he was 84. F
Of course, at that point, they could pay the loan off by borrowing more against their portfolio. In this way, they can recursively never pay tax on the money they received (and spent) in exchange for “not selling” it to a financial institution that will no longer let them withdraw the collateral.
If:
(1) your father’s mortgage was used to pay off debt by using existing real estate holdings as collateral
(2) where the holdings appreciated significantly over the lifetime of the previous loan,
(3) the previous loan was collateralized by other real estate holdings,
(4) he then re-mortgaged a small fraction of those holdings to generate free cash flow for personal use, and
(5) this strategy only worked due to the bank giving him loans significantly below market value, due to other considerations regarding your father’s impact on the bank’s broader business,
Then, no, I wouldn’t consider that set of financial transactions to be a loan.