Comment by mkmk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkmk | Hacker News Reader

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A long time ago, I worked for a brand that bought expensive advertisements in the nytimes. The sales team invited me to be a silent attendee of the 'page one meeting', a meeting during which the editors decide which stories will be on the front page of the paper and how they will be presented. By that time, they were also discussing if certain stories warranted a push notification, and how tweets would be presented.

Two parts of Nate's post really stuck out to me as reflective of my experience that day:

>When a newsroom misreports a breaking story, does that reveal its editorial biases? Again, the obvious answer is “yes”, but I’d qualify that by saying it reflects the thought processes of the particular people who were on hand to make decisions at that particular moment.

This was quite literally true, as people entered and left the room throughout the meeting, and certain people were conferenced in while others were on vacation.

> In this account, the Times frames itself as an innocent, passive actor, one that’s merely reporting on the existence of the lava — neglecting its role in trying to steer it. That’s complete bullshit, because the Times is extremely and often somewhat proudly self-conscious of this role. “We set the agenda for the country” is literally the prevailing attitude in the building.

It was interesting to see how obviously you could predict which way an editor would try to steer a story, based on the way they presented their socioeconomic affiliations through their attire and behavior. There was also a slightly ridiculous moment, at the end of the meeting, where I was presented with a printout of the headlines for the following morning's papers as if it was a top-secret document.

Anyway, I mostly get my news from twitter nowadays. At least there, I find it a bit easier to make sense of who is misleading me and why.

What I really appreciate about X is that stories too crazy to be true (like that one about protestors occupying that House office building) is that when someone posts a sensationalized but FAKE version of the headline (“Congress Invaded Again! Just like Jan 6!”) it often comes with a Community Note attached (“This was the Cannon Office Building, not the Capitol”). The Community Notes feature set allows users to attach important context to stories and keeps things from spiraling too far into one narrative or another at the expense of the truth when a tweet starts to go viral.

It's an excellent feature. Are there any prominent examples yet of astroturfed fictitious community notes that overpower real information?

> At least there, I find it a bit easier to make sense of who is misleading me

Pretty funny that this comment comes hours after New York Times lost their verification badge on X.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/19/x-twitt...

Ha! That's too perfect.

Though I should add that I find twitter to be most helpful when you follow individuals, rather than company accounts.

The news as a whole is also certainly the same. For instance Ars Technica is generally just a lot of clickbait now a days, yet if you're interested in space/aerospace then the articles from Eric Berger [1] on there are absolutely top tier.

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/

> the Times is extremely and often somewhat proudly self-conscious of this role. “We set the agenda for the country” is literally the prevailing attitude in the building.

Reminds me of the "We are the media elite" speech in The Newsroom.

> Anyway, I mostly get my news from twitter nowadays. At least there, I find it a bit easier to make sense of who is misleading me and why.

How does that make it easier to make sense of who is misleading you? Don't people on twitter have a source whose bias is unknown to you? It would be difficult to only read first person accounts of events by sources you discovered yourself. Not to mention knowing enough about those first person reporters to understand if they are misleading you or not. And if you're relying on other people (or an algorithm) to provide you sources, it feels like you'd just be adding another layer of people who can mislead you.

> How does that make it easier to make sense of who is misleading you?

Easier doesn't mean perfect – there is no such thing as perfect here – but users on Twitter tend to tell a larger story about themselves, more so than the typical newsroom reporter, and from that you have more information to gauge their thought processes.

X doesn't apply its own filter to those potentially biased reports. You can find pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel tweets. These are all suspect. What gives credence to certain points of view are the details provided. Fabrications are often shallow and when repeated offer no new insight (it's often the same tweet with little change in wording). The truth can be supported in many ways and becomes more clear as more data becomes available.

It's not that any one tweet is more accurate, it's that the collection of tweets that provide info and insight eventually steers us closer to the truth.

We don't need fact-checkers or disinformation checks. It's more useful to remove duplicate posts, low-quality posts (e.g. "Israel should bomb Gaza!!") to give us more signal to noise.

> A long time ago, I worked for a brand that bought expensive advertisements in the nytimes. The sales team invited me to be a silent attendee of the 'page one meeting',

Is this normal? So when they were reporting on tobacco cancer and deciding if it went on the front page there would be like a silent Philip Morris employee in the room staring them down and sitting with the sales team? Or was there one-way glass or something?

There is supposed to be a “wall” between the advertising department and the newsroom but in my experience of working at a major daily newspaper some decades ago, there were plenty of windows and doors in that wall. Is this story worth risking 5% of our ad revenue?

Large advertisers may not have full control over stories that affect them, but their ad spend definitely can have an influence. A negative but not all that newsworthy might get buried a bit, and a positive but not newsworthy might gain some prominence. A negative but big story would probably not influenced.

It was normal, a large conference room table where the editors sat and then a ring of chairs around the room for guests and lackeys.

My imperfect recollection is that guests were briefly introduced by their chaperone to the room so that editors could speak up if there was a potential conflict.

For all of their faults, there certainly was nothing resembling outright impropriety. Just structural challenges.

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