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In short: because it’s simply who they are by definition
Because it's cheaper and lets it survive.
The unspoken undercurrent is that Google and Facebook ate the ad spending that used to fund journalism, without replacing its function.
Google and Facebook don't fund journalism at scale -- that's why their profit margins stay at 23% & 40%.
Without revenue, reporters don't get paid, high quality reporting doesn't get done, and newsrooms grovel for any source of margin.
Which currently seems to be {minimal cost "journalism"} + {catering to power in exchange for access}.
From the number of press people jailed or killed it does not seem they enjoy any special rights of they speak truth to power.
This was overturned.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/business/media/appeals-co...
Regarding the East Room, according to the White House Correspondents' Association website (https://whca.press/covering-the-white-house/), reporters either need to have a hard pass or a temporary pass from the White House Press Office to enter. The Press Office generally only gives press passes to the press. That's why even if we restrict the conversation to the East Room, it's still a "special right" (or special privilege).
Regarding the Oval Office et al. (which admittedly is what the term "press pool" actually refers to), the Trump administration's entire argument was that press access to those spaces is a "privilege, not a right." So keeping in mind the courts affirmed an actual right to the East Room, the White House itself still grants other journalists a special privilege (because they're journalists).
You can make an argument if you'd like that the guy earlier in the thread should've said, "The press has special privileges because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job." (This ignores that it's still a "right" in other cases, like the East Room.) Squabbling over that word choice doesn't do a lot for the topic of this thread, which was journalists no longer serving the interest that justified giving them those privileges/rights.
"There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone."
Now extend this to the state of all public discourse in the US degraded by propaganda.
This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening:
https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
The press has a lot of problems right now:
* Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance.
* Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The paper in the city I live in keeps getting cut and cut and cut. There's little left.
* Social media suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the same time that fewer people read real news sources.
IDK how we fix those things... but they're all deleterious for our society.
This has more or less always been the case.
Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.
They did say "The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal", so there is probably an element of attacking what is high quality though. [I dont follow us media landscape, i have no idea what the relative quality of various papers are or if you are correct about NYT]
That said, more generally when constructing arguments, you generally want to attack the strongest version of your opponents argument. Attacking a paper known for being higher quality is always going to be more convincing than attacking a paper that is less known.
In any European country the New York Times opinion pages would be seen as pretty centrist, or even centre-right.
That so much of US media and political sphere skews heavily to the right distorts the overall picture.
“Other places are further left” seems irrelevant to this discussion.
Even if a particular source somehow manages to perfectly balance between whatever the current "left" and "right" are in that political environment, that doesn't make it free of bias. Sometimes the people on one side of the political spectrum in a given environment are genuinely, collectively, doing bad things! Sometimes there are personal biases! Sometimes the political environment shifts, and leaves you behind!
In general, it's much more important and productive to be aware of and transparent about your own biases than it is to try to present yourself as "unbiased".
But a bias towards centrist American politics doesn't mean a lack of bias — far from it.
For example, 30 years ago a "centrist" report on global warming might have given equal space to right-wing and liberal perspectives, even though the vast majority of scientists at the time sided with liberals on the facts.
20-ish years ago a centrist report on Iraq would have parroted the administration's lies about WMDs and the urgency of going to war. And the New York Times was one of those organisations!
But the article is literally about the culture war, so of course it is framed in a culture war narrative.
I guess you can claim the WSJ shouldn't have written this piece at all, but I didn't see anything glaringly wrong about it.
> The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.
I don't agree with the second part of the sentence, i.e. about the reason, not that I disagree, just that I have no idea why that is. But the first part, about discovering little of importance, is true though.
Just look back at what theoretical physist has yielded in term of practical implications historically. XVIII century physics gave us gravitation, thermo-dynamics, and basically enabled the industrial revolution. XIX century physics gave us electricity, electro-magnetism, computers, etc. First half of the XX century gave us nuclear energy, lasers, etc. But is there any major technology that post 1960s theoretical physics has given us? I can't think of any example.
Even claiming that theoretical physics enabled the industrial revolution feels off to me. What supports that claim?
Of course that's not the only factor. Like computers rely on XIX century physics but it took almost a century before the technology became industrially significant.
That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...
Insane take. Just GPS, MRIs (high temp. supercondutors), electron microscopes, quantum computing, and chip fabs alone are relevant to us here at HN.
Did it ever have it?
Things such as this remind me of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, when you notice the media is wrong about something you know, but still trust it on everything else.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Sure, but what do you do if the subject matter is the question of whether the experts are being myopic and the system in which they're operating is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose? Where's the expert for that?
If you just ask those same experts, well, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”