5 ms·

There seems to be a lot of people who cannot handle the possibility of the NY Times being wrong enough to be skeptical about. They get very upset and worried ab

There seems to be a lot of people who cannot handle the possibility of the NY Times being wrong enough to be skeptical about. They get very upset and worried about what happens when people loose faith in such institutions. They then delegitimize the distrust others have for traditionally trusted news orgs and reduce people who read alt sources (left or right) to fools. You can call them idiots all you want but in my adult memory there have been several scandals at the Times that have challenged my trust. Until you can empathize with someone who reads infowars you're never going to solve the problem of fake news.

goalieca 10y ago
So let's keep score. NYT. Wins: too many to count. Losses: 3 I don't quite see your point.
- wu-ikkyu 10y ago
  >>There seems to be a lot of people who cannot handle the possibility of the NY Times being wrong enough to be skeptical about. >NYT. Wins: too many to count. Losses: 3. I don't quite see your point. You're illustrating it.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    Ok, but compare it to most any other news source. What's your point? You're not making it.
    - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
      >To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false. -Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell 14 June 1807 http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_speechs29.html http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_spe...
      - throwaway91111 10y ago
        Well we can all appreciate quality news. Where do you find it if not the times? Yes, they've had problems, like all human entities. How far does that deviate from average? I think their quality is certainly worth paying for, although you need to adjust for bias, as everywhere.
- verylittlemeat 10y ago
  I think this is what a lot of people in this thread don't understand. They want a narrative, you're either the good guy or the bad guy. We all know about the NYTimes' failure in the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War but what about a story like Hoosick Falls where a chemical company had been dumping perfluorooctanoic acid into the drinking water? I have been reading the paper for decades and I can say that for every Iraq War failure there are hundreds of Hoosick Falls stories that involve important investigative journalism. The NYTimes makes mistakes but it is a net good to society. There is a current trend in popular culture where if a solution is not perfect then it shouldn't be implemented at all. There will never be an objective media and you should be highly skeptical of any media that claims that as their advantage.
  - hutzlibu 10y ago
    The problem is, that many people think the "failure"s were not failures, but plain lying. And so then the newspapers don't make it up for it, if they actually do good journalism on topics where they don't have a hidden agenda. Also, if you believe that, than you also don't know what other failures haven't been uncovered, so you loose trust.
    - verylittlemeat 10y ago
      Were those failures plain lying? As a person who tried to be critical in both 2003 and in retrospect I'm not so sure about that. I would encourage you to read the actual papers and the later analysis to come to your own conclusion. The OPEDs leading up to the war are particuarly interesting. If you have a NYTimes membership (I'm sure they have some form of free trial) you can access the "timesmachine" which is great UI they built to navigate archived papers back to the 1800s There is a lot of rhetoric flying around on both sides today. As in most conflicts I find the reality to be much more nuanced and less clear cut. The temptation to omit details to fit the narrative is in my opinion the only thing you can count on from all media sources.
      - hutzlibu 10y ago
        Personaly I don't know if they were lying(I was speaking of what other people believe), as I don't read the NYT that often (I am not a US citicien) and not at those times. But what I know from german newspapers, I think it is very possible. At least lying in the sense of bending and twisting words, leaving out context to intentional misslead the reader of what actually happened. This I can witness every day Or in the context of Irak, maybe they did not formally lie, but did know that the persons they quoted did. Which would count as the same for me.
- tomjen3 10y ago
  This is not a football match, there are bigger and smaller “scores”. Losing the Iraq war for one, easily destroys a generation of wins — just think about the consequences.
krapp 10y ago
The problem is, people willing to reject the NYT out of hand, and who lose faith in all mainstream media, seem either unwilling or incapable of applying the same skepticism to "alternative" sources like Infowars. I won't call them fools, but I will say many seem less interested in truth than in bias confirmation.
- griffinmmahon 10y ago
  And there's also the possibility that the NYT et al have 1) done bad things in the past but 2) have also done good things For example, Noam Chomsky rightfully called the NYT "a bad paper" but he still read it every morning because it's one of the best sources of what's going on.
  - krapp 10y ago
    I would argue that, despite its obvious biases, the mainstream media still reports more fact more often than do alternative sources. Both the mainstream and alternative media can report fact, or can report lies, and both can be used as a means of control.
    - griffinmmahon 10y ago
      Yes, exactly! None of these things are mutually exclusive. Decrying liberal/conservative media bias while being stuck within that same spectrum is an entirely impotent critique to me if you don't understand the structural incentives that make all media outlets opposed to reporting truth/facts to the public (cf. *Manufacturing Consent).
    - gambler 10y ago
      >I would argue that, despite its obvious biases, the mainstream media still reports more fact more often than do alternative sources. Which alternative sources? NewsMax? Reason.org? The Intercept? Or some crank youtube channel run by a single person?
skolos 10y ago
Quoting currently top comment: > Pointing to specific counter-examples is like identifying NASA with the failures of the Challenger -- it completely misses the forest for the trees.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

goalieca 10y ago

So let's keep score. NYT. Wins: too many to count. Losses: 3 I don't quite see your point.

wu-ikkyu 10y ago
>>There seems to be a lot of people who cannot handle the possibility of the NY Times being wrong enough to be skeptical about. >NYT. Wins: too many to count. Losses: 3. I don't quite see your point. You're illustrating it.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  Ok, but compare it to most any other news source. What's your point? You're not making it.
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    >To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false. -Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell 14 June 1807 http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_speechs29.html http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_spe...
    - throwaway91111 10y ago
      Well we can all appreciate quality news. Where do you find it if not the times? Yes, they've had problems, like all human entities. How far does that deviate from average? I think their quality is certainly worth paying for, although you need to adjust for bias, as everywhere.
verylittlemeat 10y ago
I think this is what a lot of people in this thread don't understand. They want a narrative, you're either the good guy or the bad guy. We all know about the NYTimes' failure in the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War but what about a story like Hoosick Falls where a chemical company had been dumping perfluorooctanoic acid into the drinking water? I have been reading the paper for decades and I can say that for every Iraq War failure there are hundreds of Hoosick Falls stories that involve important investigative journalism. The NYTimes makes mistakes but it is a net good to society. There is a current trend in popular culture where if a solution is not perfect then it shouldn't be implemented at all. There will never be an objective media and you should be highly skeptical of any media that claims that as their advantage.
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  The problem is, that many people think the "failure"s were not failures, but plain lying. And so then the newspapers don't make it up for it, if they actually do good journalism on topics where they don't have a hidden agenda. Also, if you believe that, than you also don't know what other failures haven't been uncovered, so you loose trust.
  - verylittlemeat 10y ago
    Were those failures plain lying? As a person who tried to be critical in both 2003 and in retrospect I'm not so sure about that. I would encourage you to read the actual papers and the later analysis to come to your own conclusion. The OPEDs leading up to the war are particuarly interesting. If you have a NYTimes membership (I'm sure they have some form of free trial) you can access the "timesmachine" which is great UI they built to navigate archived papers back to the 1800s There is a lot of rhetoric flying around on both sides today. As in most conflicts I find the reality to be much more nuanced and less clear cut. The temptation to omit details to fit the narrative is in my opinion the only thing you can count on from all media sources.
    - hutzlibu 10y ago
      Personaly I don't know if they were lying(I was speaking of what other people believe), as I don't read the NYT that often (I am not a US citicien) and not at those times. But what I know from german newspapers, I think it is very possible. At least lying in the sense of bending and twisting words, leaving out context to intentional misslead the reader of what actually happened. This I can witness every day Or in the context of Irak, maybe they did not formally lie, but did know that the persons they quoted did. Which would count as the same for me.
tomjen3 10y ago
This is not a football match, there are bigger and smaller “scores”. Losing the Iraq war for one, easily destroys a generation of wins — just think about the consequences.

krapp 10y ago

The problem is, people willing to reject the NYT out of hand, and who lose faith in all mainstream media, seem either unwilling or incapable of applying the same skepticism to "alternative" sources like Infowars. I won't call them fools, but I will say many seem less interested in truth than in bias confirmation.

griffinmmahon 10y ago
And there's also the possibility that the NYT et al have 1) done bad things in the past but 2) have also done good things For example, Noam Chomsky rightfully called the NYT "a bad paper" but he still read it every morning because it's one of the best sources of what's going on.
- krapp 10y ago
  I would argue that, despite its obvious biases, the mainstream media still reports more fact more often than do alternative sources. Both the mainstream and alternative media can report fact, or can report lies, and both can be used as a means of control.
  - griffinmmahon 10y ago
    Yes, exactly! None of these things are mutually exclusive. Decrying liberal/conservative media bias while being stuck within that same spectrum is an entirely impotent critique to me if you don't understand the structural incentives that make all media outlets opposed to reporting truth/facts to the public (cf. *Manufacturing Consent).
  - gambler 10y ago
    >I would argue that, despite its obvious biases, the mainstream media still reports more fact more often than do alternative sources. Which alternative sources? NewsMax? Reason.org? The Intercept? Or some crank youtube channel run by a single person?

skolos 10y ago

Quoting currently top comment: > Pointing to specific counter-examples is like identifying NASA with the failures of the Challenger -- it completely misses the forest for the trees.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]