5 ms·

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 N

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.
  - bzbarsky 10y ago
    I think https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students-us-colleges-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students... is plain lying of the most common kind the NYTimes does: selective citing of statistics so you can claim that everything you said is true but you create an impression at odds with reality. See http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one-real-blooper-cannot-let-pass.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one... for more details. You are of course correct that omitting details to fit the narrative is what's going on here. This particular case is more egregious that most in that "details" is "two out of the three equally important numbers in the study's results".
Bartweiss 10y ago
> The NYTimes makes mistakes but it is a net good to society. This isn't my concern though. The next layer of error beyond "good guy or bad guy" is "net good or net bad". My concern is that the NYT isn't just wrong occasionally, but wrong in systematic ways representing unconscious bias or direct manipulation. Hoosick Falls was a clear good. We need more news organizations with the weight and investigative will to take on that sort of work. The NYT is excellent at this, and I hope it continues to be. But... well, the NYT toed an establishment line in 2003, contributing to a deadly, misjudged war. In 2004, they sat on a major warrantless surveillance scoop for two years until a reporter forced them into it via book publication. After the Snowden leaks, they creatively claimed that he had decided which documents to publish without press input (the exact inverse of the truth). A Times reporter published a major article from the information Snowden provided, then argued for his prosecution because the article she wrote had nothing to do with illegal privacy violations. The list goes on at enormous length, and I only regret not keeping links to have handy on demand. So I'm not comfortable saying "1 Iraq to 100 Hoosicks". My objection is that the errors that do occur point align with each other, and align with a narrative of expanded state power and foreign intervention. There may not be any objective media, but it's still important to speak up when the losses and the wins fall on different lines.

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.
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  I think https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students-us-colleges-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students... is plain lying of the most common kind the NYTimes does: selective citing of statistics so you can claim that everything you said is true but you create an impression at odds with reality. See http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one-real-blooper-cannot-let-pass.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one... for more details. You are of course correct that omitting details to fit the narrative is what's going on here. This particular case is more egregious that most in that "details" is "two out of the three equally important numbers in the study's results".

Bartweiss 10y ago

> The NYTimes makes mistakes but it is a net good to society. This isn't my concern though. The next layer of error beyond "good guy or bad guy" is "net good or net bad". My concern is that the NYT isn't just wrong occasionally, but wrong in systematic ways representing unconscious bias or direct manipulation. Hoosick Falls was a clear good. We need more news organizations with the weight and investigative will to take on that sort of work. The NYT is excellent at this, and I hope it continues to be. But... well, the NYT toed an establishment line in 2003, contributing to a deadly, misjudged war. In 2004, they sat on a major warrantless surveillance scoop for two years until a reporter forced them into it via book publication. After the Snowden leaks, they creatively claimed that he had decided which documents to publish without press input (the exact inverse of the truth). A Times reporter published a major article from the information Snowden provided, then argued for his prosecution because the article she wrote had nothing to do with illegal privacy violations. The list goes on at enormous length, and I only regret not keeping links to have handy on demand. So I'm not comfortable saying "1 Iraq to 100 Hoosicks". My objection is that the errors that do occur point align with each other, and align with a narrative of expanded state power and foreign intervention. There may not be any objective media, but it's still important to speak up when the losses and the wins fall on different lines.