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Before I start, Disclosure: I'm neither a Trump or a Hillary supporter and I don't mean the following to be political. I'm just very dissatisfied with the sad r

Before I start, Disclosure: I'm neither a Trump or a Hillary supporter and I don't mean the following to be political. I'm just very dissatisfied with the sad reality of how I cannot trust anything online anymore. For me, the moment all my trust in NYT died was the election day. The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning by overwhelming margin, when it was very apparent that that's opposite of the truth. People kept questioning "where the hell is this data coming from?". I believe Newspapers should try to play as much neutral role as possible, but throughout the entire election cycle the narrative was NYT vs. Trump. News organizations and journalists should report stories but should not become the story. As someone who just wanted to learn what REALLY is going on, I had (and still have) hard time believing anything they say anymore. Other conservative publications at least don't claim to be neutral. A publication shouldn't claim to "tell the truth" and do a whole TV ad about it if they are clearly biased and they're also aware of this. I know they're being provocative because this sells, and they need to make money, and it's getting harder to make money with newspaper. But they've crossed the line. People keep talking about "fake news", but what's really dangerous is not some viral website that write some funny photoshopped story. What's really dangerous is influential news organizations like NYT doing deceptively objective-sounding pieces with narratives that mislead the public. By now I think a lot of people know it's very possible to take a same piece of reality and write completely different versions of it, just by framing them differently. Because of that I have hard time believing anything online anymore, especially the influential ones. This is sad because it used to be the job of journalism to fight against injustice, but nowadays it's more about generating more page views and getting more subscribers, which led to people losing faith in journalism.

lr4444lr 9y ago
It is my understanding of history that most newspapers used to have open political biases; they were even on the take from the party bosses, and it was written into their mission statements. You knew through what lens to filter the content, and they were happy with smaller, more limited readerships. This aim for objectivity in printed reporting was a recent 20th century development.
dominotw 9y ago
One of my friends sold all his stocks buying into nytimes predictions of imminent stock market crash worldwide post trump election.
iamacynic 9y ago
for 2 weeks leading up to the election, nearly every single article on nytimes.com front page "above the fold" was like this. https://web.archive.org/web/20161101110545/http://www.nytimes.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161101110545/http://www.nytime... https://web.archive.org/web/20161115000000*/nytimes.com https://web.archive.org/web/20161115000000*/nytimes.com
jasonlotito 9y ago
> The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning by overwhelming margin, when it was very apparent that that's opposite of the truth. I don't remember that at all. I remember the chances of winning, but that is not in any way a claim that she is winning by a large margin. In fact, reading the articles during the campaign and during election day, there was a lot of talk about even though polling data read one way, Trump wasn't out of it. But yes, if you just read the headlines and didn't actually read the content, I could see why you'd say this.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Here's one leading up to the election: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html?mcubz=0 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... And here's the page I was talking about: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president https://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president Now it says >95% Trump, but on that day it was the other way around--something like >95% Hillary.
  - cirath 9y ago
    The early predictions were based on the early polls, and the later predictions were based on data after election results started to come in. A lot of the States that ended up swinging were on the eastern half, so the rapidly changing outlook makes sense if you look at the bigger picture (rather than just the number at the end). That being said, predicting the outcome of an election with some 250 million potential voters based on a few hundred thousand polled individuals is a tricky game to play.
untog 9y ago
> The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning by overwhelming margin, when it was very apparent that that's opposite of the truth. I remember that interactive story. It was not what you describe. It was showing Hillary's chances of winning throughout the evening - she started at 90% or so, based on the polling averages they'd been running on a regular basis throughout the entire election season. Then, as the evening wore on, and results were not as the polling would indicate, her chances of winning dropped, dropped, and then obviously went to zero. Now, I won't argue that in hindsight that was a pretty bad feature to run. I think it vastly overestimated reader ability to understand statistical probabilities, as well as the accuracy of polling data (the Brexit vote ought to have been an indicator to be cautious). But it absolutely wasn't showing false data that indicated Hillary was winning when she was not.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  How is it not what I describe? You just described exactly what I described. Everyone was wondering (both pro-trump and anti-trump) where the "90%" came from. Because it was pretty clear the race was not that obvious. People keep saying nobody saw it coming, but that's their emotion speaking. People just didn't want Donald Trump to win because they thought he's a joke, but objectively speaking people knew clearly that there were tons of his supporters around the U.S., and it was definitely NOT 90% chance that Hillary would win. To me, THAT's the ultimate "fake news". Slapping a percentage number on it and putting it on the front page is just not right, especially when it's based on very subjective (and eventually false) speculative data.
  - untog 9y ago
    You said: "The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning" I said: "it absolutely wasn't showing false data that indicated Hillary was winning when she was not" They're pretty clearly contradictory. That data, at no point, showed Hillary "supposedly" anything. You're making my point about readers not understanding statistical probabilities. 90% doesn't mean she's winning. It means she's got a 90% chance of winning, and there is a 10% chance she will lose. She lost. > People keep saying nobody saw it coming, but that's their emotion speaking. Quite the opposite. The data (that same data you're saying came from nowhere) showed that Hillary had a 90% chance of winning. There was variance in the polls, but pretty much all of them showed Hillary with an edge. Yes, there were a great many reports of people saying that there was a lot of Trump support across the country, but those reports are the very opposite of "objective" - they were thinly spread and anecdotal. Pretty much every newspaper ran stories interviewing those Trump supporters, but there was no hard data to quantify it. Polling data isn't "subjective" and "speculative". There is a clearly defined methodology behind it. That methodology was incorrect in the 2016 election, and didn't accurate gauge support for two unprecedentedly unpopular candidates. That makes it "incorrect news", not "fake news". You could argue that the news industry has relied too heavily on this sort of statistical prediction stuff, and I'd agree with you. But in 2012 FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted all but one state, and everyone absolutely lauded Nate Silver for it ("Is Nate Silver a witch?"). But really, what that meant is that each of Nate's predictions were the right side of 50%. And in 2016 they most definitely weren't.
evangelista 9y ago
You are completely correct, the people quibbling with you about statistics have not been paying attention to what is going on and are hopelessly naive about human nature and psychology. They are demonstrating exactly the bias thinking that caused the election results to be projected the way they were. It wasn't just the New York Times, it was every single news outlet and every single poll. We have been running and studying elections for over 100 years, you would think, by now, that if we had any idea what we were doing, we would have long ago learned how to perform actual predictions using the data available to us. When people break their legs, we can cure them 100% of the time because medicine has a strong answer for this problem based in thousands of years of medical science. Election polling and prediction is simply not in the category of "solved" problems. If the statistics were really well understood...as some of the people arguing with you are claiming...WOULDN'T WE HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT BY NOW? I have had these discussions about polls and statistics with my Liberal friends. Many of them are software engineers. Some of them even work in ML at large scale. They are utterly convinced that the data and statistics just need to be tweaked a little bit more and THEN they will be correct. To quote Donald Trump: WRONG! There is a simple explanation for what happened that does not get into nit-picking statistical nuances. There is a simple explanation that does not allow people on the other side of the argument to bludgeon less educated opponents into silence by spewing technical jargon about polling data (which is really just a manipulation technique used to silence people by berating their intelligence). The explanation is that the polling data was simply made up. Or that many prediction models were created and only the ones favorable to the desired narrative were selected as being "Accurate" by people who are blinded by deep personal political bias. This outcome scares people who prefer to see the world in a particular way. People want to believe they aren't biased or that everything they read and see everyday is somehow "clean" or being presented by rational experts. That is a scary thought process...software engineers, in particular, cannot bear to believe that because it violates their underlying belief that the world operates in a logical way. So instead of thinking like this, they crack open statistics textbooks and start reading chapter 4 at you. Its a defense mechanism to avoid reality. There are direct financial rewards for telling people exactly what they want to hear. If Nate Silver and 538 consistently told people that Donald Trump would win, it is likely that their page-views would plummet into oblivion. Instead, the vast online hoards who like to be told whatever they want to hear and read news only to have their existing beliefs confirmed swarmed over Nate's websites, clicking on articles and gleefully watching the ads. What is Nate Silver's punishment for being wrong over and over again? Nothing! There is no identifiable drop-off in his web traffic despite him and his team being wrong about everything this last election. If what Nate Silver was doing was really "data journalism," shouldn't his following online have dropped off a cliff? It hasn't and it won't because what 538 is doing is not really backed by data and his readers and viewers are not discerning enough to care or believe that what they are reading is just opinion. I am fairly disgusted by humanity at this point as a result. Keep strong my brother, you are right. The people quibbling with you are living in an alternate reality where the media isn't incentivized by page views to gravitate towards narratives that result in more clicks. The media is dead.
matt4077 9y ago
The polls were off, and/or the race moved in last few days. If you can't see the difference between a statistical model's prediction and a journalist's factual claims, you're unlikely to find the sort of "objectivity" you're looking for. And, fwiw, your sort of political "objectivity" just doesn't exist. What you want is the sort of fake equivalence as in "Yesterday, 10 people died in an earthquake in Northern Italy, according to local accounts. But Jeff from Kansas writes on Twitter that there was no earthquake and the cause of death was the LHC's creation of a black hole. What's the truth? You decide! Back after this...".
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Just because something doesn't exist, doesn't mean you shouldn't strive for it, especially if you're in journalism. It's like saying "Nobody is perfectly ethical. So trying to be ethical is just being fake." Also you are using a funny example to make a point that's not relevant to this instance. That has nothing to do with news organizations siding with certain political party and pretending to be unbiased.

lr4444lr 9y ago

It is my understanding of history that most newspapers used to have open political biases; they were even on the take from the party bosses, and it was written into their mission statements. You knew through what lens to filter the content, and they were happy with smaller, more limited readerships. This aim for objectivity in printed reporting was a recent 20th century development.

dominotw 9y ago

One of my friends sold all his stocks buying into nytimes predictions of imminent stock market crash worldwide post trump election.

iamacynic 9y ago

for 2 weeks leading up to the election, nearly every single article on nytimes.com front page "above the fold" was like this. https://web.archive.org/web/20161101110545/http://www.nytimes.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161101110545/http://www.nytime... https://web.archive.org/web/20161115000000*/nytimes.com https://web.archive.org/web/20161115000000*/nytimes.com

jasonlotito 9y ago

> The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning by overwhelming margin, when it was very apparent that that's opposite of the truth. I don't remember that at all. I remember the chances of winning, but that is not in any way a claim that she is winning by a large margin. In fact, reading the articles during the campaign and during election day, there was a lot of talk about even though polling data read one way, Trump wasn't out of it. But yes, if you just read the headlines and didn't actually read the content, I could see why you'd say this.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Here's one leading up to the election: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html?mcubz=0 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... And here's the page I was talking about: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president https://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president Now it says >95% Trump, but on that day it was the other way around--something like >95% Hillary.
- cirath 9y ago
  The early predictions were based on the early polls, and the later predictions were based on data after election results started to come in. A lot of the States that ended up swinging were on the eastern half, so the rapidly changing outlook makes sense if you look at the bigger picture (rather than just the number at the end). That being said, predicting the outcome of an election with some 250 million potential voters based on a few hundred thousand polled individuals is a tricky game to play.

untog 9y ago

> The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning by overwhelming margin, when it was very apparent that that's opposite of the truth. I remember that interactive story. It was not what you describe. It was showing Hillary's chances of winning throughout the evening - she started at 90% or so, based on the polling averages they'd been running on a regular basis throughout the entire election season. Then, as the evening wore on, and results were not as the polling would indicate, her chances of winning dropped, dropped, and then obviously went to zero. Now, I won't argue that in hindsight that was a pretty bad feature to run. I think it vastly overestimated reader ability to understand statistical probabilities, as well as the accuracy of polling data (the Brexit vote ought to have been an indicator to be cautious). But it absolutely wasn't showing false data that indicated Hillary was winning when she was not.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
How is it not what I describe? You just described exactly what I described. Everyone was wondering (both pro-trump and anti-trump) where the "90%" came from. Because it was pretty clear the race was not that obvious. People keep saying nobody saw it coming, but that's their emotion speaking. People just didn't want Donald Trump to win because they thought he's a joke, but objectively speaking people knew clearly that there were tons of his supporters around the U.S., and it was definitely NOT 90% chance that Hillary would win. To me, THAT's the ultimate "fake news". Slapping a percentage number on it and putting it on the front page is just not right, especially when it's based on very subjective (and eventually false) speculative data.
- untog 9y ago
  You said: "The front page had this interactive realtime story of how Hillary is supposedly winning" I said: "it absolutely wasn't showing false data that indicated Hillary was winning when she was not" They're pretty clearly contradictory. That data, at no point, showed Hillary "supposedly" anything. You're making my point about readers not understanding statistical probabilities. 90% doesn't mean she's winning. It means she's got a 90% chance of winning, and there is a 10% chance she will lose. She lost. > People keep saying nobody saw it coming, but that's their emotion speaking. Quite the opposite. The data (that same data you're saying came from nowhere) showed that Hillary had a 90% chance of winning. There was variance in the polls, but pretty much all of them showed Hillary with an edge. Yes, there were a great many reports of people saying that there was a lot of Trump support across the country, but those reports are the very opposite of "objective" - they were thinly spread and anecdotal. Pretty much every newspaper ran stories interviewing those Trump supporters, but there was no hard data to quantify it. Polling data isn't "subjective" and "speculative". There is a clearly defined methodology behind it. That methodology was incorrect in the 2016 election, and didn't accurate gauge support for two unprecedentedly unpopular candidates. That makes it "incorrect news", not "fake news". You could argue that the news industry has relied too heavily on this sort of statistical prediction stuff, and I'd agree with you. But in 2012 FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted all but one state, and everyone absolutely lauded Nate Silver for it ("Is Nate Silver a witch?"). But really, what that meant is that each of Nate's predictions were the right side of 50%. And in 2016 they most definitely weren't.

evangelista 9y ago

You are completely correct, the people quibbling with you about statistics have not been paying attention to what is going on and are hopelessly naive about human nature and psychology. They are demonstrating exactly the bias thinking that caused the election results to be projected the way they were. It wasn't just the New York Times, it was every single news outlet and every single poll. We have been running and studying elections for over 100 years, you would think, by now, that if we had any idea what we were doing, we would have long ago learned how to perform actual predictions using the data available to us. When people break their legs, we can cure them 100% of the time because medicine has a strong answer for this problem based in thousands of years of medical science. Election polling and prediction is simply not in the category of "solved" problems. If the statistics were really well understood...as some of the people arguing with you are claiming...WOULDN'T WE HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT BY NOW? I have had these discussions about polls and statistics with my Liberal friends. Many of them are software engineers. Some of them even work in ML at large scale. They are utterly convinced that the data and statistics just need to be tweaked a little bit more and THEN they will be correct. To quote Donald Trump: WRONG! There is a simple explanation for what happened that does not get into nit-picking statistical nuances. There is a simple explanation that does not allow people on the other side of the argument to bludgeon less educated opponents into silence by spewing technical jargon about polling data (which is really just a manipulation technique used to silence people by berating their intelligence). The explanation is that the polling data was simply made up. Or that many prediction models were created and only the ones favorable to the desired narrative were selected as being "Accurate" by people who are blinded by deep personal political bias. This outcome scares people who prefer to see the world in a particular way. People want to believe they aren't biased or that everything they read and see everyday is somehow "clean" or being presented by rational experts. That is a scary thought process...software engineers, in particular, cannot bear to believe that because it violates their underlying belief that the world operates in a logical way. So instead of thinking like this, they crack open statistics textbooks and start reading chapter 4 at you. Its a defense mechanism to avoid reality. There are direct financial rewards for telling people exactly what they want to hear. If Nate Silver and 538 consistently told people that Donald Trump would win, it is likely that their page-views would plummet into oblivion. Instead, the vast online hoards who like to be told whatever they want to hear and read news only to have their existing beliefs confirmed swarmed over Nate's websites, clicking on articles and gleefully watching the ads. What is Nate Silver's punishment for being wrong over and over again? Nothing! There is no identifiable drop-off in his web traffic despite him and his team being wrong about everything this last election. If what Nate Silver was doing was really "data journalism," shouldn't his following online have dropped off a cliff? It hasn't and it won't because what 538 is doing is not really backed by data and his readers and viewers are not discerning enough to care or believe that what they are reading is just opinion. I am fairly disgusted by humanity at this point as a result. Keep strong my brother, you are right. The people quibbling with you are living in an alternate reality where the media isn't incentivized by page views to gravitate towards narratives that result in more clicks. The media is dead.

matt4077 9y ago

The polls were off, and/or the race moved in last few days. If you can't see the difference between a statistical model's prediction and a journalist's factual claims, you're unlikely to find the sort of "objectivity" you're looking for. And, fwiw, your sort of political "objectivity" just doesn't exist. What you want is the sort of fake equivalence as in "Yesterday, 10 people died in an earthquake in Northern Italy, according to local accounts. But Jeff from Kansas writes on Twitter that there was no earthquake and the cause of death was the LHC's creation of a black hole. What's the truth? You decide! Back after this...".

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Just because something doesn't exist, doesn't mean you shouldn't strive for it, especially if you're in journalism. It's like saying "Nobody is perfectly ethical. So trying to be ethical is just being fake." Also you are using a funny example to make a point that's not relevant to this instance. That has nothing to do with news organizations siding with certain political party and pretending to be unbiased.