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It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell — and they are always on the lookout for facts to b

It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell — and they are always on the lookout for facts to back up those narratives. Facts outside of the narrative are simply passed over. I wouldn’t call this fake news, but it’s also not good journalism. And yes, Fox News and MSNBC have been doing this for years. But this form of bias now seems to permeate everything, including formerly trusted titans like NPR and the NYT.

bluejekyll 8y ago
Why are you throwing NPR into that mix? NPR remains one of the few news sources that goes out of its way to try and get unbiased reporting in the US. People are people of course, so it’s impossible to be completely unbiased.
- makomk 8y ago
  I'm still baffled how NPR screwed up their story on Trump Jr supposedly lying to Congress so badly, though. If you didn't see it, they took his replies to questions about whether any other negotiations to build in Russia were going on at the same time as Cohen's ones, quoted them without context, pretended he was saying Cohen wasn't negotiating in Russia then in contradiction to Cohen's court testimony, and used this to make it look like Trump Jr had lied to Congress. Any fact checker, editor or reporter who'd bothered to check the quotes the story relied on should've caught this. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from a shady conspiracy theory peddler. (The original version: http://archive.is/ozzmb http://archive.is/ozzmb )
- Sir_Vival 8y ago
  That's used to be true but in the past two years they've gotten quite bad. For instance, during the child separation story they called it "President Trump's child separation policy," when describing it. Only weeks later did they call it "the increase of child separations due to President Trump's zero tolerance policy." It was known the day the story broke that he didn't enact the policy.
- Sir_Vival 8y ago
  That used to be true but in the past two years they've gotten quite bad. For instance, during the child separation story they called it "President Trump's child separation policy," when describing it. Only weeks later did they call it "the increase of child separations due to President Trump's zero tolerance policy." It was known the day the story broke that he didn't enact the policy.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Reuters is still pretty decent.
- zbentley 8y ago
  Reuters also rarely reports on local news, which is the crisis outlined in the post.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    All news is local news, unless Reuters reports it.
ekianjo 8y ago
> and they are always on the lookout for facts to back up those narratives Confirmation bias is fake news. Because you only pick up the details that fit your narrative, shutting down everything else. A true neutral viewpoint would share all aspects of the story from the get go.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > Confirmation bias is fake news. Because you only pick up the details that fit your narrative, shutting down everything else. That's a pretty weak strawman. As a non-US citizen who never set foot near the US, I found the MAGA story to be a pretty blatant example of fake news that was clearly pushed in spite of any fact check or impartiality. When I first saw the video pushed by US's media corporations my first reaction was to have a very negative opinion about the kid in particular and the whole political movement in general. But afterwards I had the opportunity to see the whole video, without being subjected to the blatant manipulation, and the real story is radically different than the narrative that was pushed by the media. Any journalist and specially editors who had access to the video clearly knew they were blatantly lying to the public and were intentionally misrepresenting the events, but they did so to push their agenda. This has nothing to do with confirmation bias.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    You are talking about one story. I'm talking about news in general. I don't think most journalists are deliberately lying most of the time, but it's much more likely they suffer from confirmation bias - that's something we are all subject to, by the way. But journalists should go the extra mile, it'S their job after all: they are not supposed to be activists.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      > You are talking about one story. I'm talking about news in general. I'm pointing a clear example where there was a general push for a falsified news report to push a narrative. There is no way around this. Other examples also exist, but they fly under the radar or aren't so eggregious.
solarwind 8y ago
This. I used to think "fake news" was far-right baloney, but I've come to lose all faith in the journalistic integrity of the New York Times and WaPo. This recent piece for the NYT was a bizarrely flattering story about an anti-gay, anti-Semitic hate group is a good example. They have a narrative to push and will push it with any available facts and information. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/us/black-hebrew-israelites-covington-catholic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/us/black-hebrew-israelite...
- rdtsc 8y ago
  That was a bizarre article they do mention these people spout out terrible insults and threats and are categorized as a hate group but it turns around and excuses that because it's well, Trump's fault of course, and it's not all that bad because they see it as "preaching".
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often knowingly dishonest. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter ...Which was 95 years ago. The difference now that is the rhetoric is often more obviously slanted and more likely to be nakedly inflammatory. The 50s/60s/70s had more of a tradition of restrained debate. But the politeness was always superficial. Politics was at least as murderous and corrupt as it is now. But the more measured tone, and the superficial respect for critique and analysis, made it appear more civilised. Now the tone is more likely to be extreme, which creates the illusion that obviously manipulative "fake news" is more the rule than the exception - and that this is historically different, when in fact it isn't at all.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    > There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often knowingly dishonest. Perhaps, but surely the media used to be less biased, and it’s worth striving to get back to that place.
    - 8y ago
mac01021 8y ago
> we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell Link please? Sometimes I feel like I must live under a rock.
- PixyMisa 8y ago
  What's the rent like under there? Asking for a friend.
- yepyep12 8y ago
  Easy, just look at reporting on mass shootings. What there is a white person doing a mass shooting (e.g., 3 days ago in Florida) the entire paper is about "senseless violence", "deeply disturbed individuals" and unexplained pain and suffering. When a brown person is doing a mass shooting, there is almost almost always a narrative about terrorism and how obviously the person must have been a terrorist and we just need to somehow find the link, even if the person has no clear link to anything. The WaPo is pretty balanced on this front. But dont pretend the NYT is unbaised here. WSJ is certainly biased.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    These papers' reporting biases have been well known for years. But the GP makes it sound like a particular story aired last week that focused specifically on an AGENDA the papers are pursuing. An agenda is much more than a bias. It's a set of goals and a strategy for pursuing them. A systematic bias can be a big part of that strategy. But the goals and their origin are far more interesting.
- nostromo 8y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...
CM30 8y ago
Yeah, this is a thing that's been a problem for a while now, and not just with the NYT and WaPo. Media organisations will basically not fact check anything that fits in with their worldview, which for the 'left wing' versions usually means: - Supports the idea that racism/nationalism/xenophobia is increasing cause of Trump/Brexit/whatever And the 'right wing' versions often means something similar about immigration and increased crime or political correctness. If a story fits those beats, then they'll often buy it without question, foregoing the basic background research needed in the process. That's why the Covington Catholic school kids thing got publicised so much; it fit very nicely (at first glance) with the idea that Trump voters are racist/horrible people, seemingly showed a confrontation between them and a native American tribesperson and helped the narrative many organisations wanted to push. Same with the case of that guy being 'thrown off a plane for speaking Arabic'. He wasn't, but the story fit the whole 'hate against Muslims increased after Trump election' narrative. Any fact checking at all would debunk these stories and the 'message' being pushed on social media sites, yet it wasn't done until way later. Same goes with another story I saw about a trans eSports team supposedly getting banned from a gender specific tournament. Team didn't actually exist and the story was a troll job meant to rile up one side, but media sympathetic to said side bought it hook, line and sinker. Honestly, a good journalist needs to be more skeptical about stories they agree with than disagree with (or at least equally so), and it's clear that most today aren't like that at all.
matt4077 8y ago
There are multiple stories about the mistakes that were made with the story you are alluding to in every major reputable news source, I. e. for The Atlantic: The Media Botched the Covington Story: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must... I Failed the Coving On Catholic Test: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/julie-irwin-zimmerman-i-failed-covington-catholic-test/580897/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/julie-irwi... Muddling the Covington Catholic Student Video: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/01/muddling-the-covington-catholic-student-video-the-atlantic-daily/580912/ https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/01/mudd... That sort of soul-searching does not happen, indeed it wouldn’t fit into even a 24h-channel, at Fox News.
- leereeves 8y ago
  Has Fox News ever led a national media lynching of a high school student? (That's a serious question, I don't watch them and I'd like to know if they really are as bad as people say or if people just hate them because they don't agree.)
  - untog 8y ago
    One person that immediately comes to mind is David Hogg. They certainly never held back criticism of him because he's a minor, and a host made a strange attack on him via social media: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/mar/31/fox-news-laura-ingraham-david-hogg https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/mar/31/fox-news-laura...
    - leereeves 8y ago
      That fails to convince me for at least three reasons: 1) Fox didn't say it; it was one host's personal Twitter comment. 2) David Hogg made himself a national media figure voluntarily 3) Criticising someone's GPA and college acceptance rate is not comparable to the hateful commentary about the Covington students. The main thing I wonder about after reading that story is the aftermath. If eleven advertisers dropped Ingraham over that comment, how many have dropped the liberal media over their attacks on the Convington high school students?
tome 8y ago
> It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell Is that new?
- weberc2 8y ago
  In my memory they used to try to tell all perspectives in their own terms. That stopped in the last decade, IMO.
refurb 8y ago
This sums it up well. Either news agencies have more strongly pushed an agenda lately or I’ve become more sensitive to it. Either way, it’s impossible to ignore now and it annoys the hell out of me.

bluejekyll 8y ago

Why are you throwing NPR into that mix? NPR remains one of the few news sources that goes out of its way to try and get unbiased reporting in the US. People are people of course, so it’s impossible to be completely unbiased.

makomk 8y ago
I'm still baffled how NPR screwed up their story on Trump Jr supposedly lying to Congress so badly, though. If you didn't see it, they took his replies to questions about whether any other negotiations to build in Russia were going on at the same time as Cohen's ones, quoted them without context, pretended he was saying Cohen wasn't negotiating in Russia then in contradiction to Cohen's court testimony, and used this to make it look like Trump Jr had lied to Congress. Any fact checker, editor or reporter who'd bothered to check the quotes the story relied on should've caught this. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from a shady conspiracy theory peddler. (The original version: http://archive.is/ozzmb http://archive.is/ozzmb )
Sir_Vival 8y ago
That's used to be true but in the past two years they've gotten quite bad. For instance, during the child separation story they called it "President Trump's child separation policy," when describing it. Only weeks later did they call it "the increase of child separations due to President Trump's zero tolerance policy." It was known the day the story broke that he didn't enact the policy.
Sir_Vival 8y ago
That used to be true but in the past two years they've gotten quite bad. For instance, during the child separation story they called it "President Trump's child separation policy," when describing it. Only weeks later did they call it "the increase of child separations due to President Trump's zero tolerance policy." It was known the day the story broke that he didn't enact the policy.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

Reuters is still pretty decent.

zbentley 8y ago
Reuters also rarely reports on local news, which is the crisis outlined in the post.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  All news is local news, unless Reuters reports it.

ekianjo 8y ago

> and they are always on the lookout for facts to back up those narratives Confirmation bias is fake news. Because you only pick up the details that fit your narrative, shutting down everything else. A true neutral viewpoint would share all aspects of the story from the get go.

geezerjay 8y ago
> Confirmation bias is fake news. Because you only pick up the details that fit your narrative, shutting down everything else. That's a pretty weak strawman. As a non-US citizen who never set foot near the US, I found the MAGA story to be a pretty blatant example of fake news that was clearly pushed in spite of any fact check or impartiality. When I first saw the video pushed by US's media corporations my first reaction was to have a very negative opinion about the kid in particular and the whole political movement in general. But afterwards I had the opportunity to see the whole video, without being subjected to the blatant manipulation, and the real story is radically different than the narrative that was pushed by the media. Any journalist and specially editors who had access to the video clearly knew they were blatantly lying to the public and were intentionally misrepresenting the events, but they did so to push their agenda. This has nothing to do with confirmation bias.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  You are talking about one story. I'm talking about news in general. I don't think most journalists are deliberately lying most of the time, but it's much more likely they suffer from confirmation bias - that's something we are all subject to, by the way. But journalists should go the extra mile, it'S their job after all: they are not supposed to be activists.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    > You are talking about one story. I'm talking about news in general. I'm pointing a clear example where there was a general push for a falsified news report to push a narrative. There is no way around this. Other examples also exist, but they fly under the radar or aren't so eggregious.

solarwind 8y ago

This. I used to think "fake news" was far-right baloney, but I've come to lose all faith in the journalistic integrity of the New York Times and WaPo. This recent piece for the NYT was a bizarrely flattering story about an anti-gay, anti-Semitic hate group is a good example. They have a narrative to push and will push it with any available facts and information. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/us/black-hebrew-israelites-covington-catholic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/us/black-hebrew-israelite...

rdtsc 8y ago
That was a bizarre article they do mention these people spout out terrible insults and threats and are categorized as a hate group but it turns around and excuses that because it's well, Trump's fault of course, and it's not all that bad because they see it as "preaching".
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often knowingly dishonest. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter ...Which was 95 years ago. The difference now that is the rhetoric is often more obviously slanted and more likely to be nakedly inflammatory. The 50s/60s/70s had more of a tradition of restrained debate. But the politeness was always superficial. Politics was at least as murderous and corrupt as it is now. But the more measured tone, and the superficial respect for critique and analysis, made it appear more civilised. Now the tone is more likely to be extreme, which creates the illusion that obviously manipulative "fake news" is more the rule than the exception - and that this is historically different, when in fact it isn't at all.
- weberc2 8y ago
  > There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often knowingly dishonest. Perhaps, but surely the media used to be less biased, and it’s worth striving to get back to that place.
  - 8y ago

mac01021 8y ago

> we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell Link please? Sometimes I feel like I must live under a rock.

PixyMisa 8y ago
What's the rent like under there? Asking for a friend.
yepyep12 8y ago
Easy, just look at reporting on mass shootings. What there is a white person doing a mass shooting (e.g., 3 days ago in Florida) the entire paper is about "senseless violence", "deeply disturbed individuals" and unexplained pain and suffering. When a brown person is doing a mass shooting, there is almost almost always a narrative about terrorism and how obviously the person must have been a terrorist and we just need to somehow find the link, even if the person has no clear link to anything. The WaPo is pretty balanced on this front. But dont pretend the NYT is unbaised here. WSJ is certainly biased.
- mac01021 8y ago
  These papers' reporting biases have been well known for years. But the GP makes it sound like a particular story aired last week that focused specifically on an AGENDA the papers are pursuing. An agenda is much more than a bias. It's a set of goals and a strategy for pursuing them. A systematic bias can be a big part of that strategy. But the goals and their origin are far more interesting.
nostromo 8y ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...

CM30 8y ago

Yeah, this is a thing that's been a problem for a while now, and not just with the NYT and WaPo. Media organisations will basically not fact check anything that fits in with their worldview, which for the 'left wing' versions usually means: - Supports the idea that racism/nationalism/xenophobia is increasing cause of Trump/Brexit/whatever And the 'right wing' versions often means something similar about immigration and increased crime or political correctness. If a story fits those beats, then they'll often buy it without question, foregoing the basic background research needed in the process. That's why the Covington Catholic school kids thing got publicised so much; it fit very nicely (at first glance) with the idea that Trump voters are racist/horrible people, seemingly showed a confrontation between them and a native American tribesperson and helped the narrative many organisations wanted to push. Same with the case of that guy being 'thrown off a plane for speaking Arabic'. He wasn't, but the story fit the whole 'hate against Muslims increased after Trump election' narrative. Any fact checking at all would debunk these stories and the 'message' being pushed on social media sites, yet it wasn't done until way later. Same goes with another story I saw about a trans eSports team supposedly getting banned from a gender specific tournament. Team didn't actually exist and the story was a troll job meant to rile up one side, but media sympathetic to said side bought it hook, line and sinker. Honestly, a good journalist needs to be more skeptical about stories they agree with than disagree with (or at least equally so), and it's clear that most today aren't like that at all.

matt4077 8y ago

There are multiple stories about the mistakes that were made with the story you are alluding to in every major reputable news source, I. e. for The Atlantic: The Media Botched the Covington Story: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must... I Failed the Coving On Catholic Test: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/julie-irwin-zimmerman-i-failed-covington-catholic-test/580897/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/julie-irwi... Muddling the Covington Catholic Student Video: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/01/muddling-the-covington-catholic-student-video-the-atlantic-daily/580912/ https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/01/mudd... That sort of soul-searching does not happen, indeed it wouldn’t fit into even a 24h-channel, at Fox News.

leereeves 8y ago
Has Fox News ever led a national media lynching of a high school student? (That's a serious question, I don't watch them and I'd like to know if they really are as bad as people say or if people just hate them because they don't agree.)
- untog 8y ago
  One person that immediately comes to mind is David Hogg. They certainly never held back criticism of him because he's a minor, and a host made a strange attack on him via social media: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/mar/31/fox-news-laura-ingraham-david-hogg https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/mar/31/fox-news-laura...
  - leereeves 8y ago
    That fails to convince me for at least three reasons: 1) Fox didn't say it; it was one host's personal Twitter comment. 2) David Hogg made himself a national media figure voluntarily 3) Criticising someone's GPA and college acceptance rate is not comparable to the hateful commentary about the Covington students. The main thing I wonder about after reading that story is the aftermath. If eleven advertisers dropped Ingraham over that comment, how many have dropped the liberal media over their attacks on the Convington high school students?

tome 8y ago

> It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell Is that new?

weberc2 8y ago
In my memory they used to try to tell all perspectives in their own terms. That stopped in the last decade, IMO.

refurb 8y ago

This sums it up well. Either news agencies have more strongly pushed an agenda lately or I’ve become more sensitive to it. Either way, it’s impossible to ignore now and it annoys the hell out of me.