14 ms·

NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

275 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
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umvi 7y ago
"Straightforward" extrapolation is the worst! Reminds me of the RIAA damages numbers often quoted in courts "Well, it was a $2 mp3, and ~100M copies were downloaded, that's $2 * 100M = $200M in lost revenue/damages!!" As if 1 download = 1 guaranteed lost sale. On the contrary sometimes 1 download = 1 future sale where there was none before! By that logic the easiest way to make a million is just to download (or copy) a $1 mp3 1M times - congrats, you now own $1M in assets!
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  > By that logic the easiest way to make a million is just to download (or copy) a $1 mp3 1M times - congrats, you now own $1M in assets! No. That's the easiest way to owe $1M.
- p1necone 7y ago
  Or police talking about seizing X million dollars worth of drugs where they're getting their valuation from street value but seizing the drugs in wholesale quantities from the manufacturer - and ignoring the fact that a large portion of the labor/risk that contributes to that price hasn't actually happened yet.
  - maceurt 7y ago
    Well, they usually say that it is its "street value", and is pretty accurate of how much money is being taken away from the drug economy.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      Will it be taken away though? Wouldn't the prices just adjust to the supply that is now significantly smaller?
      - moorhosj 7y ago
        I’m not sure drugs are that perfect of a market. The buyer doesn’t really have visibility into price/quality across sellers and drug buyers are not always rational, two conditions for perfect competition.[1] Actual economics is far more complex than the simple supply/demand curve taught in 101 classes. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
        luckylion 7y ago
        Sure, it certainly won't immediately adjust perfectly, but when authorities close some route or bust a large shipment, there will likely be some price change because of limited supply, increased risk (and cost) for transportation, right. It's not like drug buyers will just say "oh, you don't have any this month? okay, see you in six weeks".
      - anchpop 7y ago
        Reducing supply will remove money from the economy, although less than the amount of money that was taken (the same happens whenever the government levies a tax).
- rhino369 7y ago
  This is amateur hour RIAA damages calculations. To get a truly spicy number you gotta multiply the number of downloads by the statutory limit for willful infringement--$150,000 per infringed song. So your ipod 4th gen with 5000 songs is worth $750 million.
fyoving 7y ago
The NYT is yet to publish a correction to an article publicizing a comically erroneous study suggesting a relationship between Facebook use and attacks on refugees in Germany: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/facebook-causing-anti-refugee-attacks-germany.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/fa... They have been running smear campaigns against tech companies for years and then act dumb and ask about the change in sentiment towards them.
- fwip 7y ago
  The NYT summary sounds accurate to me. > > Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent. > That sounds horrible, but it is actually a claim about variation across municipalities, not a claim about the absolute importance of the internet. That's why they used the word "wherever," to emphasis that it was based on locality. That seems to form the bulk of Mr Cowen's objection. The remainder appears to be recitation of the stock phrase "correlation is not causation," mock horror and snark about the methods the study used (Nutella! heaven forbid!), and expressing his general confusion about parts of the study he doesn't understand. To my eyes, this doesn't appear to be a "comically erroneous study," unless, as Mr. Cowen does, you find great intrinsic humor in the concept of Nutella. Nor does the NYT reporting on it seem to misrepresent the study any more than articles for the layperson usually do.
- briandear 7y ago
  But yet, we give them credibility on political stories? That’s what makes no sense to me, we call them out on stories in which we have close experience, but we accept their stories on politics as if they were “objective,” because they happen to support our own bias. A story biased against the president: totally true, it’s “respectable” journalism. A story pushing an anti-Google agenda, “what were they thinking, this isn’t true!” People want to believe they are right and they find outlets that agree with them and claim them “objective.” A conservative thinks Limbaugh is correct, a liberal thinks Maddow is correct. It’s a circle jerk of self congratulation that leads to sharply partisan hatred. Unfortunately there isn’t a Walter Cronkite to find the objective middle.
woodgrainz 7y ago
This article is solid sanity check on the NYT story discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146090
alt_f4 7y ago
NYT does itself no favors with regard to its already questionable credibility by spreading anti-tech propaganda.
noetic_techy 7y ago
The New York Times is no longer the steady unbias pillar it once was. They hire fresh out SJW types to do their writing and it shows. Once I finally came to that realization, I stopped taking them seriously, but I feel others have not quite reached that epiphany yet. Keep in mind they almost went bankrupt if it were not for Carlos Slim bailing them out. Then you saw a bunch of praise pieces about Slim, and you realize much of the old guard is gone. That should have been the first red flag. The NYT lives off its names legacy reputations alone, but all the quality journalism is gone, with just refined legacy veneer wrapped around very questionable bias premises for most stories.
- jimbob45 7y ago
  https://nyti.ms/2rznv8D https://nyti.ms/2rznv8D Based on your comment, I, and I'm sure many others, would have quickly countered by pointing out that it shouldn't matter who you hire provided you have a competent and passionate ombudsman to rein in your inadequacies as a company. However, the link I've provided shows that they fired (without replacement) their ombudsman in 2017. This certainly supports your argument.
- ergothus 7y ago
  > The New York Times is no longer the steady unbias pillar it once was Okay, I'm open to hearing this - I've certainly noticed a decrease in quality (vs quantity - NYT still leads there) vs, say, the Washington Post. > They hire fresh out SJW types I'm not even sure what this means. I'm used to seeing "SJW" as an attack label that is absent actual meaning, similar to "snowflake" or "libtard", stemming from groups stauchly biased themselves. Are you using it here as an attack based on political belief, or do you have some more nuanced substantive meaning? The rest of your comment doesn't expand on this "epiphany" so I'm left uncertain as to your argument.
  - ianamartin 7y ago
    It certainly can be used as you described, but it doesn't have to be. I sort of loosely define an SJW as someone who 1) believes that the law should be wielded to enforce their version of morality, 2) that the correctness of their morality justifies pretty much any means of attaining it, and 3) that doing anything to further their goal is always preferable to doing nothing to further their goal, even if a specific thing is likely to have adverse consequences. That's a pretty broad definition that almost includes religious people on the right wing of the spectrum, and that's pretty much what I would say is the only difference between a Social Justice Warrior and a Religious Justice Warrior--the source of where they validate their brand of morality. Other than that, they are approximately identical in both their methods and the extent to which they are damaging to liberal democracy. I recognize that this is probably not a very common definition, and your point about SJW being a meaningless insult is likely the correct one.
eric_b 7y ago
Huh, it's as if the NYT has a narrative they wish to push, and will use lazy/questionable journalism to do it... Makes ya wonder what other topics they're doing this with...
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  WMD comes to mind.
  - davidw 7y ago
    "But her emails!" They're kind of maddening in some ways. They certainly do crap like that, but also still do some occasional really good investigative reporting. I subscribed to the Washington Post, as it's cheap through Amazon and they seem to be doing a bit better job in some ways.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    That has more with W's threats to cut off press room access to anyone who wouldn't stick to the patriotic script they wanted everyone to follow.
    - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
      Tell that to the wives, sons and daughters. How many dead soldiers and Iraqis is attending a press briefing worth?
    - WillPostForFood 7y ago
      citation?
    - Macross8299 7y ago
      Is "losing press room access" supposed to be some understandable defense of knowingly deceiving the public into a war? Doesn't seem all that different from the days of William Randolph Hearst.
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nailer 7y ago
The NYT also deliberately blurs the lines between any kind of non-leftist thinking (traditional conservative views, non-left liberal thinking, criticism of Islam or illegal immigration) and 'alt right' - a term created by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who wants to create a white ethnostate which (at least according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right) describes far right hate groups. I know people who work at the NYT. They're absolutely smart enough to know the difference.
- xnyan 7y ago
  That's funny, I see the NYT as a mid-conservative publisher that regularly equates modern leftist thought with communism in defense of their rich conservative owners. NYT regularly normalizes far-right fascists and runs over moderately liberal thinkers. I also know people who work at the NYT who share this view. Maybe it's our priors having more influence on our thought than we think, but NYT owners are the among the most wealthy so I tend to believe basic psychological principles/people acting in their own interest is what is closest to truth.
  - dbt00 7y ago
    NYT straddles a line between being institutionally conservative while having a majority liberal staff and subscriber base. It creates pattern matching hits for both sides. MSNBC has similar issues.
- moorhosj 7y ago
  What’s the basis for this claim? Where do Ross Douthat and David Brooks fit in your model?
  - nailer 7y ago
    This article: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1137539862293372928 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1137539862293372928 Read the follow up tweets for some more context. I'm a liberal, and happen to watch Ben Shapiro (an Othodox Jewish lawyer who records a conservative podcast) and follow Lauren Southern (the filmmaker who looks at people smuggling and illegal immigration, who directed the film 'Borderless') - both are mentioned in the 'online radicalisation' piece above. Other fairly boring, obviously non-alt-right sources mentioned in the piece are Milton Friedman (who won a Nobel Prize for Economics) and Jordan Peterson. Those are all very obviously non-alt-right, but included in what would seem to be a rather shady attempt to smear non-leftist sources. I haven't heard of the people you mention.
dqpb 7y ago
NYT has been systematically attacking US tech for years. I'm curious why. I ignored it for the most part, until I paid more attention to their hypocritical advertising, user tracking, and the unforgivable dark patterns they use to throttle unsubscribes - the state of residency feature flag for online unsubscribe / forcing the subscriber to hold on the phone for an hour before triaging them to a sales rep. Fuck you NYT.
donohoe 7y ago
This Twitter thread on this subject from Dir of Ad Tech at The Washington Post is worth reading: https://twitter.com/chronotope/status/1138074631980683264 https://twitter.com/chronotope/status/1138074631980683264
- graeme 7y ago
  Seems weak. Media are free to make alternative adtech. Google’s ad system has made them more money though. And the above would be true even if Google News didn’t exist. The media has incredibly sloppy thinking about their business model. What monopoly prevents the post from managing their own ads? They choose not to.
  - graeme 7y ago
    I should update this to say that AMP seems much more of a thing to critique as regards the news and adtech. Thought of this while reading today's thread on how a bug in AMP prevents links to a publisher's web page. News sites more or less must use amp to rank, I think, which means they need google adtech. Could be wrong, not an expert, but it seems an actual legit critique the media could make.
scotchio 7y ago
To be fair... The front page of Hacker News is pretty much a Google hate hangoutfest -- so maybe cut some slack on this one... I'm sure the NYT reporter was not acting malicious. Maybe they will even issue correction or update in time. No one would argue that speed of social media and corrections is not ideal, but I would bet they are trying to be accurate and transparent with their readers. I just seriously doubt the reporter and editors who published this info did so solely with the goal to attack Google by "promoting" a questionable study. Wrong/Lazy/Dumb != Evil
- ha99ja 7y ago
  The NYT is pretty known for propaganda. Assuming it is not acting malicious is not a good assumption.
- darawk 7y ago
  No, but they published something that confirmed their priors, and didn't due their due diligence on it because it confirmed their priors and was the kind of story they wanted to write. They have to be held to account for that.
  - scotchio 7y ago
    Agree. Just don't see it as malicious
    - wpasc 7y ago
      Perhaps not malicious, but publishing a more or less BS story to fit a narrative is not far from malicious on the spectrum of intention (especially if the narrative is in the NYT's business interests).
    - solveit 7y ago
      Malice is completely unnecessary for the world to go to shit. Very few people are actually malicious in any meaningful sense of the term. Most bad things happen when generally good people cut corners.
legitster 7y ago
So many studies make such bald and ridiculous assumptions but never get called out for them. Or the results of "studies" where the methods aren't even public! Linking to a "study" to validate a point is so easy and trivial. I can find studies that validate any position I need. But having "a study show" makes my argument seem truthful and academic. In that regard, "studies" seem to have a cargo cult where people happy collect and link to them but never bother to validate them. Did they not bother to actually run the numbers by anyone at all? Did it being a "study" magically make it pure and true?
espeed 7y ago
In a nutshell, Elizabeth Hansen's Harvard research group got it right... "Internet platform economics were going to swamp the majority of publishers no matter what—there is (almost) no market for their products any more; not because they couldn’t make one, but because that’s not how internet economics work." https://twitter.com/ehansen02/status/1138077051934707714 https://twitter.com/ehansen02/status/1138077051934707714
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fareesh 7y ago
The NYT recently hired someone to their editorial board who appears to be a brazen and open racist. I don't mean some kind of innuendo racist, but someone with multiple tweets like this: "Are <ethnic group> genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?" The NYT excused this this as her way of "imitating the rhetoric" of those who were harassing her online. I'm inclined to side with them because I think everyone ought to have the opportunity to address any of their past statements publicly before being condemned by "the paper of record". However: Anyone that's been paying attention to the news media knows that there is no way they would offer this opportunity or indulge this kind of a charitable interpretation. This article is likely proof of that, given that so many have not been offered the opportunity to comment on the way they/their videos have been represented.
- isbadawi 7y ago
  https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1025484876278112261 https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1025484876278112261
  - avinium 7y ago
    I'm glad you posted this. I was aware of the original tweet a few years ago, but didn't know the context until now. I haven't read the referenced article so I can't comment on whether it's a valid criticism or not. But it's clearly satirical.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      To be fair, she has had a steady stream of Tweets going back to 2014 that were pretty unambiguously racist (or if you're of the "you can't be racist against white people" persuasion, some other term that means something like "anti-white"), so you could be forgiven for mistaking the context in this one case.
  - fareesh 7y ago
    https://imgur.com/pPiOatP https://imgur.com/pPiOatP The latter half of my comment deals with this - hint: I'm not opposed to people being given a chance to explain, or being charitable and permissive to all speech.
buboard 7y ago
Google spreads way more misniformation than nyt, they aren't worth defending.
- weberc2 7y ago
  It's not a dichotomy, we can and must hold both accountable. This race-to-the-bottom thinking is ruinous.
jrochkind1 7y ago
> After quoting the head of the News Media Alliance, David Chavern, as saying newspapers deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion, > One of the most glaring omissions from the report, mentioned by a number of media-industry observers, is the ad revenue newspapers generate from the pageviews they get via Google News and Google search. The search company says publishers get more than 10 billion clicks every month (the value of which differs depending on the publisher). When asked for comment, the NMA tells CJR the purpose of the report was to look at how much Google benefits from news, not the opposite. Uh, so it sounds like Google deserves a cut of the ad revenue directed via Google News then. Man, there's no trustworthy journalism left, is there?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Was there ever?
- wyxuan 7y ago
  One blemish is not enough to cast away the entire credibility of the source. NYT has published a lot of original reporting that has proven to be true, but of course that doesn't matter on this conversation at all, doesn't it.
  - d33 7y ago
    It's not just about that, it's more about signal to noise ratio and the impact of their stories. When one deliberately adds a spin to specific categories of news, it's easy to prove them manipulative and thus, not trustworthy. The fact that they currently report correctly on the things outside of their agenda is not that relevant since it's just a matter of time before it becomes their agenda as well. Media should strive for objectivity.
shereadsthenews 7y ago
This is why I unsubd from the NYT and why it makes me sad: 99% solid journalism but 1% hot garbage is not a good enough ratio. Just in my adult lifetime this newspaper has materially contributed to both the Iraq War and the election of Trump, and now they use their paper to try to destroy me industry because their industry, which for decades was an abusive cartel exploiting advertisers, is having an angry death fit. I wish there were more outlets for journalism that don't have old-media baggage.
ralph84 7y ago
Any time I see an article in a "mainstream" news outlet on a topic I'm familiar with, the inaccuracies make me cringe. The more familiar I am with the topic, the more inaccuracies I spot. The charitable interpretation is that news outlets have been so decimated by changes in their business model that they can't afford good editors. There are plenty of less charitable interpretations.
- gundmc 7y ago
  Sounds like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect[1]. We notice the innacuracies in the fields we are familiar with and then readily believe stories outside of our expertise. Disclaimer - reporting is critically important and by and large journalists are doing their best to understand and describe incredibly complex and esoteric subjects. It's always good to remember there is a lot more nuance behind just about every story than surface level would indicate. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
  - kortilla 7y ago
    >reporting is critically important and by and large journalists are doing their best to understand and describe incredibly complex and esoteric subjects. No, by and large they absolutely aren’t doing their best. If they were the Gell-Mann amnesia effect wouldn’t be so prominent because it’s trivial to run stories by experts on topics. Most reporters are crunched for time and just churn out crap as fast as possible.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      Which expert on journalism production processes did you query to verify that statement?
      - whenchamenia 7y ago
        You can simply observe the output and see the bias. Its not a theoretical matter.
rayiner 7y ago
> Several observers noted the story was timed in such a way as to provide maximum publicity for a bill that the New Media Alliance has been promoting to Congress, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. The proposed legislation would exempt newspaper companies from competition laws, which prevent industry-leading entities from collaborating to set prices. The NMA argues this would allow publishers to lobby Google and other platforms for better financial compensation together instead of individually. On one hand, you can’t make this stuff up. A “competition” bill that exempts companies from competition laws. On the other hand, this is the problem with the “content middleman” business. By leveraging its near monopoly over eyeballs, Google can negotiate to receive an outsized share of the revenues from people viewing say NYT content, relative to the value Google adds to the transition. That is also why I welcome the rise of competition in movie/TV streaming, even if it means subscribing to multiple services. The value added by any particular streaming service is pretty minimal. (Except for Netflix original content, Netflix is streaming say NBC’s content from Amazon’s servers over Verizon’s wires to an app using video codecs developed by Sony/etc.) Netflix, etc., isn’t adding nothing, there is a value to the curation and licensing deals, but it’s status as a middleman would allow it to wrestle a much larger share of the profit from the transaction than the share of value it adds.
- sametmax 7y ago
  Except netflix will probably die and you'll get the choice between 2 bullies : amazon and disney. Also I have a hard time feeling sorry for the traditional press. They spend decades killing their own reputation and now paying the price. They could have had web sites so reputable, so popular, that they would have been the news hub. Instead they turned internet into the bad guy, kept publishing political agendas and sensasionalist headlines and hoped we would suck it up as we did when they were king of the hill.
  - mr_t 7y ago
    Naive question: What makes you think that Netflix will probably die?
    - 7y ago
thrower123 7y ago
If you expect better of the New York Times, you haven't been paying attention for the past few years.
TehCorwiz 7y ago
". . .this would allow publishers to lobby Google and other platforms for better financial compensation together instead of individually." Something something collective bargaining.
deleted 7y ago
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_cs2017_ 7y ago
Why is not only the conservative, but even the liberal media so strongly anti-tech? Google, Facebook, and the majority of other tech firms are extraordinarily liberal, far beyond the normal California bias. And not only are their executives and employees overwhelmingly liberal, the companies often act on those beliefs (by supporting various political causes, creating a certain liberal emphasis in their educational tools, etc). Or, put another way, how did the tech firms manage to become enemies with the liberals despite being on their side in the political battle?
- bryan_w 7y ago
  Someone made the believe that big tech was responsible for getting trump elected
in3d 7y ago
Why don’t these news publishers come together and make a competitor to Google News? Google News is a poor product. It cannot do basic NLP things right, like properly grouping related news. The titles that are chosen as the first ones to display often don’t convey the story. Irrelevant or extremely partisan stories are prominently listed. “More stories like this” or “fewer stories like this” does nothing. The publishers could ban Google News from displaying their headlines and include snippets on their service, so they wouldn’t even need to compete fairly. To me it seems that they are scared to losing short term traffic and lack a long-term vision.
- gipp 7y ago
  Absolutely none of the things you listed are anything close to "basic". Those are things that newsrooms full of talented and well-coordinated professionals regularly get wrong, let alone software algorithms. You're listing massive, completely unsolved problems and acting like they're table stakes.
blablabla123 7y ago
> and the figure quoted by the Times—without any critical assessment whatsoever—appears to be based almost entirely on questionable mathematical extrapolation from a comment made by a former Google executive more than a decade ago They definitely have a point, without putting a tremendous effort into this, one must have to use very speculative mathematical extrapolation. Although I'm not sure whether it would ever be worth to put additional mathematical rigour into this because that would be a lot of work. Speaking of myself, for many years Google News has been my starting point for using the internet and self-speaking for getting myself a news update. News sources have become replaceable and I was always thinking: oh nice, so I'm always reading articles from various sources/perspectives, so this must eliminate virtually all bias. But what has happened in reality is this: - many news companies closed down/were merged into other companies - often agency news (Reuters, AP, ...) are copy&pasted into articles - some online newspapers mostly put bot generated news that seems to be automatically assembled from agency news and correspondent's; the quality and readability of this is almost 0 So for me a tipping point has been reached and I switched back to going directly to news magazine/paper websites. Also I've subscribed to 2 paid subscriptions. I feel much better informed with more relevant information.
whenchamenia 7y ago
NYT, the most prolific poster on HN, caught out again, like every month it seems. Yet they still rule the front page. When will people stand up to bad journalalism being pushed on them?

275 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

umvi 7y ago

"Straightforward" extrapolation is the worst! Reminds me of the RIAA damages numbers often quoted in courts "Well, it was a $2 mp3, and ~100M copies were downloaded, that's $2 * 100M = $200M in lost revenue/damages!!" As if 1 download = 1 guaranteed lost sale. On the contrary sometimes 1 download = 1 future sale where there was none before! By that logic the easiest way to make a million is just to download (or copy) a $1 mp3 1M times - congrats, you now own $1M in assets!

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
> By that logic the easiest way to make a million is just to download (or copy) a $1 mp3 1M times - congrats, you now own $1M in assets! No. That's the easiest way to owe $1M.
p1necone 7y ago
Or police talking about seizing X million dollars worth of drugs where they're getting their valuation from street value but seizing the drugs in wholesale quantities from the manufacturer - and ignoring the fact that a large portion of the labor/risk that contributes to that price hasn't actually happened yet.
- maceurt 7y ago
  Well, they usually say that it is its "street value", and is pretty accurate of how much money is being taken away from the drug economy.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Will it be taken away though? Wouldn't the prices just adjust to the supply that is now significantly smaller?
    - moorhosj 7y ago
      I’m not sure drugs are that perfect of a market. The buyer doesn’t really have visibility into price/quality across sellers and drug buyers are not always rational, two conditions for perfect competition.[1] Actual economics is far more complex than the simple supply/demand curve taught in 101 classes. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
      - luckylion 7y ago
        Sure, it certainly won't immediately adjust perfectly, but when authorities close some route or bust a large shipment, there will likely be some price change because of limited supply, increased risk (and cost) for transportation, right. It's not like drug buyers will just say "oh, you don't have any this month? okay, see you in six weeks".
    - anchpop 7y ago
      Reducing supply will remove money from the economy, although less than the amount of money that was taken (the same happens whenever the government levies a tax).
rhino369 7y ago
This is amateur hour RIAA damages calculations. To get a truly spicy number you gotta multiply the number of downloads by the statutory limit for willful infringement--$150,000 per infringed song. So your ipod 4th gen with 5000 songs is worth $750 million.

fyoving 7y ago

The NYT is yet to publish a correction to an article publicizing a comically erroneous study suggesting a relationship between Facebook use and attacks on refugees in Germany: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/facebook-causing-anti-refugee-attacks-germany.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/fa... They have been running smear campaigns against tech companies for years and then act dumb and ask about the change in sentiment towards them.

fwip 7y ago
The NYT summary sounds accurate to me. > > Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent. > That sounds horrible, but it is actually a claim about variation across municipalities, not a claim about the absolute importance of the internet. That's why they used the word "wherever," to emphasis that it was based on locality. That seems to form the bulk of Mr Cowen's objection. The remainder appears to be recitation of the stock phrase "correlation is not causation," mock horror and snark about the methods the study used (Nutella! heaven forbid!), and expressing his general confusion about parts of the study he doesn't understand. To my eyes, this doesn't appear to be a "comically erroneous study," unless, as Mr. Cowen does, you find great intrinsic humor in the concept of Nutella. Nor does the NYT reporting on it seem to misrepresent the study any more than articles for the layperson usually do.
briandear 7y ago
But yet, we give them credibility on political stories? That’s what makes no sense to me, we call them out on stories in which we have close experience, but we accept their stories on politics as if they were “objective,” because they happen to support our own bias. A story biased against the president: totally true, it’s “respectable” journalism. A story pushing an anti-Google agenda, “what were they thinking, this isn’t true!” People want to believe they are right and they find outlets that agree with them and claim them “objective.” A conservative thinks Limbaugh is correct, a liberal thinks Maddow is correct. It’s a circle jerk of self congratulation that leads to sharply partisan hatred. Unfortunately there isn’t a Walter Cronkite to find the objective middle.

woodgrainz 7y ago

This article is solid sanity check on the NYT story discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146090

alt_f4 7y ago

NYT does itself no favors with regard to its already questionable credibility by spreading anti-tech propaganda.

noetic_techy 7y ago

The New York Times is no longer the steady unbias pillar it once was. They hire fresh out SJW types to do their writing and it shows. Once I finally came to that realization, I stopped taking them seriously, but I feel others have not quite reached that epiphany yet. Keep in mind they almost went bankrupt if it were not for Carlos Slim bailing them out. Then you saw a bunch of praise pieces about Slim, and you realize much of the old guard is gone. That should have been the first red flag. The NYT lives off its names legacy reputations alone, but all the quality journalism is gone, with just refined legacy veneer wrapped around very questionable bias premises for most stories.

jimbob45 7y ago
https://nyti.ms/2rznv8D https://nyti.ms/2rznv8D Based on your comment, I, and I'm sure many others, would have quickly countered by pointing out that it shouldn't matter who you hire provided you have a competent and passionate ombudsman to rein in your inadequacies as a company. However, the link I've provided shows that they fired (without replacement) their ombudsman in 2017. This certainly supports your argument.
ergothus 7y ago
> The New York Times is no longer the steady unbias pillar it once was Okay, I'm open to hearing this - I've certainly noticed a decrease in quality (vs quantity - NYT still leads there) vs, say, the Washington Post. > They hire fresh out SJW types I'm not even sure what this means. I'm used to seeing "SJW" as an attack label that is absent actual meaning, similar to "snowflake" or "libtard", stemming from groups stauchly biased themselves. Are you using it here as an attack based on political belief, or do you have some more nuanced substantive meaning? The rest of your comment doesn't expand on this "epiphany" so I'm left uncertain as to your argument.
- ianamartin 7y ago
  It certainly can be used as you described, but it doesn't have to be. I sort of loosely define an SJW as someone who 1) believes that the law should be wielded to enforce their version of morality, 2) that the correctness of their morality justifies pretty much any means of attaining it, and 3) that doing anything to further their goal is always preferable to doing nothing to further their goal, even if a specific thing is likely to have adverse consequences. That's a pretty broad definition that almost includes religious people on the right wing of the spectrum, and that's pretty much what I would say is the only difference between a Social Justice Warrior and a Religious Justice Warrior--the source of where they validate their brand of morality. Other than that, they are approximately identical in both their methods and the extent to which they are damaging to liberal democracy. I recognize that this is probably not a very common definition, and your point about SJW being a meaningless insult is likely the correct one.

eric_b 7y ago

Huh, it's as if the NYT has a narrative they wish to push, and will use lazy/questionable journalism to do it... Makes ya wonder what other topics they're doing this with...

fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
WMD comes to mind.
- davidw 7y ago
  "But her emails!" They're kind of maddening in some ways. They certainly do crap like that, but also still do some occasional really good investigative reporting. I subscribed to the Washington Post, as it's cheap through Amazon and they seem to be doing a bit better job in some ways.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  That has more with W's threats to cut off press room access to anyone who wouldn't stick to the patriotic script they wanted everyone to follow.
  - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
    Tell that to the wives, sons and daughters. How many dead soldiers and Iraqis is attending a press briefing worth?
  - WillPostForFood 7y ago
    citation?
  - Macross8299 7y ago
    Is "losing press room access" supposed to be some understandable defense of knowingly deceiving the public into a war? Doesn't seem all that different from the days of William Randolph Hearst.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nailer 7y ago

The NYT also deliberately blurs the lines between any kind of non-leftist thinking (traditional conservative views, non-left liberal thinking, criticism of Islam or illegal immigration) and 'alt right' - a term created by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who wants to create a white ethnostate which (at least according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right) describes far right hate groups. I know people who work at the NYT. They're absolutely smart enough to know the difference.

xnyan 7y ago
That's funny, I see the NYT as a mid-conservative publisher that regularly equates modern leftist thought with communism in defense of their rich conservative owners. NYT regularly normalizes far-right fascists and runs over moderately liberal thinkers. I also know people who work at the NYT who share this view. Maybe it's our priors having more influence on our thought than we think, but NYT owners are the among the most wealthy so I tend to believe basic psychological principles/people acting in their own interest is what is closest to truth.
- dbt00 7y ago
  NYT straddles a line between being institutionally conservative while having a majority liberal staff and subscriber base. It creates pattern matching hits for both sides. MSNBC has similar issues.
moorhosj 7y ago
What’s the basis for this claim? Where do Ross Douthat and David Brooks fit in your model?
- nailer 7y ago
  This article: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1137539862293372928 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1137539862293372928 Read the follow up tweets for some more context. I'm a liberal, and happen to watch Ben Shapiro (an Othodox Jewish lawyer who records a conservative podcast) and follow Lauren Southern (the filmmaker who looks at people smuggling and illegal immigration, who directed the film 'Borderless') - both are mentioned in the 'online radicalisation' piece above. Other fairly boring, obviously non-alt-right sources mentioned in the piece are Milton Friedman (who won a Nobel Prize for Economics) and Jordan Peterson. Those are all very obviously non-alt-right, but included in what would seem to be a rather shady attempt to smear non-leftist sources. I haven't heard of the people you mention.

dqpb 7y ago

NYT has been systematically attacking US tech for years. I'm curious why. I ignored it for the most part, until I paid more attention to their hypocritical advertising, user tracking, and the unforgivable dark patterns they use to throttle unsubscribes - the state of residency feature flag for online unsubscribe / forcing the subscriber to hold on the phone for an hour before triaging them to a sales rep. Fuck you NYT.

donohoe 7y ago

This Twitter thread on this subject from Dir of Ad Tech at The Washington Post is worth reading: https://twitter.com/chronotope/status/1138074631980683264 https://twitter.com/chronotope/status/1138074631980683264

graeme 7y ago
Seems weak. Media are free to make alternative adtech. Google’s ad system has made them more money though. And the above would be true even if Google News didn’t exist. The media has incredibly sloppy thinking about their business model. What monopoly prevents the post from managing their own ads? They choose not to.
- graeme 7y ago
  I should update this to say that AMP seems much more of a thing to critique as regards the news and adtech. Thought of this while reading today's thread on how a bug in AMP prevents links to a publisher's web page. News sites more or less must use amp to rank, I think, which means they need google adtech. Could be wrong, not an expert, but it seems an actual legit critique the media could make.

scotchio 7y ago

To be fair... The front page of Hacker News is pretty much a Google hate hangoutfest -- so maybe cut some slack on this one... I'm sure the NYT reporter was not acting malicious. Maybe they will even issue correction or update in time. No one would argue that speed of social media and corrections is not ideal, but I would bet they are trying to be accurate and transparent with their readers. I just seriously doubt the reporter and editors who published this info did so solely with the goal to attack Google by "promoting" a questionable study. Wrong/Lazy/Dumb != Evil

ha99ja 7y ago
The NYT is pretty known for propaganda. Assuming it is not acting malicious is not a good assumption.
darawk 7y ago
No, but they published something that confirmed their priors, and didn't due their due diligence on it because it confirmed their priors and was the kind of story they wanted to write. They have to be held to account for that.
- scotchio 7y ago
  Agree. Just don't see it as malicious
  - wpasc 7y ago
    Perhaps not malicious, but publishing a more or less BS story to fit a narrative is not far from malicious on the spectrum of intention (especially if the narrative is in the NYT's business interests).
  - solveit 7y ago
    Malice is completely unnecessary for the world to go to shit. Very few people are actually malicious in any meaningful sense of the term. Most bad things happen when generally good people cut corners.

legitster 7y ago

So many studies make such bald and ridiculous assumptions but never get called out for them. Or the results of "studies" where the methods aren't even public! Linking to a "study" to validate a point is so easy and trivial. I can find studies that validate any position I need. But having "a study show" makes my argument seem truthful and academic. In that regard, "studies" seem to have a cargo cult where people happy collect and link to them but never bother to validate them. Did they not bother to actually run the numbers by anyone at all? Did it being a "study" magically make it pure and true?

espeed 7y ago

In a nutshell, Elizabeth Hansen's Harvard research group got it right... "Internet platform economics were going to swamp the majority of publishers no matter what—there is (almost) no market for their products any more; not because they couldn’t make one, but because that’s not how internet economics work." https://twitter.com/ehansen02/status/1138077051934707714 https://twitter.com/ehansen02/status/1138077051934707714

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fareesh 7y ago

The NYT recently hired someone to their editorial board who appears to be a brazen and open racist. I don't mean some kind of innuendo racist, but someone with multiple tweets like this: "Are <ethnic group> genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?" The NYT excused this this as her way of "imitating the rhetoric" of those who were harassing her online. I'm inclined to side with them because I think everyone ought to have the opportunity to address any of their past statements publicly before being condemned by "the paper of record". However: Anyone that's been paying attention to the news media knows that there is no way they would offer this opportunity or indulge this kind of a charitable interpretation. This article is likely proof of that, given that so many have not been offered the opportunity to comment on the way they/their videos have been represented.

isbadawi 7y ago
https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1025484876278112261 https://twitter.com/awprokop/status/1025484876278112261
- avinium 7y ago
  I'm glad you posted this. I was aware of the original tweet a few years ago, but didn't know the context until now. I haven't read the referenced article so I can't comment on whether it's a valid criticism or not. But it's clearly satirical.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    To be fair, she has had a steady stream of Tweets going back to 2014 that were pretty unambiguously racist (or if you're of the "you can't be racist against white people" persuasion, some other term that means something like "anti-white"), so you could be forgiven for mistaking the context in this one case.
- fareesh 7y ago
  https://imgur.com/pPiOatP https://imgur.com/pPiOatP The latter half of my comment deals with this - hint: I'm not opposed to people being given a chance to explain, or being charitable and permissive to all speech.

buboard 7y ago

Google spreads way more misniformation than nyt, they aren't worth defending.

weberc2 7y ago
It's not a dichotomy, we can and must hold both accountable. This race-to-the-bottom thinking is ruinous.

jrochkind1 7y ago

> After quoting the head of the News Media Alliance, David Chavern, as saying newspapers deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion, > One of the most glaring omissions from the report, mentioned by a number of media-industry observers, is the ad revenue newspapers generate from the pageviews they get via Google News and Google search. The search company says publishers get more than 10 billion clicks every month (the value of which differs depending on the publisher). When asked for comment, the NMA tells CJR the purpose of the report was to look at how much Google benefits from news, not the opposite. Uh, so it sounds like Google deserves a cut of the ad revenue directed via Google News then. Man, there's no trustworthy journalism left, is there?

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Was there ever?
wyxuan 7y ago
One blemish is not enough to cast away the entire credibility of the source. NYT has published a lot of original reporting that has proven to be true, but of course that doesn't matter on this conversation at all, doesn't it.
- d33 7y ago
  It's not just about that, it's more about signal to noise ratio and the impact of their stories. When one deliberately adds a spin to specific categories of news, it's easy to prove them manipulative and thus, not trustworthy. The fact that they currently report correctly on the things outside of their agenda is not that relevant since it's just a matter of time before it becomes their agenda as well. Media should strive for objectivity.

shereadsthenews 7y ago

This is why I unsubd from the NYT and why it makes me sad: 99% solid journalism but 1% hot garbage is not a good enough ratio. Just in my adult lifetime this newspaper has materially contributed to both the Iraq War and the election of Trump, and now they use their paper to try to destroy me industry because their industry, which for decades was an abusive cartel exploiting advertisers, is having an angry death fit. I wish there were more outlets for journalism that don't have old-media baggage.

ralph84 7y ago

Any time I see an article in a "mainstream" news outlet on a topic I'm familiar with, the inaccuracies make me cringe. The more familiar I am with the topic, the more inaccuracies I spot. The charitable interpretation is that news outlets have been so decimated by changes in their business model that they can't afford good editors. There are plenty of less charitable interpretations.

gundmc 7y ago
Sounds like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect[1]. We notice the innacuracies in the fields we are familiar with and then readily believe stories outside of our expertise. Disclaimer - reporting is critically important and by and large journalists are doing their best to understand and describe incredibly complex and esoteric subjects. It's always good to remember there is a lot more nuance behind just about every story than surface level would indicate. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- kortilla 7y ago
  >reporting is critically important and by and large journalists are doing their best to understand and describe incredibly complex and esoteric subjects. No, by and large they absolutely aren’t doing their best. If they were the Gell-Mann amnesia effect wouldn’t be so prominent because it’s trivial to run stories by experts on topics. Most reporters are crunched for time and just churn out crap as fast as possible.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    Which expert on journalism production processes did you query to verify that statement?
    - whenchamenia 7y ago
      You can simply observe the output and see the bias. Its not a theoretical matter.

rayiner 7y ago

> Several observers noted the story was timed in such a way as to provide maximum publicity for a bill that the New Media Alliance has been promoting to Congress, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. The proposed legislation would exempt newspaper companies from competition laws, which prevent industry-leading entities from collaborating to set prices. The NMA argues this would allow publishers to lobby Google and other platforms for better financial compensation together instead of individually. On one hand, you can’t make this stuff up. A “competition” bill that exempts companies from competition laws. On the other hand, this is the problem with the “content middleman” business. By leveraging its near monopoly over eyeballs, Google can negotiate to receive an outsized share of the revenues from people viewing say NYT content, relative to the value Google adds to the transition. That is also why I welcome the rise of competition in movie/TV streaming, even if it means subscribing to multiple services. The value added by any particular streaming service is pretty minimal. (Except for Netflix original content, Netflix is streaming say NBC’s content from Amazon’s servers over Verizon’s wires to an app using video codecs developed by Sony/etc.) Netflix, etc., isn’t adding nothing, there is a value to the curation and licensing deals, but it’s status as a middleman would allow it to wrestle a much larger share of the profit from the transaction than the share of value it adds.

sametmax 7y ago
Except netflix will probably die and you'll get the choice between 2 bullies : amazon and disney. Also I have a hard time feeling sorry for the traditional press. They spend decades killing their own reputation and now paying the price. They could have had web sites so reputable, so popular, that they would have been the news hub. Instead they turned internet into the bad guy, kept publishing political agendas and sensasionalist headlines and hoped we would suck it up as we did when they were king of the hill.
- mr_t 7y ago
  Naive question: What makes you think that Netflix will probably die?
  - 7y ago

thrower123 7y ago

If you expect better of the New York Times, you haven't been paying attention for the past few years.

TehCorwiz 7y ago

". . .this would allow publishers to lobby Google and other platforms for better financial compensation together instead of individually." Something something collective bargaining.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

_cs2017_ 7y ago

Why is not only the conservative, but even the liberal media so strongly anti-tech? Google, Facebook, and the majority of other tech firms are extraordinarily liberal, far beyond the normal California bias. And not only are their executives and employees overwhelmingly liberal, the companies often act on those beliefs (by supporting various political causes, creating a certain liberal emphasis in their educational tools, etc). Or, put another way, how did the tech firms manage to become enemies with the liberals despite being on their side in the political battle?

bryan_w 7y ago
Someone made the believe that big tech was responsible for getting trump elected

in3d 7y ago

Why don’t these news publishers come together and make a competitor to Google News? Google News is a poor product. It cannot do basic NLP things right, like properly grouping related news. The titles that are chosen as the first ones to display often don’t convey the story. Irrelevant or extremely partisan stories are prominently listed. “More stories like this” or “fewer stories like this” does nothing. The publishers could ban Google News from displaying their headlines and include snippets on their service, so they wouldn’t even need to compete fairly. To me it seems that they are scared to losing short term traffic and lack a long-term vision.

gipp 7y ago
Absolutely none of the things you listed are anything close to "basic". Those are things that newsrooms full of talented and well-coordinated professionals regularly get wrong, let alone software algorithms. You're listing massive, completely unsolved problems and acting like they're table stakes.

blablabla123 7y ago

> and the figure quoted by the Times—without any critical assessment whatsoever—appears to be based almost entirely on questionable mathematical extrapolation from a comment made by a former Google executive more than a decade ago They definitely have a point, without putting a tremendous effort into this, one must have to use very speculative mathematical extrapolation. Although I'm not sure whether it would ever be worth to put additional mathematical rigour into this because that would be a lot of work. Speaking of myself, for many years Google News has been my starting point for using the internet and self-speaking for getting myself a news update. News sources have become replaceable and I was always thinking: oh nice, so I'm always reading articles from various sources/perspectives, so this must eliminate virtually all bias. But what has happened in reality is this: - many news companies closed down/were merged into other companies - often agency news (Reuters, AP, ...) are copy&pasted into articles - some online newspapers mostly put bot generated news that seems to be automatically assembled from agency news and correspondent's; the quality and readability of this is almost 0 So for me a tipping point has been reached and I switched back to going directly to news magazine/paper websites. Also I've subscribed to 2 paid subscriptions. I feel much better informed with more relevant information.

whenchamenia 7y ago

NYT, the most prolific poster on HN, caught out again, like every month it seems. Yet they still rule the front page. When will people stand up to bad journalalism being pushed on them?