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During my career in IT the New York Times did a handful of articles involving either the small company I worked for or on some subject area I was heavily involv

During my career in IT the New York Times did a handful of articles involving either the small company I worked for or on some subject area I was heavily involved in. Each time I was amazed at the level of inaccuracies and misunderstandings the in the articles. Given that this happened in a small sample, it could be that these were unusual cases, but I highly doubt it. I have a feeling that this is all too common. Since then I look at mainstream media reporting with lots of skepticism.

gwbrooks 7y ago
Former newspaper editor and publisher here. The quickest way to lose your faith in the media is to have them cover something you actually know about.
KKKKkkkk1 7y ago
I worked on a project that was the subject of media interest that management wanted to keep under wraps. We would occasionally read bad news about the project in the NYT or the WSJ, management would deny the news, and then future developments would confirm that the reporting was correct (other than some inconsequential details that management would harp on). These folks might not know much about 3D printing or blockchain or whatnot, but they are experts at sourcing, verifying, and reporting information. Dismiss them at your peril.
- thu2111 7y ago
  Hmm, if they were truly experts at that then there'd be far fewer mistakes that people notice. And they'd have widely discussed, mature, sophisticated systems for catching errors, sort of like how the software industry invests so much into type systems and other quality techniques. I think it's more likely you just remember that incident because it was so directly relevant to your life, so it gets magnified. I can add my voice to the chorus of people who have noticed a vast gulf between what gets reported and reality, especially when op-eds get involved. This doesn't happen all the time. I've been involved in some stories which were pretty accurately reported. But it's completely dependent on (a) the skill of the individual journalist and much more importantly (b) if the story is relevant to something the journalist cares about. It's relatively easy for journalists to cover 3D printing or blockchain "reliably" (by the standards of the press) because they don't actually care about these topics. When the issue you know about starts to intersect social worldviews or power games within the political/journalistic sphere itself, things get crazy really fast. And there's no consistency between journalists. The entire press industry is set up to consider journalism to be the act of a heroic and noble individual rather than the outcome of a process, a system. The "Jim Lehrer's Rules of Journalism" story that was discussed here recently is a good example of that. It wasn't actually a set of rules in the sense an engineer would understand it (i.e. something checked and enforced), it was a personal honour code. Journalism will never be able to increase its reliability whilst it treats the output as the product primarily of a writer + editor.

gwbrooks 7y ago

Former newspaper editor and publisher here. The quickest way to lose your faith in the media is to have them cover something you actually know about.

KKKKkkkk1 7y ago

I worked on a project that was the subject of media interest that management wanted to keep under wraps. We would occasionally read bad news about the project in the NYT or the WSJ, management would deny the news, and then future developments would confirm that the reporting was correct (other than some inconsequential details that management would harp on). These folks might not know much about 3D printing or blockchain or whatnot, but they are experts at sourcing, verifying, and reporting information. Dismiss them at your peril.

thu2111 7y ago
Hmm, if they were truly experts at that then there'd be far fewer mistakes that people notice. And they'd have widely discussed, mature, sophisticated systems for catching errors, sort of like how the software industry invests so much into type systems and other quality techniques. I think it's more likely you just remember that incident because it was so directly relevant to your life, so it gets magnified. I can add my voice to the chorus of people who have noticed a vast gulf between what gets reported and reality, especially when op-eds get involved. This doesn't happen all the time. I've been involved in some stories which were pretty accurately reported. But it's completely dependent on (a) the skill of the individual journalist and much more importantly (b) if the story is relevant to something the journalist cares about. It's relatively easy for journalists to cover 3D printing or blockchain "reliably" (by the standards of the press) because they don't actually care about these topics. When the issue you know about starts to intersect social worldviews or power games within the political/journalistic sphere itself, things get crazy really fast. And there's no consistency between journalists. The entire press industry is set up to consider journalism to be the act of a heroic and noble individual rather than the outcome of a process, a system. The "Jim Lehrer's Rules of Journalism" story that was discussed here recently is a good example of that. It wasn't actually a set of rules in the sense an engineer would understand it (i.e. something checked and enforced), it was a personal honour code. Journalism will never be able to increase its reliability whilst it treats the output as the product primarily of a writer + editor.