9 ms·

All I wanted to do was read the memo and I couldn't find the link. I'm not sure if I missed it or what but this is a common problem I run into on "news" sites.

All I wanted to do was read the memo and I couldn't find the link. I'm not sure if I missed it or what but this is a common problem I run into on "news" sites. They quote (often out of context) parts of something but give no links to the actual source.

throwawaysea 7y ago
That's very much by design, in order to paint a certain picture, generate outrage, and ultimately clicks. Recall when the James Damore story was breaking? Many outlets like Motherboard (owned by Vice, authors of this story) circulated quotes and even modified documents that didn't show the full list of research references quoted by Damore, in an attempt to paint a certain picture. Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  > Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting. Creating fact focused journalism is a laudible goal but I'd be curious of what specific time in history you think that this was generally the case?
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    That's a good point. I can't say whether we've ever hit the mark on that generally. However, old news broadcasts (you can find them on Youtube) do seem a lot less emotional and more neutral. They probably still had their biases; I am unsure. However, I feel like HN is often sources from outlets like Vox and Vice, both of which are recognized as having a strong bias (see https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings). We can at least do better, even if we can't be perfect.
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      There is as much bias in what you choose to report on as there is in the way you report it. For most of the mid-late 20th century major media outlets uncritically reported information stated by the White House and the military. To do so without commentary or comparison to factual reality is a kind of bias but feels neutral because it doesn't create contention in an individual's mind. There are exceptions such as Cronkite's broadcast after the Tet Offensive which I am not lauding or criticizing here, only to say it was out of the norm.
  - downerending 7y ago
    Not OP, but it was my impression that quality journalism was generally the case in the 1980s (in the US at least). What I was reading then certainly seemed to be. Separation of church and state was taken very seriously. These days, you can't start with the assumption that a story is written to J standards. Rather, you need to start with the assumption that it's pushing narrative, and hope to be surprised.
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      I think you should consider the possibility that the news wasn't necessarily any better just more people had faith in a few sources such as broadcast news and national papers, leading to less contention of the facts.
      - downerending 7y ago
        There definitely was bias then, but it was far more limited (with a few scandalous exceptions). As an example, TV news couldn't strongly push an agenda lest they risk losing their broadcast license. Mixing church and state at the NYT was a great way to get fired. More personally, I took a J class during this period and wrote for a school newspaper. The instructor talked about J standards the way NRA instructors talk about gun safety--it was practically a religion. These days, if you want facts, you have to plumb the cesspools of the right and the left and work it out for yourself.
        DubiousPusher 7y ago
        You really don't think they teach the same high-minded stuff in journalism classes these days? I would bet you that if you sat in on meetings at the NYT or broadcast news outlets you would hear the exact same kind of intent as you attribute to them in yesteryear. I could be wrong but I think the far bigger difference from then to today is not the quality of the journalism out of mainstream outlets but that the plethora of outlets available has removed the necessity of consensus myth making. Instead of a collected national myth that Americans share they can now choose their own myth. They used to have to bend their views somewhat towards the major news because people seek to resolve their cognitive dissonance. Now they can change the channel. As an example, my parents are conservative and when Walter Cronkite criticized the Vietnam War and journalists put direct images of the conflict on TV they praised that. Yet when mainstream news which had generally backed the war in Iraq began to report on things going wrong there my parents were livid. When news outlets began reporting on soldiers dying and reading the names of the dead they were even angrier. Nevermind that the news was unable to air the kinds of direct footage of war they had in the 60s because the military had become much savier about the kinds of situations they let reporters into. I think major news had almost the exact same, pro establishment, upper middle class ivy league bias it has today. I just think it's easier to confirm a contrary opinion. If Fox News existed in the sixties I think it would've run with slander stories about MLK for example and might've hampered Civil Rights. But they didn't exist and general regard for MLK as a hero became the default myth. Again, I could be wrong but I think it's a perspective worth putting up against the common narrative.
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    The 1980's had excellent investigative journalism. Journalists these days limit their fact-finding to what tweets they can dig up.
    - pasabagi 7y ago
      I know that the watergate scandal was in the 70's, but it's generally held to be a landmark of great investigative journalism. A few years ago, it came out that 'deep throat' was actually Mark Felt, a former FBI director with an axe to grind against Nixon. So this great demonstration of the power of a free press turned out to be actually a couple of ambitious journalists serving as the mouthpiece for a three-letter agency, and indeed, the FBI at that time (and Mark Felt especially) were a paradigm of overreach. Which is kind of a depressing turn on what was once one of the American journalistic epics about the power of truth. Obviously it's hard to generalize, but it does seem to me that this is part of the advantage governments and companies see in a free press - it's a way to launder information, so you can be in every way obviously a rat, but have the voice of a trusted, independent organization. I don't know if the watergate scandal was characteristic. Certainly, it's an extreme example. But if politicians and statesmen couldn't play journalists, why would they invite them to every occasion? If journalists were investigators in the sense that police are investigators - powerful people would quickly learn to shun them, just as criminals avoid every possible interaction with the police. Seems to me that investigative journalism is, in the final analysis, a way of giving credibility to a process that is at best haphazard and informal, and at worst, simple propaganda.
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      Unless, you were gay or an intravenous drug user. Then you got to hear journalists literally laughing along with the Reagan administration's jokular jokes about the disease that might kill you. Or you didn't because no one reported about that at the time.
- mifreewil 7y ago
  I don't know why you're getting down-voted. Must be people that've never read about mass media in Manufacturing Consent.
  - ahelwer 7y ago
    Have you? That book was about how the pro-corporate media portray various regions & people so as to drum up support for war. This situation is roughly the opposite of that.
    - mifreewil 7y ago
      It's more generally about mass media and the manipulation of information to create a certain narrative. The same tactics of mass media can be applied to different agendas.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  throwawaysea I didn't realize marine pollution had gotten so bad.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Probably because it was forwarded by email and the leaker's identity and job would be at risk.
- daenz 7y ago
  Redacting is a long accepted practice when revealing information but preserving secrets.
  - Pharaoh2 7y ago
    Its fairly common to embed canary trap into message to find out who the leeker is. Not saying this memo had one, but its generally no longer safe to just show redacted messages without compromising the source.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Supposedly so is the practice of using subtle variations in spelling, word choice, word order, spacing, typography, etc. to identify recipients of documents.
    - greedo 7y ago
      Canary Trap...
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      This is exactly what I worked on ~10 years ago at amazon, embedding steganographic information into a certain internal app that reported confidential sales numbers. Ended up catching the person who leaked this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/leaked-sales-data-puts-kindle-fire-sales-at-250000-over-five-days/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/leaked-sales-data-puts-kin...
      - JorgeGT 7y ago
        Out of curiosity, can you share a ballpark of how many different variations can you generate per, say, paragraph of text?

throwawaysea 7y ago

That's very much by design, in order to paint a certain picture, generate outrage, and ultimately clicks. Recall when the James Damore story was breaking? Many outlets like Motherboard (owned by Vice, authors of this story) circulated quotes and even modified documents that didn't show the full list of research references quoted by Damore, in an attempt to paint a certain picture. Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting.

DubiousPusher 7y ago
> Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting. Creating fact focused journalism is a laudible goal but I'd be curious of what specific time in history you think that this was generally the case?
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  That's a good point. I can't say whether we've ever hit the mark on that generally. However, old news broadcasts (you can find them on Youtube) do seem a lot less emotional and more neutral. They probably still had their biases; I am unsure. However, I feel like HN is often sources from outlets like Vox and Vice, both of which are recognized as having a strong bias (see https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings). We can at least do better, even if we can't be perfect.
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    There is as much bias in what you choose to report on as there is in the way you report it. For most of the mid-late 20th century major media outlets uncritically reported information stated by the White House and the military. To do so without commentary or comparison to factual reality is a kind of bias but feels neutral because it doesn't create contention in an individual's mind. There are exceptions such as Cronkite's broadcast after the Tet Offensive which I am not lauding or criticizing here, only to say it was out of the norm.
- downerending 7y ago
  Not OP, but it was my impression that quality journalism was generally the case in the 1980s (in the US at least). What I was reading then certainly seemed to be. Separation of church and state was taken very seriously. These days, you can't start with the assumption that a story is written to J standards. Rather, you need to start with the assumption that it's pushing narrative, and hope to be surprised.
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    I think you should consider the possibility that the news wasn't necessarily any better just more people had faith in a few sources such as broadcast news and national papers, leading to less contention of the facts.
    - downerending 7y ago
      There definitely was bias then, but it was far more limited (with a few scandalous exceptions). As an example, TV news couldn't strongly push an agenda lest they risk losing their broadcast license. Mixing church and state at the NYT was a great way to get fired. More personally, I took a J class during this period and wrote for a school newspaper. The instructor talked about J standards the way NRA instructors talk about gun safety--it was practically a religion. These days, if you want facts, you have to plumb the cesspools of the right and the left and work it out for yourself.
      - DubiousPusher 7y ago
        You really don't think they teach the same high-minded stuff in journalism classes these days? I would bet you that if you sat in on meetings at the NYT or broadcast news outlets you would hear the exact same kind of intent as you attribute to them in yesteryear. I could be wrong but I think the far bigger difference from then to today is not the quality of the journalism out of mainstream outlets but that the plethora of outlets available has removed the necessity of consensus myth making. Instead of a collected national myth that Americans share they can now choose their own myth. They used to have to bend their views somewhat towards the major news because people seek to resolve their cognitive dissonance. Now they can change the channel. As an example, my parents are conservative and when Walter Cronkite criticized the Vietnam War and journalists put direct images of the conflict on TV they praised that. Yet when mainstream news which had generally backed the war in Iraq began to report on things going wrong there my parents were livid. When news outlets began reporting on soldiers dying and reading the names of the dead they were even angrier. Nevermind that the news was unable to air the kinds of direct footage of war they had in the 60s because the military had become much savier about the kinds of situations they let reporters into. I think major news had almost the exact same, pro establishment, upper middle class ivy league bias it has today. I just think it's easier to confirm a contrary opinion. If Fox News existed in the sixties I think it would've run with slander stories about MLK for example and might've hampered Civil Rights. But they didn't exist and general regard for MLK as a hero became the default myth. Again, I could be wrong but I think it's a perspective worth putting up against the common narrative.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  The 1980's had excellent investigative journalism. Journalists these days limit their fact-finding to what tweets they can dig up.
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    I know that the watergate scandal was in the 70's, but it's generally held to be a landmark of great investigative journalism. A few years ago, it came out that 'deep throat' was actually Mark Felt, a former FBI director with an axe to grind against Nixon. So this great demonstration of the power of a free press turned out to be actually a couple of ambitious journalists serving as the mouthpiece for a three-letter agency, and indeed, the FBI at that time (and Mark Felt especially) were a paradigm of overreach. Which is kind of a depressing turn on what was once one of the American journalistic epics about the power of truth. Obviously it's hard to generalize, but it does seem to me that this is part of the advantage governments and companies see in a free press - it's a way to launder information, so you can be in every way obviously a rat, but have the voice of a trusted, independent organization. I don't know if the watergate scandal was characteristic. Certainly, it's an extreme example. But if politicians and statesmen couldn't play journalists, why would they invite them to every occasion? If journalists were investigators in the sense that police are investigators - powerful people would quickly learn to shun them, just as criminals avoid every possible interaction with the police. Seems to me that investigative journalism is, in the final analysis, a way of giving credibility to a process that is at best haphazard and informal, and at worst, simple propaganda.
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    Unless, you were gay or an intravenous drug user. Then you got to hear journalists literally laughing along with the Reagan administration's jokular jokes about the disease that might kill you. Or you didn't because no one reported about that at the time.
mifreewil 7y ago
I don't know why you're getting down-voted. Must be people that've never read about mass media in Manufacturing Consent.
- ahelwer 7y ago
  Have you? That book was about how the pro-corporate media portray various regions & people so as to drum up support for war. This situation is roughly the opposite of that.
  - mifreewil 7y ago
    It's more generally about mass media and the manipulation of information to create a certain narrative. The same tactics of mass media can be applied to different agendas.
anigbrowl 7y ago
throwawaysea I didn't realize marine pollution had gotten so bad.

anigbrowl 7y ago

Probably because it was forwarded by email and the leaker's identity and job would be at risk.

daenz 7y ago
Redacting is a long accepted practice when revealing information but preserving secrets.
- Pharaoh2 7y ago
  Its fairly common to embed canary trap into message to find out who the leeker is. Not saying this memo had one, but its generally no longer safe to just show redacted messages without compromising the source.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Supposedly so is the practice of using subtle variations in spelling, word choice, word order, spacing, typography, etc. to identify recipients of documents.
  - greedo 7y ago
    Canary Trap...
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    This is exactly what I worked on ~10 years ago at amazon, embedding steganographic information into a certain internal app that reported confidential sales numbers. Ended up catching the person who leaked this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/leaked-sales-data-puts-kindle-fire-sales-at-250000-over-five-days/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/leaked-sales-data-puts-kin...
    - JorgeGT 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, can you share a ballpark of how many different variations can you generate per, say, paragraph of text?