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I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had writte

I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper. It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse. I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly stopped reading newspapers, and don't trust anything they write, without checking the facts.

zoul 6y ago
That was bad journalism. Would you also stop trusting all doctors after meeting a bad one?
- asparuh_kostov 6y ago
  The bar to be a doctor is higher than having internet and a blog.
  - neonate 6y ago
    Not that much higher.
    - dijit 6y ago
      One of these things requires 20 minutes and €5. The other requires more than half a decade of intense education, internships, tests and further verifications. (Not to mention thousands of Euros in education costs, if not state sponsored) I cannot think of a larger difference in terms of barrier to entry.
      - dazag 6y ago
        You don't seem to understand, that under capitalism, mostly any work or study has to be backed up with money. Doctors don't become doctors a different way a reporter becomes one. What they teach you in universities it's not whay you end up doing. A reporter doesn't mean to do bad when they start studying, neither does a doctor. The results are totally different.
      - mratsim 6y ago
        Half a decade? In France Medical Doctors require 6 years of externship, 4 years of internship + various amount of years depending on the specialization up to 5 (?) for example for neurology. It's also the population that lead to the most suicides due to how intense the expectations are and failure will lead you to tenures you don't want (There is a spot for everyone but not where you want and on the speciality you want, even though we are lacking doctors ...)
        dijit 6y ago
        I wanted to say decade but I know someone would say "you don't need to do 10 years, you are only in school 6 in my country". So, I said 'more than half-a-decade' because that is essentially the absolute minimum that nobody can be pedantic about.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Me, sure. From then on they'd have to earn my trust - not just get it because they're doctors...
- stevenjohns 6y ago
  * What if every hospital had an overt political stance and forced doctors to make diagnoses based on those politics? * What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health? * What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics? Unfortunately all US media, and most international media, is equally bad and built on bad intentions for varying levels of nefarious purposes.
  - yreg 6y ago
    This is interesting to me. In central Europe, or at least my country, the serious media keep very high standards. Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals. I find our independent media to be a key element of our democracy and I am worried when I hear the US media don't work quite the same. Edit: I thought I might as well reply with our solutions to your bullet points - Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist. The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians. - The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society. (+ ads ofc) - If one wants power to change things the far superior strategy in my country is to do the actual politics and not to report on it.
    - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
      Same here but eastern Europe. Heck, American newspapers even endorse candidates which I find insane, it's like psychiatrists encouraging suicide.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      Independent objective media are the lifeblood of democracy. You literally cannot have a healthy democracy without a strong and independent fourth estate. For a long time I underestimated how much of a bedrock requirement this is. It's easy to dismiss the media as entertainment at best or noise at worst. But at best they model fairness, balance, and rationality, and if you have no one doing that in public the quality of discourse soon crashes.
- Lio 6y ago
  Would you trust a hospital with a reputation for employing doctors that never get pulled up or fired for their bad work?
- mekoka 6y ago
  How many bad doctors do you need to meet before deciding that they're also human? As the saying goes, "trust, but verify".
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  Doctors are heavily regulated. Journalists aren't. I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous. Professional journalism has a long, long track record of opposing any consequences to their actions whatsoever. I love the idea of professional journalists. But the reality of them just does not work in practice in our current media industries.
  - callmeal 6y ago
    >I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous. Unfortunately expectations do not match reality. 10% of deaths are due to medical errors [0]. Then look at how the rest of the medical establishment are failing us. CDC is prohibited from naming the hospitals that have this error. The only thing they report on is trends [1]. If you have a hospital in your neighborhood, can you find out anything about it? From the medical error rate, to the spread of Candida Auris[2] is there any dangerous news about your local hospital/healthcare system that is public? [0]: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db118.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db118.htm [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-candida-auris.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-can...
- projektfu 6y ago
  If you buy a frozen pizza and it tastes terrible, should you continue buying and eating them for a week until you have enough data points? If a single sample of corn in a shipment is contaminated with aflatoxin should you keep testing it and trying to find the good corn? If a program corrupts your data on first use should you keep trying it on different data before rejecting it?
- dataduck 6y ago
  Can you find any recent examples of good journalism?
brnt 6y ago
Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it. I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course agree there are many kinds of people who call themselves journalists many of which don't improve our society. We must fight this battle, as we must fight every battle, because that's the only way things change for the better. Do not let cynicism win.
- buboard 6y ago
  Most of the reported news is N=1 events. If the news reported averages instead, it wouldn't sell
  - brnt 6y ago
    That's a problem specific to news reporting, not journalism as a whole. I consider news reporting seperate from investigative journalism. What happened is far easier to report and consume than a report on why it happened. So, a better filter against biased news reporting, better than averaging, is taking a longer view and reading more comprehensive analyses. You can spin everything, but I find the more the article tends towards a study (investigative journalism), the blatant spinners drop off exponentially. Any bias is usually clear in such texts and therefore easily accounted for.
- zkid18 6y ago
  Also stopped reading any news and reports from big media about 3 years ago. Just curious are there any independent investigation journalists that work on the patreon/subscription model? Would consider donation them rather than NYT or WSJ.
  - xenocratus 6y ago
    Don't know about investigative journalism, but https://thecorrespondent.com/ https://thecorrespondent.com/ claim they're only supported through their reader's subscriptions.
01100011 6y ago
After getting in trouble with the law and getting the story in the paper as a kid, I realized people like a simple narrative which matches with their expectations. Reality is complicated and people just don't have time for it. Not the cops, not the media, and not the readers.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
Reminds me of when I was in elementary and one day I was sick and all my classmates met the governor. The media was obviously there and one classmate was asked to write something to say to the governor. The media claimed he was 11 but his age was 12. The teacher taught us that the media isnt always necessarily telling you the truth. There is way more bias in the media these past few years than I have ever seen so confirming sources is more important than anything. I dont usually trust "anonymous sources" unless there is accompanying hard evidence.
- projektfu 6y ago
  They should use the Slashdot epithet. “An anonymous coward familiar with the discussion said ...”
virgilp 6y ago
I think unfortunately journalists are trained to take phrases out of context so that they sound "sensational" / trigger emotional responses in the readers. You quickly find that out if give out interviews - you need to be very mindful how things may sound if taken out of context. E.g. a while ago a newspaper here took me an interview/ they were building a story about people that had somewhat remarkable results in school & ample opportunities to leave (e.g. I participated in IOI and had 2 medals), and still chose to stay in the country - what were their motives, how it turned out for them. During the interview, I mentioned something along the lines that "I earn well enough to afford everything that I want, and my friends/family is here, I'm used to the local culture, etc". As a result, "I can afford everything" became basically the headline.
- megameter 6y ago
  Wealth is one of the classic ones that journalists like stretching. My mom, a classical musician, got asked about her wages, and after some back and forth (since they varied by the job, of course), she was given this more specific question: "what's the most you made from a gig?" The sum she replied with, of course, made it into the resulting magazine article as an hourly average. Cue the stinkeyes from colleagues.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    This is so common in British press of lower quality: an engineer on £80K salary gets arrested for x,y,z. A man in his 30s left his £2M house before he decided to steal money from the donation box and etc.
    - Chris2048 6y ago
      Is it possible to sue for this kind of misrepresentation (lies), or do you need to prove financial (non social) damages?
      - cosmodisk 6y ago
        In Britain: very unlikely. I think sometimes journalists know the exact salaries ( public servants) or simply guess based on job title. The same with house prices. Again, the chances of getting anything through courts are very slim.
m0zg 6y ago
It baffles me when people trust the "news", _especially_ if they only consume news within their own little bubble. I was interviewed a couple of times on technological topics (once by a NYT journalist), and was once in the middle of events that were reported on, so I knew what actually happened. In all three cases what was printed was total clickbait horseshit that had nothing to do with reality. So if a journalist wants to talk to me now, I will only do it if it generates clickbait horseshit that's good for me somehow.
- aj3 6y ago
  You can always agree for an interview on a condition of receiving final draft before it gets published and having a say on it. Whether they agree or not depends on how many other sources they have for that story.
Stevvo 6y ago
In underprivileged communities in the UK, kids are raised from a young age not to trust a "journo".
enriquto 6y ago
> I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago This. Sometimes we joke that "all news is fake news"; but it is actually true!
- perch56 6y ago
  A book that opened my eyes is Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life by Rolf Dobelli.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  The problem is that the press drives policy decisions, so you cannot disengage completely. You would need to find a direct line of communication towards representatives without the press. We have the means for that theoretically, but it needs a lot of engagement. I think most people would benefit when cutting out classical papers.
greggman3 6y ago
I had a similar experience with reporters. I worked on a commercial product, on release someone just opening store had a sale, some reporter interpreted that sale as dumping a failing product and wrote that story. No amount of proof to the contrary would get them to retract. Whether or not it effected sales I have no idea but I learned some reporters are scum There is also the phenomenon of reading articles about topics I know well and haven them be completely wrong which leads to to at least entertain the idea that the same is true for topics i don't know about. No idea what the solution is.
tzfld 6y ago
Unfortunately every single media outlet has a narrative to propagate. Being that an imposed one or from their own convictions. Can't find a single source of information being totally objective.
nelaboras 6y ago
> "I don't trust anything they write without checking the facts." I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever. How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists? What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector? The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases. The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - "I don't trust journalists" translates in most cases to "I don't trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint." This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information. Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn't mean you should distrust all apples.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Gell-Mann amnesia effect: """ Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. - Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002) """ This isn’t to say that all journalists are “bad apples”, but as the full aphorism says, “A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel”.
AtHeartEngineer 6y ago
I had a similar experience in Iraq. I had saw an attack happen and then heard the CNN report about it a few hours later and it wasn't even in the realm of what happened. It was surreal.
- abj 6y ago
  Could I ask what the CNN article got wrong? I'm curious how different their story was to the actual attack.
- smdyc1 6y ago
  This may be slightly off topic here, but I attended a birthday party of a friend last year. Long story short, there was a guy at the same pub who OD'd and my wife and I helped him until the ambulance arrived. There was a 'reality' TV cameraman with them and we didn't want him filming us so I asked him to stop. His tactic was to shove the camera in my face and make snide remarks to provoke a reaction. When I put my hand up and stepped back, the guy tilted the camera back really quickly and took a knee panning it up at me, and started saying things like "you hit me! That's assault". To this day I have no idea what ended up being shown, if anything, but it was an eye opening experience about the abject dishonesty involved in reality TV. I can just as easily see that applied to TV journalism.
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
I woke up to the fact that most newspapers are like that in the last 2-3 years. That resulted in me eliminating one publication after the other. Today only one has remained, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a german-language publication from Switzerland. Lets see how long it holds up.
- aj3 6y ago
  But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either. I prefer the Economist - they clearly have a very strong bias in some political & economical stories, but that bias is predictable and consistent. At least their factual reporting seems on the point.
  - Symmetry 6y ago
    I've always found that when they cover something I'm familiar with they do at least a credible job of it.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
    > But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either. I'd call myself an "accidental moderate" in PG's terms, and there are lots of good accounts on Twitter that look at both sides of the issue. You don't need to follow lots of accounts on a wide range of the political spectrum, but simply avoid the partisan/"belief bunching" preachers, and pick the smartest and most rational ones instead. This has been the biggest source of education for me recently.
VBprogrammer 6y ago
Having seen the inside of a few events and the reporting produced in response, I'd say a healthy dose of scepticism is usually warranted when reading about something you have no personal involvement in. In fact one of the worst experience for me in terms of trust for the media was working at a startup. The willingness of journalists to produce puff pieces, or print press releases virtually verbatim, on the basis of 5 minutes of SQL queries cobbled together and cherry picked to produce the desired result was frightening.
alexashka 6y ago
You know what's even more sad? Journalists on average, are more intelligent than an average human being. An average journalist distorts the truth knowingly and is a scumbag. An average person parrots lies and is convinced of them, and if you point it out, he/she'll be upset with you. This is how religions continue even in the face of the best thinkers for centuries, coming up with the most considerate, foolproof arguments for why it's bullshit. At some point we have to ask: do people even want to be able to tell truth apart from bullshit, or do they just want to be led and told what to do by someone they like?
adsche 6y ago
Genuine question, how do you (or others) check the facts? Where do you get facts from?
- aj3 6y ago
  Professionally relevant information - insider sources, other information that is important for you for whatever reason - from original sources. If there aren't any original sources (e.g. politics, history etc) - cross reference multiple interpretations that present story from different angles, e.g. Fox vs CNN, Guardian vs BBC, Washington Post vs Al Jazeera vs Russia Today. Of course for some stories there are sources that are better suited than others due to their focus (e.g. throw in Democracy Now for anything about grassroots movements, various scientific/medical news are discussed most in-depth by specialized podcasts, etc). And then there is information that isn't important (it doesn't affect you and you can't act on it) and you're just seeking it out of habit (addiction really).
stared 6y ago
First and foremost, I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired. NYT is a reputable journal and shouldn't tolerate such unprofessional and potentially dangerous behavior. The person breached a few lines of ethical journalism, and for no justified reason: First, purposefully using an incorrect name (and Scott Alexander's online identity is Scott Alexander). In many other cases, even if the name is known publicly, and it is (or was) a legal anme, a journalist does not need to write it. Second, for everyone having vocal opinions, it puts them in real danger. If revealing someone's identity (or a threat of such) makes someone close their blog, the journalist have already made their damage. Third, it erodes trust in journalists. Such journalists make any other journalism harder, as people have justified reasons not to talk. Not every person wants to increase their risk. I hope that until the journalist gets fired, no activist, whistleblower, a person who wants to speak about professional malpractice, controversial artist etc. won't talk to NYT. For their own safety.
- huffmsa 6y ago
  The NYT isn't reputable anymore. Haven't been for a while. Case in point, this article they might publish. They fired most of their senior editors in 2017 because they were both too expensive and enforcing old school journalist standards and integrity which doesn't generate clicks like hot handed opinion pieces followed by reverse opinion pieces does. Though mind you that senior group was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, so take their integrity with a grain of salt.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    > Case in point, this article they might publish. As an NYT subscriber, I'm very concerned by this, but I think it's ironic that people skeptical of the media because they don't wait to get facts right are so willing to jump to the conclusion that Scott's account is the full story. I'm inclined to believe Scott, but just as a remotely plausible hypothetical: there's also been rumors of a hit piece floating around for a few days[1]. Maybe they uncovered something Scott doesn't want out there besides just his identity and this is his way of seeding distrust before it gets out. [1] https://twitter.com/TauTeFox/status/1273775737527394306 https://twitter.com/TauTeFox/status/1273775737527394306
martin_bech 6y ago
Just by luck I've been interviewed on camera a few times, and each time Im astounded, how im not really beeing interviewed, im rather beeing asked questions phrased a certain way, so they have a certain response that fits a narrative.
simonh 6y ago
News organisations pander to their audience, so I think it's really important to understand what that audience is. If you happen to be in that target audience, then of course there's a real risk you'll end up in an echo chamber that becomes increasingly far away from anything resembling a consensus reality. I've come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different target audiences. I occasionally read the Daily Mail (my mother gets it, don't judge) and the Guardian. My main source of general news is the BBC news site, but I also regularly read The Economist. From time to time I pop on to the Fox News site, partly to remind myself that the Daily Mail could actually be a lot worse. I listen to LBC in the car (A London based politics and current affairs talk radio show). Genuine question - I'd be interested in how others approach this. Is my set of sources too skewed one way or another? Am I missing a decent balanced source, or should I add a credible source on any particular political leaning?
- scarmig 6y ago
  Most news is worthless. What's important will have more perspective available six months from now (or, better, six years from now); what's not important is just parlor room gossip. Reading e.g. the politics section of the NYT religiously for the past couple years, your biggest takeaway would be that Trump is an idiot who doesn't belong in office. Which, as far as it goes, is true, but there's no need to pick up a bad habit like reading the NYT in order to know that. It's probably necessary to know enough about this week's going-ons for social reasons, to the same extent that it's necessary to know who's playing in the Super Bowl, but there are more useful ways to spend your energies.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  One underrated option is to just not read the news: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... Getting the news from "both sides" is just getting two bullshit spins on the same topic, but the truth isn't in the middle. You can get "just the facts" from outlets like Reuters. You may find that this isn't really entertaining and that really you do consume news for other reasons than getting informed. You may recognize that you actually want "the spin", you want the emotional turmoil, the sensation. From that perspective, consuming news is more like a consuming a drug: A guilty pleasure that should not be overindulged in.
DoubleGlazing 6y ago
The father of one of my neighbours recently died in a house fire. It was a tragic accident, nothing sinister. The whole family could be described as boringly average with nothing of note about them. The family refused all requests for interviews from the media. That didn't stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family photos (both old and more recent ones) and published pictures of the whole family. The family could deal with the headlines, but that someone leaked family photos to the paper really hit them hard. The story was so sensationalised and gory and completely off the scale. A few column inches would have sufficed, instead it was double page spread implying the family was in turmoil. The paper turned an already painful family situation in to an absolute nightmare.
- hackissimo123 6y ago
  My favourite example of all time of journalistic shamelessness is ABC reporting that Robin Williams's were "respectfully asking for privacy" following his death, while a banner at the top of the same page advertised live aerial footage of Robin Williams's home: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=abc_classy http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=abc_classy
- csharptwdec19 6y ago
  Doesn't the UK have strong laws about libel and slander? Or do they not apply to Ireland?
  - DuskStar 6y ago
    Ireland is a different country.
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    The Republic of Ireland is situated on the island of Ireland, which is itself one of the archipelago known as the British Isles (a term which is offensive to certain people from the Republic). Other entities which sit on the British Isles include the Isle of Man and the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", comprising four nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). Great Britain is one of the British Isles, and it contains most of Wales, Scotland, and England.
nvr219 6y ago
How do you get the news? Who do you trust?
- projektfu 6y ago
  For me, it’s difficult to “trust”. I assume I know next to nothing about India vs Pakistan or the Mexican drug war and that Journalism isn’t going to change that. At best it’s a source of stories like any novel, at worst it’s trying to mislead. In the case of Mexico’s drug war, most Americans are probably very misguided as to how dangerous it is for tourists and also how much of it is seen by the average Mexican on a given day. I feel I’ve learned infinitely more in one conversation on Tandem with someone who lives in Mexico than I ever will from a newspaper. If I read about riots in my city, I know there was something going on but I can’t really trust that the news correctly identified the place, people, or motive. I may have the desire to learn more and so I will reach out to someone who was there our lives in that neighborhood. I had a waking up moment in 2003 during the Iraq war protests. I learned that the NYT, which was my favorite because each issue was a literary work that could be read from front to back, reported as though they’d never been to NYC. If they couldn’t get basic details right when the story was literally on the same street (Broadway) then I don’t know what they’re actually capable of reporting.
  - nvr219 6y ago
    oh ok
HenryBemis 6y ago
Even if the reporter was half decent (let's assume he/she was), it would most likely be the Editor that have twisted the story around, for whatever reason or excuse. It happens in all kinds of business. Go talk to an auditor (ANY) auditor and they will have plenty of horror stories where the reviewer rewrote a paragraph "to better reflect the message", in which rewrite the message was changed.
papeda 6y ago
May as well ask here, I pretty much only read the weekly Economist to get my news at this point. I think I have their slight biases dialed in at this point. Anyone want to make a case for a different primary news source/argue that The Economist is bad? For context, I like The Economist because it's mostly unemotional, information-dense, and the magazine comes in a single weekly thing to read.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The Economist is the rare case of a news source that's not too bad, at least at present. We can't let ourselves become complacent, however - just see what's happening to the NYT.
pythonwizz 6y ago
The Economist is actually pretty good. They have their own political bias (see at wikipedia entry) but both, their news and technology reporting is top notch.
journo12345 6y ago
I don’t know if I’ll really be able to add to this conversation, but two cents anyway: I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better. I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism. 1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles. (This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.) 2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath. 3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful. That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.
euler_angles 6y ago
Many years ago, a close family friend, who was a police officer in a small town, committed suicide. The local television news kept trying to find the man's children and wife in the days immediately following his suicide to ask them questions. Because there's no informative news value to the general public in his family's reactions -- of course they're heartbroken and grieving, their beloved husband/father took his own life -- it was clear that the media just wanted to air emotional people to appeal to viewers. I stopped watching television news -- because the vast majority of 'news' programs are just entertainment with a veneer of news.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
Many, many years ago, I was the foreman on a murder trial in our little town. In the jury selection process, the public defender -- a good, respected, local attorney -- asked the first candidate pool if they had read about the murder in the local paper. Almost everyone had. Then he asked if any of them had ever had a story written about them, or, say, their business, in this local paper. Three or four people raised their hand. Then he simply asked, "Did they get it right?" Everyone shook their head. Everyone laughed, and he moved on. Point made. That was my eye-opener.
- catacombs 6y ago
  > Then he simply asked, "Did they get it right?" Everyone shook their head. Everyone laughed, and he moved on. A good follow up would be "How?" The coverage might have been factually correct, but just because they didn't like it doesn't mean the information was wrong.
TomSwirly 6y ago
The Times wrote a story about a play written about my life (long story) and there was a mistake in every line - most trivial and inexplicable, like guessing an age for people and getting it wrong, and some mistakes actively annoying. Also, I once appeared in the Post and the Times in the same day when my friend and I got blown up in a steam pipe explosion (we were covered in mud but undamaged). The Times made us seem suave and hip (they mentioned my natty tie covered by mud) and the Post made us seem like victims of a tragedy. Such different pictures! All very educational.
bttrfl 6y ago
Well, I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter WASN'T at the scene, and yet I later read what she had written about it in the newspaper as if she had been present. It was a really nice review of a show that... was cancelled.
cskinner 6y ago
Some things to keep in mind when doing any interview. First, know what message you want to get across, and focus on that. Second, avoid almost all "what if" type hypothetical questions. Third, make your own recording of any interview, and make sure the reporter is aware that you are doing so. I was fortunate enough to be part of some media training early in my career, where the trainer (an ex-TV reporter) recorded an interview with one of the participants. The next day they played for us the video they had put together splicing different questions into the interview and editing down the responses. The resulting "interview" was a real hit piece, and the editing was done smoothly enough that it presented as a single continuous take (even with the switching camera angles). It would have been very damaging if it had been broadcast like that, and without proof that it was faked the PR effort to counteract it would have been challenging.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  I'd say even more simply, don't talk to the press without the intermediation of a competent PR professional. It's the same reason you don't talk to the police without a lawyer. Even if you're the cleverest person in the world, you're playing a game against an opponent who does this for a living and holds all the cards.
brightball 6y ago
I learned this in college. I was head of an organization that supported a lot of activities around sports and I was interviewed by the school paper. Had a nice conversation and then the story came out. He used 2 sentences from a 30 minute conversation to insert out of context in a piece totally unrelated to what we were talking about. I’ve been on guard ever since.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
skissane 6y ago
In 2005, The Australian newspaper published an article claiming that Macquarie University IT Services was going to make redundant 50-60 staff. (I can't find the text of the article online, but I can find a citation for it [1].) I remember being amused by this article, because I actually worked there at the time, and we didn't actually have 50-60 staff to make redundant. If they'd let go of 50-60 staff from our department, we would have had a negative number of employees remaining (the actual number of employees was a bit over 40). It also reinforced my tendency to distrust journalists, who often fail to get even basic facts right. (There was an element of truth behind the story – they did plan a significant round of job cuts, 15 years later I can't recall exactly how big, but it could have been a third of the department – it was just the numbers in the article had been impossibly inflated. And the plan was never to lay off the entire department, just a significant chunk of it.) [1] https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/121830411 https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/121830411
catacombs 6y ago
How do you stay informed?
greenhatglack 6y ago
Same here to some degree. Those who wield actual power will never be criticized or exposed, which means that journalists are inherently useless or closer to being a corpse. Daphne Caruana Galizia, Tim Pool, Andy Ngo are some who are constantly attacked both verbally and physically and thus I have bit more faith in them than I do for others "journalists". Always keep Reverse Gell-Man Amnesia in mind.
hedora 6y ago
My wife and I have a combined >20 years experience in microbiology and medical research, so we’re feeling the pain of “this journalist has no idea what they’re talking about” more than usual these days. The coverage of COVID has been more distressing than the actual disease. (Hint: epidemiologists specialize in studying the spread of diseases after the fact; asking them about an ongoing epidemic is like asking an expert on Roman architecture to build an office building.) Here’s some example nonsense in the news. I regularly see the same story argue both points in each bullet: - Sweden has had too many cases (deaths), and too few cases (people with antibodies). - Last week 5% of 1000 confirmed cases died; this week 0.5% of 10,000 estimated cases died. “Experts” “baffled” but we are winning and can reopen (the same publication will flip the numbers and conclusion tomorrow) - Antibodies might not lead to immunity, but the vaccine (which does nothing but cause your body to create antibodies) will be a panacea. Bonus gem from yesterday: New study shows kids don’t spread COVID. The numbers are based on studies of areas where schools and daycares were closed, and the kids were quarantined. Adults were more likely to catch COVID at work than from their quarantined kids. There was one (just one) school where the kids spread COVID amongst themselves, but that was probably an outlier. No one really understands how it happened. Note that the high-level conclusion of this last article was probably right: kids usually don’t get symptoms, and asymptomatic people are less likely to cough / spread it. A stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess.
wutbrodo 6y ago
This is a pretty easy conclusion to come to theoretically, too. Any position of power is going to tend towards abuse and incompetence if there's not some sort of filter in hiring for or sustaining the institution. Newspapers live or die by clicks and subscribers: There's no incentive towards any notion of "journalistic integrity", there's no filter ensuring that journalists are especially intelligent or honest, and there's no reason to believe that the typical journalist is any less likely to abuse their position than the typical police officer. Just as there are individual dedicated, ethical police who believe deeply in fulfilling their mission the right way, there are good journalists out there who make the world better. But for every Ronan Farrow, there are a thousand Farhad Manjoos and Cade Metzes; for every Foreign Affairs, there are a hundred New York Times or Fox News. The net effect is the same as with police: understand that we've got a horridly imperfect system chock full of dishonest actors and engage with it on those terms. Don't talk to cops without a lawyer; don't talk to a journalist without a PR person and/or a specific plan for what you're getting out of the exchange and how to protect yourself from exploitation[1]. The Internet has greatly accelerated this trend. Pre-Internet, if by some miracle you managed to get enough honest, intelligent people together in a single paper, you could establish a culture of journalistic ethics under the aegis of the slack afforded by your local monopoly on distribution. But in the Internet era, you need to be fully competitive on the terms defined by the market, which, as described above, don't point towards honest, ethical reporting at all. The tragedy with journalism is that government is usually a useful tool to address this problem: well-crafted regulation can shape incentives such that you don't need to rely on wishing for good cops, which is the direction that police reform discussions are taking. A heavy government hand, however, is anathema to the role that journalists are supposed to play in modern society, so this tool is off the table. I've thought about this for a very long time, and I don't know how to solve this. [1] This obviously doesn't apply in narrow cases like "observation from man on the street"
- Super_Jambo 6y ago
  There is no way to fix advertising funded, it's the problem with facebook and google too. Advertising means the consumers aren't customers to be served but eyeballs to be harvested and served up.
anoraca 6y ago
I would like to caution anyone reading the comments to be skeptical of posts that push to erode your faith in journalism. There has been an alarming trend of people pushing a narrative that news organizations cannot be trusted. It is a toxic attack on one of the most important components in a functional democratic republic.

zoul 6y ago

That was bad journalism. Would you also stop trusting all doctors after meeting a bad one?

asparuh_kostov 6y ago
The bar to be a doctor is higher than having internet and a blog.
- neonate 6y ago
  Not that much higher.
  - dijit 6y ago
    One of these things requires 20 minutes and €5. The other requires more than half a decade of intense education, internships, tests and further verifications. (Not to mention thousands of Euros in education costs, if not state sponsored) I cannot think of a larger difference in terms of barrier to entry.
    - dazag 6y ago
      You don't seem to understand, that under capitalism, mostly any work or study has to be backed up with money. Doctors don't become doctors a different way a reporter becomes one. What they teach you in universities it's not whay you end up doing. A reporter doesn't mean to do bad when they start studying, neither does a doctor. The results are totally different.
    - mratsim 6y ago
      Half a decade? In France Medical Doctors require 6 years of externship, 4 years of internship + various amount of years depending on the specialization up to 5 (?) for example for neurology. It's also the population that lead to the most suicides due to how intense the expectations are and failure will lead you to tenures you don't want (There is a spot for everyone but not where you want and on the speciality you want, even though we are lacking doctors ...)
      - dijit 6y ago
        I wanted to say decade but I know someone would say "you don't need to do 10 years, you are only in school 6 in my country". So, I said 'more than half-a-decade' because that is essentially the absolute minimum that nobody can be pedantic about.
coldtea 6y ago
Me, sure. From then on they'd have to earn my trust - not just get it because they're doctors...
stevenjohns 6y ago
* What if every hospital had an overt political stance and forced doctors to make diagnoses based on those politics? * What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health? * What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics? Unfortunately all US media, and most international media, is equally bad and built on bad intentions for varying levels of nefarious purposes.
- yreg 6y ago
  This is interesting to me. In central Europe, or at least my country, the serious media keep very high standards. Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals. I find our independent media to be a key element of our democracy and I am worried when I hear the US media don't work quite the same. Edit: I thought I might as well reply with our solutions to your bullet points - Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist. The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians. - The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society. (+ ads ofc) - If one wants power to change things the far superior strategy in my country is to do the actual politics and not to report on it.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
    Same here but eastern Europe. Heck, American newspapers even endorse candidates which I find insane, it's like psychiatrists encouraging suicide.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Independent objective media are the lifeblood of democracy. You literally cannot have a healthy democracy without a strong and independent fourth estate. For a long time I underestimated how much of a bedrock requirement this is. It's easy to dismiss the media as entertainment at best or noise at worst. But at best they model fairness, balance, and rationality, and if you have no one doing that in public the quality of discourse soon crashes.
Lio 6y ago
Would you trust a hospital with a reputation for employing doctors that never get pulled up or fired for their bad work?
mekoka 6y ago
How many bad doctors do you need to meet before deciding that they're also human? As the saying goes, "trust, but verify".
Mindwipe 6y ago
Doctors are heavily regulated. Journalists aren't. I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous. Professional journalism has a long, long track record of opposing any consequences to their actions whatsoever. I love the idea of professional journalists. But the reality of them just does not work in practice in our current media industries.
- callmeal 6y ago
  >I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous. Unfortunately expectations do not match reality. 10% of deaths are due to medical errors [0]. Then look at how the rest of the medical establishment are failing us. CDC is prohibited from naming the hospitals that have this error. The only thing they report on is trends [1]. If you have a hospital in your neighborhood, can you find out anything about it? From the medical error rate, to the spread of Candida Auris[2] is there any dangerous news about your local hospital/healthcare system that is public? [0]: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db118.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db118.htm [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-candida-auris.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-can...
projektfu 6y ago
If you buy a frozen pizza and it tastes terrible, should you continue buying and eating them for a week until you have enough data points? If a single sample of corn in a shipment is contaminated with aflatoxin should you keep testing it and trying to find the good corn? If a program corrupts your data on first use should you keep trying it on different data before rejecting it?
dataduck 6y ago
Can you find any recent examples of good journalism?

brnt 6y ago

Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it. I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course agree there are many kinds of people who call themselves journalists many of which don't improve our society. We must fight this battle, as we must fight every battle, because that's the only way things change for the better. Do not let cynicism win.

buboard 6y ago
Most of the reported news is N=1 events. If the news reported averages instead, it wouldn't sell
- brnt 6y ago
  That's a problem specific to news reporting, not journalism as a whole. I consider news reporting seperate from investigative journalism. What happened is far easier to report and consume than a report on why it happened. So, a better filter against biased news reporting, better than averaging, is taking a longer view and reading more comprehensive analyses. You can spin everything, but I find the more the article tends towards a study (investigative journalism), the blatant spinners drop off exponentially. Any bias is usually clear in such texts and therefore easily accounted for.
zkid18 6y ago
Also stopped reading any news and reports from big media about 3 years ago. Just curious are there any independent investigation journalists that work on the patreon/subscription model? Would consider donation them rather than NYT or WSJ.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  Don't know about investigative journalism, but https://thecorrespondent.com/ https://thecorrespondent.com/ claim they're only supported through their reader's subscriptions.

01100011 6y ago

After getting in trouble with the law and getting the story in the paper as a kid, I realized people like a simple narrative which matches with their expectations. Reality is complicated and people just don't have time for it. Not the cops, not the media, and not the readers.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

Reminds me of when I was in elementary and one day I was sick and all my classmates met the governor. The media was obviously there and one classmate was asked to write something to say to the governor. The media claimed he was 11 but his age was 12. The teacher taught us that the media isnt always necessarily telling you the truth. There is way more bias in the media these past few years than I have ever seen so confirming sources is more important than anything. I dont usually trust "anonymous sources" unless there is accompanying hard evidence.

projektfu 6y ago
They should use the Slashdot epithet. “An anonymous coward familiar with the discussion said ...”

virgilp 6y ago

I think unfortunately journalists are trained to take phrases out of context so that they sound "sensational" / trigger emotional responses in the readers. You quickly find that out if give out interviews - you need to be very mindful how things may sound if taken out of context. E.g. a while ago a newspaper here took me an interview/ they were building a story about people that had somewhat remarkable results in school & ample opportunities to leave (e.g. I participated in IOI and had 2 medals), and still chose to stay in the country - what were their motives, how it turned out for them. During the interview, I mentioned something along the lines that "I earn well enough to afford everything that I want, and my friends/family is here, I'm used to the local culture, etc". As a result, "I can afford everything" became basically the headline.

megameter 6y ago
Wealth is one of the classic ones that journalists like stretching. My mom, a classical musician, got asked about her wages, and after some back and forth (since they varied by the job, of course), she was given this more specific question: "what's the most you made from a gig?" The sum she replied with, of course, made it into the resulting magazine article as an hourly average. Cue the stinkeyes from colleagues.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  This is so common in British press of lower quality: an engineer on £80K salary gets arrested for x,y,z. A man in his 30s left his £2M house before he decided to steal money from the donation box and etc.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    Is it possible to sue for this kind of misrepresentation (lies), or do you need to prove financial (non social) damages?
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
      In Britain: very unlikely. I think sometimes journalists know the exact salaries ( public servants) or simply guess based on job title. The same with house prices. Again, the chances of getting anything through courts are very slim.

m0zg 6y ago

It baffles me when people trust the "news", _especially_ if they only consume news within their own little bubble. I was interviewed a couple of times on technological topics (once by a NYT journalist), and was once in the middle of events that were reported on, so I knew what actually happened. In all three cases what was printed was total clickbait horseshit that had nothing to do with reality. So if a journalist wants to talk to me now, I will only do it if it generates clickbait horseshit that's good for me somehow.

aj3 6y ago
You can always agree for an interview on a condition of receiving final draft before it gets published and having a say on it. Whether they agree or not depends on how many other sources they have for that story.

Stevvo 6y ago

In underprivileged communities in the UK, kids are raised from a young age not to trust a "journo".

enriquto 6y ago

> I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago This. Sometimes we joke that "all news is fake news"; but it is actually true!

perch56 6y ago
A book that opened my eyes is Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life by Rolf Dobelli.
raxxorrax 6y ago
The problem is that the press drives policy decisions, so you cannot disengage completely. You would need to find a direct line of communication towards representatives without the press. We have the means for that theoretically, but it needs a lot of engagement. I think most people would benefit when cutting out classical papers.

greggman3 6y ago

I had a similar experience with reporters. I worked on a commercial product, on release someone just opening store had a sale, some reporter interpreted that sale as dumping a failing product and wrote that story. No amount of proof to the contrary would get them to retract. Whether or not it effected sales I have no idea but I learned some reporters are scum There is also the phenomenon of reading articles about topics I know well and haven them be completely wrong which leads to to at least entertain the idea that the same is true for topics i don't know about. No idea what the solution is.

tzfld 6y ago

Unfortunately every single media outlet has a narrative to propagate. Being that an imposed one or from their own convictions. Can't find a single source of information being totally objective.

nelaboras 6y ago

> "I don't trust anything they write without checking the facts." I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever. How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists? What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector? The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases. The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - "I don't trust journalists" translates in most cases to "I don't trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint." This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information. Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn't mean you should distrust all apples.

ben_w 6y ago
Gell-Mann amnesia effect: """ Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. - Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002) """ This isn’t to say that all journalists are “bad apples”, but as the full aphorism says, “A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel”.

AtHeartEngineer 6y ago

I had a similar experience in Iraq. I had saw an attack happen and then heard the CNN report about it a few hours later and it wasn't even in the realm of what happened. It was surreal.

abj 6y ago
Could I ask what the CNN article got wrong? I'm curious how different their story was to the actual attack.
smdyc1 6y ago
This may be slightly off topic here, but I attended a birthday party of a friend last year. Long story short, there was a guy at the same pub who OD'd and my wife and I helped him until the ambulance arrived. There was a 'reality' TV cameraman with them and we didn't want him filming us so I asked him to stop. His tactic was to shove the camera in my face and make snide remarks to provoke a reaction. When I put my hand up and stepped back, the guy tilted the camera back really quickly and took a knee panning it up at me, and started saying things like "you hit me! That's assault". To this day I have no idea what ended up being shown, if anything, but it was an eye opening experience about the abject dishonesty involved in reality TV. I can just as easily see that applied to TV journalism.

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

I woke up to the fact that most newspapers are like that in the last 2-3 years. That resulted in me eliminating one publication after the other. Today only one has remained, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a german-language publication from Switzerland. Lets see how long it holds up.

aj3 6y ago
But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either. I prefer the Economist - they clearly have a very strong bias in some political & economical stories, but that bias is predictable and consistent. At least their factual reporting seems on the point.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  I've always found that when they cover something I'm familiar with they do at least a credible job of it.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  > But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either. I'd call myself an "accidental moderate" in PG's terms, and there are lots of good accounts on Twitter that look at both sides of the issue. You don't need to follow lots of accounts on a wide range of the political spectrum, but simply avoid the partisan/"belief bunching" preachers, and pick the smartest and most rational ones instead. This has been the biggest source of education for me recently.

VBprogrammer 6y ago

Having seen the inside of a few events and the reporting produced in response, I'd say a healthy dose of scepticism is usually warranted when reading about something you have no personal involvement in. In fact one of the worst experience for me in terms of trust for the media was working at a startup. The willingness of journalists to produce puff pieces, or print press releases virtually verbatim, on the basis of 5 minutes of SQL queries cobbled together and cherry picked to produce the desired result was frightening.

alexashka 6y ago

You know what's even more sad? Journalists on average, are more intelligent than an average human being. An average journalist distorts the truth knowingly and is a scumbag. An average person parrots lies and is convinced of them, and if you point it out, he/she'll be upset with you. This is how religions continue even in the face of the best thinkers for centuries, coming up with the most considerate, foolproof arguments for why it's bullshit. At some point we have to ask: do people even want to be able to tell truth apart from bullshit, or do they just want to be led and told what to do by someone they like?

adsche 6y ago

Genuine question, how do you (or others) check the facts? Where do you get facts from?

aj3 6y ago
Professionally relevant information - insider sources, other information that is important for you for whatever reason - from original sources. If there aren't any original sources (e.g. politics, history etc) - cross reference multiple interpretations that present story from different angles, e.g. Fox vs CNN, Guardian vs BBC, Washington Post vs Al Jazeera vs Russia Today. Of course for some stories there are sources that are better suited than others due to their focus (e.g. throw in Democracy Now for anything about grassroots movements, various scientific/medical news are discussed most in-depth by specialized podcasts, etc). And then there is information that isn't important (it doesn't affect you and you can't act on it) and you're just seeking it out of habit (addiction really).

stared 6y ago

First and foremost, I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired. NYT is a reputable journal and shouldn't tolerate such unprofessional and potentially dangerous behavior. The person breached a few lines of ethical journalism, and for no justified reason: First, purposefully using an incorrect name (and Scott Alexander's online identity is Scott Alexander). In many other cases, even if the name is known publicly, and it is (or was) a legal anme, a journalist does not need to write it. Second, for everyone having vocal opinions, it puts them in real danger. If revealing someone's identity (or a threat of such) makes someone close their blog, the journalist have already made their damage. Third, it erodes trust in journalists. Such journalists make any other journalism harder, as people have justified reasons not to talk. Not every person wants to increase their risk. I hope that until the journalist gets fired, no activist, whistleblower, a person who wants to speak about professional malpractice, controversial artist etc. won't talk to NYT. For their own safety.

huffmsa 6y ago
The NYT isn't reputable anymore. Haven't been for a while. Case in point, this article they might publish. They fired most of their senior editors in 2017 because they were both too expensive and enforcing old school journalist standards and integrity which doesn't generate clicks like hot handed opinion pieces followed by reverse opinion pieces does. Though mind you that senior group was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, so take their integrity with a grain of salt.
- paulgb 6y ago
  > Case in point, this article they might publish. As an NYT subscriber, I'm very concerned by this, but I think it's ironic that people skeptical of the media because they don't wait to get facts right are so willing to jump to the conclusion that Scott's account is the full story. I'm inclined to believe Scott, but just as a remotely plausible hypothetical: there's also been rumors of a hit piece floating around for a few days[1]. Maybe they uncovered something Scott doesn't want out there besides just his identity and this is his way of seeding distrust before it gets out. [1] https://twitter.com/TauTeFox/status/1273775737527394306 https://twitter.com/TauTeFox/status/1273775737527394306

martin_bech 6y ago

Just by luck I've been interviewed on camera a few times, and each time Im astounded, how im not really beeing interviewed, im rather beeing asked questions phrased a certain way, so they have a certain response that fits a narrative.

simonh 6y ago

News organisations pander to their audience, so I think it's really important to understand what that audience is. If you happen to be in that target audience, then of course there's a real risk you'll end up in an echo chamber that becomes increasingly far away from anything resembling a consensus reality. I've come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different target audiences. I occasionally read the Daily Mail (my mother gets it, don't judge) and the Guardian. My main source of general news is the BBC news site, but I also regularly read The Economist. From time to time I pop on to the Fox News site, partly to remind myself that the Daily Mail could actually be a lot worse. I listen to LBC in the car (A London based politics and current affairs talk radio show). Genuine question - I'd be interested in how others approach this. Is my set of sources too skewed one way or another? Am I missing a decent balanced source, or should I add a credible source on any particular political leaning?

scarmig 6y ago
Most news is worthless. What's important will have more perspective available six months from now (or, better, six years from now); what's not important is just parlor room gossip. Reading e.g. the politics section of the NYT religiously for the past couple years, your biggest takeaway would be that Trump is an idiot who doesn't belong in office. Which, as far as it goes, is true, but there's no need to pick up a bad habit like reading the NYT in order to know that. It's probably necessary to know enough about this week's going-ons for social reasons, to the same extent that it's necessary to know who's playing in the Super Bowl, but there are more useful ways to spend your energies.
gridlockd 6y ago
One underrated option is to just not read the news: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... Getting the news from "both sides" is just getting two bullshit spins on the same topic, but the truth isn't in the middle. You can get "just the facts" from outlets like Reuters. You may find that this isn't really entertaining and that really you do consume news for other reasons than getting informed. You may recognize that you actually want "the spin", you want the emotional turmoil, the sensation. From that perspective, consuming news is more like a consuming a drug: A guilty pleasure that should not be overindulged in.

DoubleGlazing 6y ago

The father of one of my neighbours recently died in a house fire. It was a tragic accident, nothing sinister. The whole family could be described as boringly average with nothing of note about them. The family refused all requests for interviews from the media. That didn't stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family photos (both old and more recent ones) and published pictures of the whole family. The family could deal with the headlines, but that someone leaked family photos to the paper really hit them hard. The story was so sensationalised and gory and completely off the scale. A few column inches would have sufficed, instead it was double page spread implying the family was in turmoil. The paper turned an already painful family situation in to an absolute nightmare.

hackissimo123 6y ago
My favourite example of all time of journalistic shamelessness is ABC reporting that Robin Williams's were "respectfully asking for privacy" following his death, while a banner at the top of the same page advertised live aerial footage of Robin Williams's home: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=abc_classy http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=abc_classy
csharptwdec19 6y ago
Doesn't the UK have strong laws about libel and slander? Or do they not apply to Ireland?
- DuskStar 6y ago
  Ireland is a different country.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  The Republic of Ireland is situated on the island of Ireland, which is itself one of the archipelago known as the British Isles (a term which is offensive to certain people from the Republic). Other entities which sit on the British Isles include the Isle of Man and the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", comprising four nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). Great Britain is one of the British Isles, and it contains most of Wales, Scotland, and England.

nvr219 6y ago

How do you get the news? Who do you trust?

projektfu 6y ago
For me, it’s difficult to “trust”. I assume I know next to nothing about India vs Pakistan or the Mexican drug war and that Journalism isn’t going to change that. At best it’s a source of stories like any novel, at worst it’s trying to mislead. In the case of Mexico’s drug war, most Americans are probably very misguided as to how dangerous it is for tourists and also how much of it is seen by the average Mexican on a given day. I feel I’ve learned infinitely more in one conversation on Tandem with someone who lives in Mexico than I ever will from a newspaper. If I read about riots in my city, I know there was something going on but I can’t really trust that the news correctly identified the place, people, or motive. I may have the desire to learn more and so I will reach out to someone who was there our lives in that neighborhood. I had a waking up moment in 2003 during the Iraq war protests. I learned that the NYT, which was my favorite because each issue was a literary work that could be read from front to back, reported as though they’d never been to NYC. If they couldn’t get basic details right when the story was literally on the same street (Broadway) then I don’t know what they’re actually capable of reporting.
- nvr219 6y ago
  oh ok

HenryBemis 6y ago

Even if the reporter was half decent (let's assume he/she was), it would most likely be the Editor that have twisted the story around, for whatever reason or excuse. It happens in all kinds of business. Go talk to an auditor (ANY) auditor and they will have plenty of horror stories where the reviewer rewrote a paragraph "to better reflect the message", in which rewrite the message was changed.

papeda 6y ago

May as well ask here, I pretty much only read the weekly Economist to get my news at this point. I think I have their slight biases dialed in at this point. Anyone want to make a case for a different primary news source/argue that The Economist is bad? For context, I like The Economist because it's mostly unemotional, information-dense, and the magazine comes in a single weekly thing to read.

zozbot234 6y ago
The Economist is the rare case of a news source that's not too bad, at least at present. We can't let ourselves become complacent, however - just see what's happening to the NYT.

pythonwizz 6y ago

The Economist is actually pretty good. They have their own political bias (see at wikipedia entry) but both, their news and technology reporting is top notch.

journo12345 6y ago

I don’t know if I’ll really be able to add to this conversation, but two cents anyway: I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better. I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism. 1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles. (This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.) 2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath. 3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful. That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.

euler_angles 6y ago

Many years ago, a close family friend, who was a police officer in a small town, committed suicide. The local television news kept trying to find the man's children and wife in the days immediately following his suicide to ask them questions. Because there's no informative news value to the general public in his family's reactions -- of course they're heartbroken and grieving, their beloved husband/father took his own life -- it was clear that the media just wanted to air emotional people to appeal to viewers. I stopped watching television news -- because the vast majority of 'news' programs are just entertainment with a veneer of news.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

Many, many years ago, I was the foreman on a murder trial in our little town. In the jury selection process, the public defender -- a good, respected, local attorney -- asked the first candidate pool if they had read about the murder in the local paper. Almost everyone had. Then he asked if any of them had ever had a story written about them, or, say, their business, in this local paper. Three or four people raised their hand. Then he simply asked, "Did they get it right?" Everyone shook their head. Everyone laughed, and he moved on. Point made. That was my eye-opener.

catacombs 6y ago
> Then he simply asked, "Did they get it right?" Everyone shook their head. Everyone laughed, and he moved on. A good follow up would be "How?" The coverage might have been factually correct, but just because they didn't like it doesn't mean the information was wrong.

TomSwirly 6y ago

The Times wrote a story about a play written about my life (long story) and there was a mistake in every line - most trivial and inexplicable, like guessing an age for people and getting it wrong, and some mistakes actively annoying. Also, I once appeared in the Post and the Times in the same day when my friend and I got blown up in a steam pipe explosion (we were covered in mud but undamaged). The Times made us seem suave and hip (they mentioned my natty tie covered by mud) and the Post made us seem like victims of a tragedy. Such different pictures! All very educational.

bttrfl 6y ago

Well, I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter WASN'T at the scene, and yet I later read what she had written about it in the newspaper as if she had been present. It was a really nice review of a show that... was cancelled.

cskinner 6y ago

Some things to keep in mind when doing any interview. First, know what message you want to get across, and focus on that. Second, avoid almost all "what if" type hypothetical questions. Third, make your own recording of any interview, and make sure the reporter is aware that you are doing so. I was fortunate enough to be part of some media training early in my career, where the trainer (an ex-TV reporter) recorded an interview with one of the participants. The next day they played for us the video they had put together splicing different questions into the interview and editing down the responses. The resulting "interview" was a real hit piece, and the editing was done smoothly enough that it presented as a single continuous take (even with the switching camera angles). It would have been very damaging if it had been broadcast like that, and without proof that it was faked the PR effort to counteract it would have been challenging.

dcolkitt 6y ago
I'd say even more simply, don't talk to the press without the intermediation of a competent PR professional. It's the same reason you don't talk to the police without a lawyer. Even if you're the cleverest person in the world, you're playing a game against an opponent who does this for a living and holds all the cards.

brightball 6y ago

I learned this in college. I was head of an organization that supported a lot of activities around sports and I was interviewed by the school paper. Had a nice conversation and then the story came out. He used 2 sentences from a 30 minute conversation to insert out of context in a piece totally unrelated to what we were talking about. I’ve been on guard ever since.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu

skissane 6y ago

In 2005, The Australian newspaper published an article claiming that Macquarie University IT Services was going to make redundant 50-60 staff. (I can't find the text of the article online, but I can find a citation for it [1].) I remember being amused by this article, because I actually worked there at the time, and we didn't actually have 50-60 staff to make redundant. If they'd let go of 50-60 staff from our department, we would have had a negative number of employees remaining (the actual number of employees was a bit over 40). It also reinforced my tendency to distrust journalists, who often fail to get even basic facts right. (There was an element of truth behind the story – they did plan a significant round of job cuts, 15 years later I can't recall exactly how big, but it could have been a third of the department – it was just the numbers in the article had been impossibly inflated. And the plan was never to lay off the entire department, just a significant chunk of it.) [1] https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/121830411 https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/121830411

catacombs 6y ago

How do you stay informed?

greenhatglack 6y ago

Same here to some degree. Those who wield actual power will never be criticized or exposed, which means that journalists are inherently useless or closer to being a corpse. Daphne Caruana Galizia, Tim Pool, Andy Ngo are some who are constantly attacked both verbally and physically and thus I have bit more faith in them than I do for others "journalists". Always keep Reverse Gell-Man Amnesia in mind.

hedora 6y ago

My wife and I have a combined >20 years experience in microbiology and medical research, so we’re feeling the pain of “this journalist has no idea what they’re talking about” more than usual these days. The coverage of COVID has been more distressing than the actual disease. (Hint: epidemiologists specialize in studying the spread of diseases after the fact; asking them about an ongoing epidemic is like asking an expert on Roman architecture to build an office building.) Here’s some example nonsense in the news. I regularly see the same story argue both points in each bullet: - Sweden has had too many cases (deaths), and too few cases (people with antibodies). - Last week 5% of 1000 confirmed cases died; this week 0.5% of 10,000 estimated cases died. “Experts” “baffled” but we are winning and can reopen (the same publication will flip the numbers and conclusion tomorrow) - Antibodies might not lead to immunity, but the vaccine (which does nothing but cause your body to create antibodies) will be a panacea. Bonus gem from yesterday: New study shows kids don’t spread COVID. The numbers are based on studies of areas where schools and daycares were closed, and the kids were quarantined. Adults were more likely to catch COVID at work than from their quarantined kids. There was one (just one) school where the kids spread COVID amongst themselves, but that was probably an outlier. No one really understands how it happened. Note that the high-level conclusion of this last article was probably right: kids usually don’t get symptoms, and asymptomatic people are less likely to cough / spread it. A stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess.

wutbrodo 6y ago

This is a pretty easy conclusion to come to theoretically, too. Any position of power is going to tend towards abuse and incompetence if there's not some sort of filter in hiring for or sustaining the institution. Newspapers live or die by clicks and subscribers: There's no incentive towards any notion of "journalistic integrity", there's no filter ensuring that journalists are especially intelligent or honest, and there's no reason to believe that the typical journalist is any less likely to abuse their position than the typical police officer. Just as there are individual dedicated, ethical police who believe deeply in fulfilling their mission the right way, there are good journalists out there who make the world better. But for every Ronan Farrow, there are a thousand Farhad Manjoos and Cade Metzes; for every Foreign Affairs, there are a hundred New York Times or Fox News. The net effect is the same as with police: understand that we've got a horridly imperfect system chock full of dishonest actors and engage with it on those terms. Don't talk to cops without a lawyer; don't talk to a journalist without a PR person and/or a specific plan for what you're getting out of the exchange and how to protect yourself from exploitation[1]. The Internet has greatly accelerated this trend. Pre-Internet, if by some miracle you managed to get enough honest, intelligent people together in a single paper, you could establish a culture of journalistic ethics under the aegis of the slack afforded by your local monopoly on distribution. But in the Internet era, you need to be fully competitive on the terms defined by the market, which, as described above, don't point towards honest, ethical reporting at all. The tragedy with journalism is that government is usually a useful tool to address this problem: well-crafted regulation can shape incentives such that you don't need to rely on wishing for good cops, which is the direction that police reform discussions are taking. A heavy government hand, however, is anathema to the role that journalists are supposed to play in modern society, so this tool is off the table. I've thought about this for a very long time, and I don't know how to solve this. [1] This obviously doesn't apply in narrow cases like "observation from man on the street"

Super_Jambo 6y ago
There is no way to fix advertising funded, it's the problem with facebook and google too. Advertising means the consumers aren't customers to be served but eyeballs to be harvested and served up.

anoraca 6y ago

I would like to caution anyone reading the comments to be skeptical of posts that push to erode your faith in journalism. There has been an alarming trend of people pushing a narrative that news organizations cannot be trusted. It is a toxic attack on one of the most important components in a functional democratic republic.