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> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of ch

> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp to it and change. The days of BSing people are over. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-highway.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-th... https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-with-precision-and-judgment-but-not-integrity-in-tesla-test/ https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-w...

arp242 6y ago
That's 7 years ago? I don't know anything about that entire story so I can't comment specifically, but the NYT publishes about 150 articles a day, so there are bound to be some stinkers over the years. It's not great, but dismissing an entire publication over it doesn't strike me as fair.
- busterarm 6y ago
  The NYT used to have industry-leading editorial standards. Just a week or two ago in their reporting on the UFO story, they initially reported it in a "ZOMG ALIENS ARE REAL!" way, which is the most clickbaity thing they could have done...and then silently published a correction after they got the bump in views. The NYT is practically indistinguishable from (modern) BuzzFeed.
  - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    Seconding this. I actually pay for the Times out of sheer nostalgia for its being my hometown paper, but when they're publishing Very Serious Stories on the press-release UFO crap the government was trying to distract people with, they're doing a just plain bad job of journalism.
  - arp242 6y ago
    Right; but it's one thing to say "they no longer have industry-leading editorial standards" and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect. I don't read the NYT front page – just articles linked here and elsewhere – so my view of it is far from complete and biased; I don't see "ZOMG ALIES!"-type articles for example, but there certainly still seems plenty of content of value on the NYT, in spite of also having content that detracts from that. You also have to appreciate the NYT's position I think; at the end of the day, a newspaper is in the business selling newspapers. It's not quite that simple as many journalists and publications – quite rightfully – believe they have a greater task than "just running a business", but at the end of the day bills need to be paid, and the NYT is a business. A business that now has to compete against a plethora of free content, not infrequently written by incompetent hacks (possibly with a less-than-savoury agenda) with almost no editorial standards. Competing against "free" is hard, and is not an easy position for a business to be in and quite likely a big reason for the decline in editorial standards. This is pretty much what this article is about. "ZOMG ALIENS!" is complete nonsense, but ... it probably also drives traffic, and thus revenue. One way to see this is that this revenue-based clickbait content sponsors the more in-depth quality content and, like advertisement, is kind of a necessary evil. But yeah, it's not great. As an aside, I have plenty of gripes with the state of the press by the way; especially since the Trump presidency things have ... not evolved in the right direction. But we must also be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
    - labcomputer 6y ago
      > and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect The newspaper's ombudsman declined to punish the reporter in any way, or admit anything other than "oops, mistakes were made". That's what makes it a failure of the newspaper and not just "less-than-perfect" reporting. It's one example from a pattern of behavior, and the reason people are saying the NYT no longer have industry-leading editorial standards. Let me remind you that the reporter was caught red-handed driving a car in circles in a parking lot so that he could have a more salacious story about "running out of gas". The original article stated that he coasted off the freeway into the parking lot with no energy remaining. There's no two ways about it: That's a lie. How low do you need the p-value to be before you reject the null hypothesis? 0.0005? 5e-9? Nobody is disputing that news is a hard business, but you can't have it both ways: If you're going to run a serious newspaper, then you need to run a serious newspaper. That means upholding editorial standards. Most importantly, that mean having real repercussions for reporters who break the trust of your readership. > "ZOMG ALIENS!" is complete nonsense, but ... it probably also drives traffic, and thus revenue. The owners are completely within their rights to pivot and turn the NYT into the next buzzfeed. But you're just reinforcing the point that it is no longer a serious newspaper.
- andrewtbham 6y ago
  this attitude is part of the problem... no one goes back and holds them accountable for anything. they just move onto the next BS problem and never notice the old stuff was dead wrong. If you want to change your perspective, invest in the companies... it will stick with you. I foolishly shorted apple around antenna gate. that was the beginning of me starting to hold the media accountable. the media is wrong over and over and people don't seem to notice.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I'd love to see historical articles matching what they predicted with what actually happened. At least in tech writing, I'd expect most of their predictions to be wrong.
- fossuser 6y ago
  This was recently: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-between-Taylor-Lorenz-and-Balaji-S-Srinivasan-really-about https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-bet... Also this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-... Also: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter I think there are some great New York Times writers (Li Yuan’s articles I always like), but there’s a lot of seriously bad writing and writers. It’s not exclusive to NYT either, Vox makes some great stuff - but they also published that “no handshakes” article mocking Silicon Valley for taking COVID seriously. Vox repeatedly pushed the “COVID isn’t a pandemic” story. Vox doubled down on the “no handshakes” thing with Kara Swisher arguing in support of it. They still haven’t admitted being wrong. Link: https://medium.com/@balajis/citations-for-the-recode-handshake-debunking-b2751adc7e69 https://medium.com/@balajis/citations-for-the-recode-handsha... If you know anyone who has a NYT piece written about them usually they’re surprised by how many things are wrong. Of course these are just the publications that even pretend to be honest, I’m not unfairly targeting them - others unnamed are often worse. I think their ad driven model is a corrupting influence. I also think their anti-tech company bias is related to tech companies destroying their historical business model (I think they're holding a grudge: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...). I think it’s better to support good writers directly, I hope substack and independent blogs win. Some suggestions: Persuasion: https://www.persuasion.community/ https://www.persuasion.community/ Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/ https://stratechery.com/ Stay Tuned with Preet: https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-podcast/ https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-podcast/ Andrew Sullivan: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe Sam Harris: https://samharris.org/ https://samharris.org/
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    who is going to do, and who is going to pay for, the actual reporting on which the smart but frequently bloviating sort of writers that you cite rely?
- marcusverus 6y ago
  For a more timely example, please recall the whole 1619 debacle, in which the NYT published and subsequently defended a slander against our own American history. The article claimed that preserving the institution of slavery was "one of the primary reasons" for the American Revolution. Even after this claim (among others) was trashed by prominent academic historians, the NYT editorial board defended the article (in a manner scarcely discernible from lying), and only issued a correction after the historians persisted in their criticism. The correction, it should be noted, merely replaced the blatant lie with a masterfully crafted phrase which was clearly intended to imply the very same lie. This is not the behavior of an organization with a commitment to the truth. [0] Original Critique and NYT response: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th... [1] Historians' response: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-proje... [2] NYT Issues Correction: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the-1619-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the...
- 1121redblackgo 6y ago
  This whole thread feels like I am taking crazy pills. It seems odd that so many people are on the contrarian juice in this thread against one of the best journalism outlets in the world. I am right there with you. There are bound to be stinkers, but on the whole the reality that the Times operates in is miles ahead and closer to the truth than most reporting out there, if not all.
thatwasunusual 6y ago
> The days of BSing people are over. Really?
- andrewtbham 6y ago
  lol... things are different. in the old days, no one would have ever known tesla's side of the story.
  - tailrecursion 6y ago
    Yes, this is how I read the OP's comment about the days of BS being over. In the past, newspapers had exclusivity not just in access but in voice. Their frame was THE frame. Today, anyone with a phone can be a journalist. Anyone (not everyone) can access a large audience and get their story out. Anyone can establish an alternative frame, or point out lies, smears, dubious sources or stealth edits. Can a newspaper be serious without putting its published articles under source control with complete edit history?
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Now instead of one or two popular crackpots selling snake oil we have hundreds on social media and elsewhere spreading the equivalent of snake oil.
blueyes 6y ago
What does the author of this piece want? The "truth", or even a plausible interpretation of the facts, is expensive to produce. It is even more expensive when you do it every day covering a wide array of topics. If you value facts and good analysis, pay for them. It's that simple. Sure, the New York Times gets a lot of things wrong. So does everyone else, including many commenters on HN. * But a lot of what the New York Times reports, that people disagree with, are things that governments and companies say and do. Those governments and companies have reasons to lie, but the enunciation of the lie is a fact. Judgment is left to the reader, if he has it. * Publications are also reflections of the societies and political systems in which they are embedded. They speak based on the assumptions and contest of forces in that milieu. * Most publications are firmly rooted in the attention seeking dynamics of their industry. Many of their errors can be categorized as: amplifying the causes of fear or outrage. Again, if you keep that in mind, their stories are easier to parse. * Finally, a publication is not a monolith. It is a human organization with good reporters and bad reporters, good days and bad days. The Tesla article written by Stross was ludicrous. The reports by Judy Miller that led us into the Iraq War were abhorrent. The New York Times should be ashamed of those lapses. But it is putting out a large number of factual reports everyday. Much larger than any equivalent number of human beings in America.
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  >If you value facts and good analysis, pay for them. If you have a society where people must pay for truths but are given lies freely, then should we be surprised when people believe lies? Given those people have equal say in how things are ran as the people willing to pay for truth, doesn't this cause a social level problem?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    It's hard to have a society where lies are expensive that doesn't lead to suppressing speech in general. So, I think you touch on a real problem - but I don't think making lies expensive will lead to a good outcome either. The internet creates a huge amount of easily accessible false information, but also a huge amount of easily accessible true information (more than at any other time in history). People just need the ability to tell the difference. Arguably access to all the information in the world won't save us because the non-free stuff isn't accurate either, and people still aren't trying to actually understand what's true. They're just trying to find stuff to support what they already believe. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_truth_is_paywalled_but_the_lies_are_free/g081ol4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_...
afpx 6y ago
I've been looking for an alternative to the NYT that has as good or better writing and reporting. Do you have any suggestions?
- symlinkk 6y ago
  WSJ
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  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    NYT leans slightly left, WSJ leans slightly right, and I feel like reading both gives you a fairly balanced view on the issues of the day. The opinion sections of each publication can get fringey, but that's just the clickbait that pays the bills - it's obvious that the rest of the articles try hard to adhere to journalistic standards.
  - greyhair 6y ago
    WSJ news section is pretty good, but their focus is a little narrow. The opinion pages? Just tear those out and trash them before any of the words can accidentally leak into your brain. The space between the news side and opinion side of the WSJ is wider than the space between Fox News and Fox and Friends.
fabbari 6y ago
Just out of completeness you could have added the actual response to Tesla's comments: https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-what-it-says-and-what-it-doesnt https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-... To say the least: it's not as clear cut as you make it to be. My personal opinion - for what is worth it - is that between Musk and a journalist of the NYT I would still trust the journalist more. But I am naive that way.
- labcomputer 6y ago
  > Musk and a journalist of the NYT I would still trust the journalist more Why do you believe a journalist who contradicts his own story after being called out on the original? Anyone reading your link in isolation might think it a fine rebuttal, but it's inconsistent with the original piece he wrong for the NYT--they can't both be true. I also like how he defends the "sloppy note-taking" with, "But the manufacturer didn't tell me they had a GPS tracker on the car." That speaks volumes.
javajosh 6y ago
It's a mistake to judge an organization on one, or even a handful of incidents. There should be a pattern of inaccuracy and bias before you "cancel" a news source. This is one of the unsung problems of the modern world, the growing impossibility of keeping an accurate "reputation" in your brain. Virtually everyone and everything has been accused of being evil, in general, or specifically. It's no longer good enough to just "have good feelings" about a name, because I guarantee you've read something about every name that is negative. Mere accusation is trivial to make, and society has somehow gotten away from swift and harsh punishment against baseless accusation. Without that (very useful) habit, the heuristic of equating reputation with number of accusations is meaningless, and yet we all still do it.
- aeternum 6y ago
  Good point, and no news source is immune. Inaccurate and outright fake news has been around since the invention of the printing press. Benjamin Franklin himself authored plenty of it for political purposes. In fact much of the mistreatment of the Native Americans may have stemmed from his “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle” article.
- andrewtbham 6y ago
  at least on the topic of tesla, nyt has been wrong and unfair against tesla for about 10 years. i really don't know about other topics... but... pg repeatedly questions the integrity of nyt and has personally been the victim of their bias. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236979160100343812 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236979160100343812
  - jimkleiber 6y ago
    In the first link you provided, PG put two photos: one of the NYT article and one of his HN post. The NYT article yes, condensed his lengthy post into one sentence, which will almost always be incomplete, but they also linked that quote to what I assume was the HN post. I guess it seems to me that PG is upset they didn't fully encapsulate his ideas, and I'd probably be frustrated as well. But is that the role of a journalist? And is it even possible to condense all of someone else's material and communicate it to another audience without losing information? Maybe it's just me, but I use journalists as a stepping stone for learning more about a topic. I see them writing summaries (sometimes inaccurate) of things that happen in the world and then if I'm curious, I try to dig deeper into the primary sources to learn more. I'd imagine almost every primary source believes journalists get the story wrong now and then, as the journalist doesn't say it the way they would say it. But I marvel in today's world, where I have such quick access to priamry sources to learn more.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Meh that was years ago. Things ebb and flow, but what got me recently was their uptake of cancel culture. They're even throwing out editors because their reporters and others there have glommed on to the idea that non-progressive -opinions- are not welcome. I am a progressive but I do not buy into this the shame-shame-shame bell attitude that has taken the internet by storm. Vanguarded by twitter.
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skrtskrt 6y ago
NYT has beat the drums of war for Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the recent Bolivian coup and pretty much every other imperialist, fascist action backed by the US the world over. Its "liberalism" is a thin sheen over another mass media corporation continually enabling the military-industrial complex at the cost of tens of millions of lives. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/ https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-false...
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jaccarmac 6y ago
"But it’s important to understand the problem with the Times: it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate—though sometimes they are—but that the facts are presented in a way that misleads." Shall we make sure that the quote at the top of the thread includes at least one full sentence as context?
andreilys 6y ago
I lost faith when they tried to dox Scott Alexander for no reason other than to generate a few clicks over the controversy.
mancerayder 6y ago
Tesla is a scientific error, but what about their 1619 Project stuff? For me it was the wild Op Eds literally calling for a revolution, and a two day focus on Trump on the front page and the side op eds while there were riots within view of my window. I remember specifically seeing 5 helicopters within sight, after a second day of rioting, seeing nothing mentioned in the home town NYT that we had sacked Soho and Midtown in consecutive days, hundreds of businesses attacked, and deciding then and there that it was a dangerous, misleading newspaper. After several years of subscribing, I unsubscribed.
cs702 6y ago
Focusing on a small part of one sentence which is only tangentially related to the OP's main topic seems... unfair to me. I found the OP to be a well-written, well-reasoned, thought-provoking article and would highly recommend reading it in its entirety before passing judgment on it.
ksec 6y ago
I am extremely naive on the topic, so be easy on me. 1. Does that mean Tesla gets to know every single thing about my car? Where I have driven to, and how I use it, what time I use it? 2. Both Nytimes and Top Gear act on the same thing ( note. I barely read the NYT article ), If Clarkson were not driving in a normal manner, and flying around a test track burning tires, it will quickly run out of battery. And due to the way filming and production, they didn't actually ran out of battery. I would have thought a normal thing to do would be to disagree with the results, and suggest driving in normal condition and battery conserve manner would results in better milage. Instead Tesla went all out and start suing. I would call this spinning the truth in some sense. But I wouldn't all this BS.
SnotJockey 6y ago
Yeah, That pissed me off too, It stank of petrochemical company bribery or willful ignorance. That said they still produce some quality journalism and I wouldn't write off an entire news organization for one shitty decision (to back a bad review). Just like I don't judge all of Tesla for the fact they don't separate their freeway and street driving data so we can properly analyze their self driving crash statistics misleading potential customers.
neycoda 6y ago
If you think the New York Times is bad, you should try looking up all of the crazy assertions made by Fox News show hosts.

arp242 6y ago

That's 7 years ago? I don't know anything about that entire story so I can't comment specifically, but the NYT publishes about 150 articles a day, so there are bound to be some stinkers over the years. It's not great, but dismissing an entire publication over it doesn't strike me as fair.

busterarm 6y ago
The NYT used to have industry-leading editorial standards. Just a week or two ago in their reporting on the UFO story, they initially reported it in a "ZOMG ALIENS ARE REAL!" way, which is the most clickbaity thing they could have done...and then silently published a correction after they got the bump in views. The NYT is practically indistinguishable from (modern) BuzzFeed.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  Seconding this. I actually pay for the Times out of sheer nostalgia for its being my hometown paper, but when they're publishing Very Serious Stories on the press-release UFO crap the government was trying to distract people with, they're doing a just plain bad job of journalism.
- arp242 6y ago
  Right; but it's one thing to say "they no longer have industry-leading editorial standards" and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect. I don't read the NYT front page – just articles linked here and elsewhere – so my view of it is far from complete and biased; I don't see "ZOMG ALIES!"-type articles for example, but there certainly still seems plenty of content of value on the NYT, in spite of also having content that detracts from that. You also have to appreciate the NYT's position I think; at the end of the day, a newspaper is in the business selling newspapers. It's not quite that simple as many journalists and publications – quite rightfully – believe they have a greater task than "just running a business", but at the end of the day bills need to be paid, and the NYT is a business. A business that now has to compete against a plethora of free content, not infrequently written by incompetent hacks (possibly with a less-than-savoury agenda) with almost no editorial standards. Competing against "free" is hard, and is not an easy position for a business to be in and quite likely a big reason for the decline in editorial standards. This is pretty much what this article is about. "ZOMG ALIENS!" is complete nonsense, but ... it probably also drives traffic, and thus revenue. One way to see this is that this revenue-based clickbait content sponsors the more in-depth quality content and, like advertisement, is kind of a necessary evil. But yeah, it's not great. As an aside, I have plenty of gripes with the state of the press by the way; especially since the Trump presidency things have ... not evolved in the right direction. But we must also be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
  - labcomputer 6y ago
    > and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect The newspaper's ombudsman declined to punish the reporter in any way, or admit anything other than "oops, mistakes were made". That's what makes it a failure of the newspaper and not just "less-than-perfect" reporting. It's one example from a pattern of behavior, and the reason people are saying the NYT no longer have industry-leading editorial standards. Let me remind you that the reporter was caught red-handed driving a car in circles in a parking lot so that he could have a more salacious story about "running out of gas". The original article stated that he coasted off the freeway into the parking lot with no energy remaining. There's no two ways about it: That's a lie. How low do you need the p-value to be before you reject the null hypothesis? 0.0005? 5e-9? Nobody is disputing that news is a hard business, but you can't have it both ways: If you're going to run a serious newspaper, then you need to run a serious newspaper. That means upholding editorial standards. Most importantly, that mean having real repercussions for reporters who break the trust of your readership. > "ZOMG ALIENS!" is complete nonsense, but ... it probably also drives traffic, and thus revenue. The owners are completely within their rights to pivot and turn the NYT into the next buzzfeed. But you're just reinforcing the point that it is no longer a serious newspaper.
andrewtbham 6y ago
this attitude is part of the problem... no one goes back and holds them accountable for anything. they just move onto the next BS problem and never notice the old stuff was dead wrong. If you want to change your perspective, invest in the companies... it will stick with you. I foolishly shorted apple around antenna gate. that was the beginning of me starting to hold the media accountable. the media is wrong over and over and people don't seem to notice.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I'd love to see historical articles matching what they predicted with what actually happened. At least in tech writing, I'd expect most of their predictions to be wrong.
fossuser 6y ago
This was recently: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-between-Taylor-Lorenz-and-Balaji-S-Srinivasan-really-about https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-bet... Also this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-... Also: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter I think there are some great New York Times writers (Li Yuan’s articles I always like), but there’s a lot of seriously bad writing and writers. It’s not exclusive to NYT either, Vox makes some great stuff - but they also published that “no handshakes” article mocking Silicon Valley for taking COVID seriously. Vox repeatedly pushed the “COVID isn’t a pandemic” story. Vox doubled down on the “no handshakes” thing with Kara Swisher arguing in support of it. They still haven’t admitted being wrong. Link: https://medium.com/@balajis/citations-for-the-recode-handshake-debunking-b2751adc7e69 https://medium.com/@balajis/citations-for-the-recode-handsha... If you know anyone who has a NYT piece written about them usually they’re surprised by how many things are wrong. Of course these are just the publications that even pretend to be honest, I’m not unfairly targeting them - others unnamed are often worse. I think their ad driven model is a corrupting influence. I also think their anti-tech company bias is related to tech companies destroying their historical business model (I think they're holding a grudge: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...). I think it’s better to support good writers directly, I hope substack and independent blogs win. Some suggestions: Persuasion: https://www.persuasion.community/ https://www.persuasion.community/ Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/ https://stratechery.com/ Stay Tuned with Preet: https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-podcast/ https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-podcast/ Andrew Sullivan: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe Sam Harris: https://samharris.org/ https://samharris.org/
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  who is going to do, and who is going to pay for, the actual reporting on which the smart but frequently bloviating sort of writers that you cite rely?
marcusverus 6y ago
For a more timely example, please recall the whole 1619 debacle, in which the NYT published and subsequently defended a slander against our own American history. The article claimed that preserving the institution of slavery was "one of the primary reasons" for the American Revolution. Even after this claim (among others) was trashed by prominent academic historians, the NYT editorial board defended the article (in a manner scarcely discernible from lying), and only issued a correction after the historians persisted in their criticism. The correction, it should be noted, merely replaced the blatant lie with a masterfully crafted phrase which was clearly intended to imply the very same lie. This is not the behavior of an organization with a commitment to the truth. [0] Original Critique and NYT response: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th... [1] Historians' response: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-proje... [2] NYT Issues Correction: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the-1619-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the...
1121redblackgo 6y ago
This whole thread feels like I am taking crazy pills. It seems odd that so many people are on the contrarian juice in this thread against one of the best journalism outlets in the world. I am right there with you. There are bound to be stinkers, but on the whole the reality that the Times operates in is miles ahead and closer to the truth than most reporting out there, if not all.

thatwasunusual 6y ago

> The days of BSing people are over. Really?

andrewtbham 6y ago
lol... things are different. in the old days, no one would have ever known tesla's side of the story.
- tailrecursion 6y ago
  Yes, this is how I read the OP's comment about the days of BS being over. In the past, newspapers had exclusivity not just in access but in voice. Their frame was THE frame. Today, anyone with a phone can be a journalist. Anyone (not everyone) can access a large audience and get their story out. Anyone can establish an alternative frame, or point out lies, smears, dubious sources or stealth edits. Can a newspaper be serious without putting its published articles under source control with complete edit history?
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Now instead of one or two popular crackpots selling snake oil we have hundreds on social media and elsewhere spreading the equivalent of snake oil.

blueyes 6y ago

What does the author of this piece want? The "truth", or even a plausible interpretation of the facts, is expensive to produce. It is even more expensive when you do it every day covering a wide array of topics. If you value facts and good analysis, pay for them. It's that simple. Sure, the New York Times gets a lot of things wrong. So does everyone else, including many commenters on HN. * But a lot of what the New York Times reports, that people disagree with, are things that governments and companies say and do. Those governments and companies have reasons to lie, but the enunciation of the lie is a fact. Judgment is left to the reader, if he has it. * Publications are also reflections of the societies and political systems in which they are embedded. They speak based on the assumptions and contest of forces in that milieu. * Most publications are firmly rooted in the attention seeking dynamics of their industry. Many of their errors can be categorized as: amplifying the causes of fear or outrage. Again, if you keep that in mind, their stories are easier to parse. * Finally, a publication is not a monolith. It is a human organization with good reporters and bad reporters, good days and bad days. The Tesla article written by Stross was ludicrous. The reports by Judy Miller that led us into the Iraq War were abhorrent. The New York Times should be ashamed of those lapses. But it is putting out a large number of factual reports everyday. Much larger than any equivalent number of human beings in America.

SkyBelow 6y ago
>If you value facts and good analysis, pay for them. If you have a society where people must pay for truths but are given lies freely, then should we be surprised when people believe lies? Given those people have equal say in how things are ran as the people willing to pay for truth, doesn't this cause a social level problem?
- fossuser 6y ago
  It's hard to have a society where lies are expensive that doesn't lead to suppressing speech in general. So, I think you touch on a real problem - but I don't think making lies expensive will lead to a good outcome either. The internet creates a huge amount of easily accessible false information, but also a huge amount of easily accessible true information (more than at any other time in history). People just need the ability to tell the difference. Arguably access to all the information in the world won't save us because the non-free stuff isn't accurate either, and people still aren't trying to actually understand what's true. They're just trying to find stuff to support what they already believe. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_truth_is_paywalled_but_the_lies_are_free/g081ol4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_...

afpx 6y ago

I've been looking for an alternative to the NYT that has as good or better writing and reporting. Do you have any suggestions?

symlinkk 6y ago
WSJ
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- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  NYT leans slightly left, WSJ leans slightly right, and I feel like reading both gives you a fairly balanced view on the issues of the day. The opinion sections of each publication can get fringey, but that's just the clickbait that pays the bills - it's obvious that the rest of the articles try hard to adhere to journalistic standards.
- greyhair 6y ago
  WSJ news section is pretty good, but their focus is a little narrow. The opinion pages? Just tear those out and trash them before any of the words can accidentally leak into your brain. The space between the news side and opinion side of the WSJ is wider than the space between Fox News and Fox and Friends.

fabbari 6y ago

Just out of completeness you could have added the actual response to Tesla's comments: https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-what-it-says-and-what-it-doesnt https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-... To say the least: it's not as clear cut as you make it to be. My personal opinion - for what is worth it - is that between Musk and a journalist of the NYT I would still trust the journalist more. But I am naive that way.

labcomputer 6y ago
> Musk and a journalist of the NYT I would still trust the journalist more Why do you believe a journalist who contradicts his own story after being called out on the original? Anyone reading your link in isolation might think it a fine rebuttal, but it's inconsistent with the original piece he wrong for the NYT--they can't both be true. I also like how he defends the "sloppy note-taking" with, "But the manufacturer didn't tell me they had a GPS tracker on the car." That speaks volumes.

javajosh 6y ago

It's a mistake to judge an organization on one, or even a handful of incidents. There should be a pattern of inaccuracy and bias before you "cancel" a news source. This is one of the unsung problems of the modern world, the growing impossibility of keeping an accurate "reputation" in your brain. Virtually everyone and everything has been accused of being evil, in general, or specifically. It's no longer good enough to just "have good feelings" about a name, because I guarantee you've read something about every name that is negative. Mere accusation is trivial to make, and society has somehow gotten away from swift and harsh punishment against baseless accusation. Without that (very useful) habit, the heuristic of equating reputation with number of accusations is meaningless, and yet we all still do it.

aeternum 6y ago
Good point, and no news source is immune. Inaccurate and outright fake news has been around since the invention of the printing press. Benjamin Franklin himself authored plenty of it for political purposes. In fact much of the mistreatment of the Native Americans may have stemmed from his “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle” article.
andrewtbham 6y ago
at least on the topic of tesla, nyt has been wrong and unfair against tesla for about 10 years. i really don't know about other topics... but... pg repeatedly questions the integrity of nyt and has personally been the victim of their bias. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236979160100343812 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236979160100343812
- jimkleiber 6y ago
  In the first link you provided, PG put two photos: one of the NYT article and one of his HN post. The NYT article yes, condensed his lengthy post into one sentence, which will almost always be incomplete, but they also linked that quote to what I assume was the HN post. I guess it seems to me that PG is upset they didn't fully encapsulate his ideas, and I'd probably be frustrated as well. But is that the role of a journalist? And is it even possible to condense all of someone else's material and communicate it to another audience without losing information? Maybe it's just me, but I use journalists as a stepping stone for learning more about a topic. I see them writing summaries (sometimes inaccurate) of things that happen in the world and then if I'm curious, I try to dig deeper into the primary sources to learn more. I'd imagine almost every primary source believes journalists get the story wrong now and then, as the journalist doesn't say it the way they would say it. But I marvel in today's world, where I have such quick access to priamry sources to learn more.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Meh that was years ago. Things ebb and flow, but what got me recently was their uptake of cancel culture. They're even throwing out editors because their reporters and others there have glommed on to the idea that non-progressive -opinions- are not welcome. I am a progressive but I do not buy into this the shame-shame-shame bell attitude that has taken the internet by storm. Vanguarded by twitter.

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skrtskrt 6y ago

NYT has beat the drums of war for Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the recent Bolivian coup and pretty much every other imperialist, fascist action backed by the US the world over. Its "liberalism" is a thin sheen over another mass media corporation continually enabling the military-industrial complex at the cost of tens of millions of lives. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/ https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-false...

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jaccarmac 6y ago

"But it’s important to understand the problem with the Times: it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate—though sometimes they are—but that the facts are presented in a way that misleads." Shall we make sure that the quote at the top of the thread includes at least one full sentence as context?

andreilys 6y ago

I lost faith when they tried to dox Scott Alexander for no reason other than to generate a few clicks over the controversy.

mancerayder 6y ago

Tesla is a scientific error, but what about their 1619 Project stuff? For me it was the wild Op Eds literally calling for a revolution, and a two day focus on Trump on the front page and the side op eds while there were riots within view of my window. I remember specifically seeing 5 helicopters within sight, after a second day of rioting, seeing nothing mentioned in the home town NYT that we had sacked Soho and Midtown in consecutive days, hundreds of businesses attacked, and deciding then and there that it was a dangerous, misleading newspaper. After several years of subscribing, I unsubscribed.

cs702 6y ago

Focusing on a small part of one sentence which is only tangentially related to the OP's main topic seems... unfair to me. I found the OP to be a well-written, well-reasoned, thought-provoking article and would highly recommend reading it in its entirety before passing judgment on it.

ksec 6y ago

I am extremely naive on the topic, so be easy on me. 1. Does that mean Tesla gets to know every single thing about my car? Where I have driven to, and how I use it, what time I use it? 2. Both Nytimes and Top Gear act on the same thing ( note. I barely read the NYT article ), If Clarkson were not driving in a normal manner, and flying around a test track burning tires, it will quickly run out of battery. And due to the way filming and production, they didn't actually ran out of battery. I would have thought a normal thing to do would be to disagree with the results, and suggest driving in normal condition and battery conserve manner would results in better milage. Instead Tesla went all out and start suing. I would call this spinning the truth in some sense. But I wouldn't all this BS.

SnotJockey 6y ago

Yeah, That pissed me off too, It stank of petrochemical company bribery or willful ignorance. That said they still produce some quality journalism and I wouldn't write off an entire news organization for one shitty decision (to back a bad review). Just like I don't judge all of Tesla for the fact they don't separate their freeway and street driving data so we can properly analyze their self driving crash statistics misleading potential customers.

neycoda 6y ago

If you think the New York Times is bad, you should try looking up all of the crazy assertions made by Fox News show hosts.