17 ms·

What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

333 points by apsec112 6y ago

EdwardDiego 6y ago
> On June 10th they wrote, in reference to LA teachers going on strike, that “the average classroom had forty-six students”. (This was in the lede, where the author was setting context for how upset the reader should be.) When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an average across a large sample? Never.) ...Except the figure given was obviously in context of Los Angeles, not the entire US. Here's the context: > On Monday, January 14, 2019, Los Angeles’s thirty-four thousand public-school teachers went on strike. They demanded smaller classes (the average classroom had forty-six students) However, finding out actual figures for LA schools is hard, as you have differing figures published by differing sites, based on sources who are on either side of a dispute that involves class sizes. That said, based on this one I found, it looks like the average isn't 46, that's more of an outlier, but neither is it in the "most have a number of students that start with two. More rarely it's a one or three". https://edsource.org/2019/class-size-conundrum-at-the-heart-of-los-angeles-teachers-strike/607412 https://edsource.org/2019/class-size-conundrum-at-the-heart-... > Science teacher Michelle Levin has only 33 kids in each of her classes — which makes her fortunate. That’s not because a class of 33 is “small.” Levin’s class sizes at Daniel Webster Middle School in West Los Angeles are larger than national averages for similar middle schools, which range from 26 to 28 students. But Levin says 33 students is small by L.A. Unified School District standards. In most LAUSD middle schools, the largest core classes have 37 kids — and can sometimes be as large as 46. Noted caveat - this is only for middle schools. Other caveat - I really can't find any non-partisan figures on this. However, I am happy to contend the author is taking claims out of context in this particular instance to make a point, and backs it up with tweets, one of which is no longer available, and the other is from someone who works for a right wing think tank. So... yeah. Qui custodet custodes? If you're publishing from "savingjournalism.substack.com", perhaps try to properly source (Cato Institute associate scholars are a biased source on union disputes for obvious reasons) the objections you're making. And treat the claims you're 'debunking' in context, please.
- apsec112 6y ago
  The New Yorker themselves corrected it from "the average classroom had forty-six students" to "as many as forty-six students". They published a "fact", in the lead paragraph, that they themselves eventually agreed was wrong. How is that "taking claims out of context"?
  - EdwardDiego 6y ago
    Did you read my comment? 1) Author contrasted claims made to _national_ averages, not _LA_ averages. 2) I agree with you that they got it wrong, I even said as such: > However, finding out actual figures for LA schools is hard, as you have differing figures published by differing sites, based on sources who are on either side of a dispute that involves class sizes. That said, based on this one I found, it looks like the average isn't 46, that's more of an outlier, but neither is it in the "most have a number of students that start with two. More rarely it's a one or three". However, the author's assertions of _how they got it wrong_, are, from a cursory reading, also misleading.
    - edbob 6y ago
      I don't see any assertions of "how they got it wrong" in the article, at least about the class sizes. The article states that the number was wrong, that it was obviously wrong, and investigates how the mistake was "corrected". The article is not concerned with "how they got it wrong" at all, only "how they corrected it". The obviousness of the error is brought up because it's relevant to these bullet points: "Both correction notices are notably vague as to how bad the errors were" and "They don’t seem to have reviewed the teacher strike piece for other mistakes".
- edbob 6y ago
  The original text, before you clipped it out of context and framed it, says "When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an average across a large sample? Never.)" This is accurate, as is the claim that The New Yorker's figure of an average of 46 is completely off base. As your own figures clearly show. > someone who works for a right wing think tank. This kind of bias contributes nothing and makes good-faith discussion impossible. It's openly insulting and can only produce a flame war. Edit: Reworded to be a little nicer.
newintellectual 6y ago
It would be far more accurate to assume that the paper of Walter Duranty's record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty) is routinely wrong than right. Their correct statements are the exception, not the rule.
denimnerd42 6y ago
I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-... > Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking > Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States. My company has banned Jetbrains now and received questions from regulators about it. Don't see them banning Microsoft anytime soon.
- ZeroCool2u 6y ago
  Glad someone else brought this example up. Honestly, what a staggeringly low quality piece of journalism.
- whoisstan 6y ago
  Interestingly I just had an unrelated discussion on goodreads about that. The first mentioned author of the NYT article is supposedly a cybersecurity expert. The article lacked any evidence and called the company russian and obscure, they edited that but it’s still on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20210106195835/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-hack.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210106195835/https://www.nytim... I left a goodreads comment on the NYT authors latest cybersecurity book calling her knowledge and practice in question. How can article like this stand, if it cannot be backed up, bad journalism and a lack understanding of the matter?
  - notimetorelax 6y ago
    This makes me wonder, 3 branches of government exist to balance each other out. Journalism stands on its own, what’s the counter balance to journalism?
    - nradov 6y ago
      Social media
reureu 6y ago
I appreciate this article is about how bad the NYT is, but let's never forget their most epic correction of all time: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/movies/room-237-documentary-with-theories-about-the-shining.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/movies/room-237-documenta...
nojito 6y ago
What happens when substacks make mistakes?
- apsec112 6y ago
  Someone starts a competing Substack and steals their subscribers. It's much harder to do that with the NYT and New Yorker, which are big institutions with all kinds of privileges and insider access.
- fullshark 6y ago
  Sometimes they correct it in a tweet or follow up substack and no one reads that one, the previous one confirming their biases was much more entertaining.
- spamizbad 6y ago
  Doesn't matter because most of substack isn't really journalism - it's punditry and navel-gazing. It's basically disrupting the op-ed page. And op-eds, even in NYT, have been full of factual errors across the entire political spectrum of personalities who write for it.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Nobody cares, because Substack isn’t treated as the “paper of record”. The problem is not that NYT etc. needs to be perfect, but that these news outlets are privileged sources that are used in crafting “evidence-based” arguments about all sorts of important things (but especially public policy).
  - fsh 6y ago
    I would say that on hn it very much is treated as such.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  When "a" substack who knows, from the TFA: > Purely for comparative purposes, a two-bullet rundown of my own corrections policy: > If a reader points out anything untrue or unfair, I (i) pay out a bounty, (ii) make in-line and end-note edits to the original, (iii) update my public corrections log > If the mistake is serious, I also publish reflections on where things broke down and what I’m doing to limit future risk (example) > [...]
cccc4all 6y ago
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... NYT and New Yorker and other establishment media outlets are corporate businesses. Their only interest is to push their propaganda narratives to further their own interests and protect their owners and other corporations.
alex_young 6y ago
From the NYT article this blogger is upset about: “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi” “Mistake” he’s highlighting: “ The Sanofi portion of those holdings totalled a max of $1,485”. Sounds like accurate reporting. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it’s something, and it has the appearance of a conflict of interest. Edit: before you downvote me, please consider that politicians have historically been held to account for the _appearance_ of conflict of interest, and that this is a good thing for a democracy. They have historically avoided this in high office by divesting or placing assets in a blind trust, something Trump did not do. NYT has a journalistic duty to report this conflict of interest and did so while saying it is small.
- apsec112 6y ago
  The article further explains: "HCQ is a cheap generic drug that was widely being given away for free Pharma firms don’t benefit much from picking one generic over another Sanofi was never going to make meaningful money on Plaquenil The disclosures in question were already over a year out of date The disclosures actually show net sales of the Sanofi-related fund (More sourcing for all that here.) It wasn’t just Twitter that pointed out how misleading this framing was. So did Politifact. So did Vox. And The Washington Post did so rather scaldingly.
  - alex_young 6y ago
    What is misleading about saying Trump “small personal financial interest”? That seems pretty clear cut and truthful.
    - NDizzle 6y ago
      What do you think a “small personal financial interest” is to a billionaire?! A few million? A few hundred thousand?! Not less than $2k. C’mon man.
      - ajkjk 6y ago
        It... doesn't matter? The criticism that the statement is wrong isn't right if the statement isn't wrong.
joe_the_user 6y ago
Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy. And this is healthy, in a way. No it's not. The NYTimes engages in journalism, which is a particular way of gathering and presenting facts. Which to say, among other things, they rely on publicly available information, gathering facts on the ground and sources. Sources are people with information, often but not always powerful people. They check facts/claims but according to their viewpoint. Often they're a conduit for the powerful people they like to present their story, sometimes a true story, sometimes not. Which is to say they'll take claims that look like obvious bs and are actually bs stand IF these come from the sources they like and if they can't be clearly and directly be refuted. And smart, powerful people can craft such claims, indeed enhance their power by crafting such things. I mean, I can see the comments are filled with places the NYtimes got it wrong. I think my link is good for showing the dynamics of how they got it wrong. "Russian Bounties!!!" and all that jazz[1]. Edit: also should note, the over-the-top claims for "objectivity" of the OP is transparently full-of-shit. Just so you know I know. "Retraction bounties" - NYTimes may have it's problems but that's never how journalism worked. [1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/bounty-tales/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/bounty-tales/
- mcguire 6y ago
  Welcome to postmodernism! Nothing anyone says can be taken at face value! Deconstruct everything! :-)
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    That attitude has always existed about news, post-modernism just tried to wrongly apply it to literally everything.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      Why did you say that?
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
underseacables 6y ago
“ Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.” Let’s stop right there. I think the last 8 years have shown the media to have lost significant amounts of public trust. I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.
- markdown 6y ago
  > I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer. Yup. These days I only get my news from The Daily Wire and Joe Rogan. I'm educated, and I just can't trust the lamestream media.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Poe’s law is pretty strong here.
  - slacka 6y ago
    Is this comment missing a /s? The Daily Wire is actual fake news, with a long track record of misinformation and poor quality content[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]... While not perfect, NYT has a long track record of quality journalism that goes back hundreds of years, winning 130 Pulitzer Prizes. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-daily-wire/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-daily-wire/ [2] https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-wing https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-wing [3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/shadowy-right-wing-network-behind-ben-shapiros-facebook-success https://www.thedailybeast.com/shadowy-right-wing-network-beh... [4] https://www.factcheck.org/2017/04/carson-didnt-find-hud-errors/ https://www.factcheck.org/2017/04/carson-didnt-find-hud-erro... [5] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-we-know-what-really-causes-climate-james-barrett-the-daily-wire/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-we-know-wh... [6] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/global-quackery-earth-not-warmed-past-19-years-new-study-finds-joseph-curl-the-daily-wire/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/global-quackery-earth... [7] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/daily-wire-article-misunderstands-study-carbon-budget-along-fox-news-telegraph-daily-mail-breitbart-james-barrett/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/daily-wire-article-mi... [8] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-mohammed-popular-name-netherlands/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-mohammed-popular-name-n...
TeeMassive 6y ago
And not only that, those news organizations often stealth edit their articles months or years after the fact.
aimor 6y ago
"Even so, never once has that led to a public correction." It's not just you, the US government has this same problem with the NYT where the Times publishes false and damaging (damaging to the public, not to the government) information. In one case I heard of the NYT wouldn't so much as add a link to the government website where people could get the help that the article denied existed.
seventytwo 6y ago
Yes, and these are some of the most reputable and accurate in the business. Imagine the tripe with places like OAN, the gateway pundit, epoch times, etc...
rangoon626 6y ago
Nothing. They’re mouthpieces of the establishment and they have to retract nothing.
seventytwo 6y ago
Seems like it would be easy to have a change log at the bottom of every article that tracks edits. There’s probably three free widgets like this on GitHub that would work just fine.
- vharuck 6y ago
  I've seen articles on NPR and Reuters that have brief summaries of edits at the bottom. Stuff like "Edited to correct affiliation of Dr X. The article originally and incorrectly said she worked at Y University." They'll also put an "edited at" time at the top.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    More often they stealth edit to remove evidence of their inaccuracies or lies, though.
    - zaik 6y ago
      Source?
      - 0xy 6y ago
        https://twitter.com/jerrydunleavy/status/1308586151771549698 https://twitter.com/jerrydunleavy/status/1308586151771549698 https://twitter.com/JerylBier/status/1239624136118468608 https://twitter.com/JerylBier/status/1239624136118468608 That's just dishonest stealth editing. Reuters in particular has been known to spread intelligence/CIA propaganda (particularly during the Turkey coup).
  - seventytwo 6y ago
    Yes, those are good. But it would be so easy to have a GitHub-style change log, and/or a Wikipedia-style “talk” section where rationale for changes is discussed. It could increase attention and time on the site as well, good for the bottom lines at the outfits too.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
tehwebguy 6y ago
Headline, abstract and URL edits to NYT are tracked by @nyt_diff on Twitter, it can be very interesting to see: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff https://twitter.com/nyt_diff Not sure if they only catch front page article changes or what. Newspaper article content is a big game that’s worth tracking, but what’s more difficult (probably nearly impossible right now) is local television news. Tons of news is pushed through to a wide audience and then it’s gone as quickly as it came with any damage due to errors or omissions being done instantly and probably permanently.
- db48x 6y ago
  The Internet Archive captures both television and radio news, though obviously it's only a fraction of the total. https://archive.org/details/tv https://archive.org/details/tv and https://archive.org/details/radio https://archive.org/details/radio
- jonnyone 6y ago
  That looks like a great follow, thanks. Speaking of Twitter, their "trending" section introduces yet another level of possible editorializing/bias. They have started to try and summarize trending topics in a digestible way, but this introduces the perceived authority of their interpretation. I haven't seen anything particularly egregious on their part, but it's definitely something to be aware of.
- soared 6y ago
  Seems weird that every post is in image. Yes changelogs with text would be challenging, but you can't search/etc images.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    Because Twitter sucks and let you post lots of text in images but not in text. It's awful.
    - tehwebguy 6y ago
      Also no rich text so it would be difficult to indicate what text was removed, added and unchanged in a readable format without the image.
MattGaiser 6y ago
One of the problems with trust is that people see corrections and admitting ignorance as signs of unreliability and confidence and stubbornness as signs of reliability. I can't count the number of times someone arguing with me has dug up a correction or retraction page on something unrelated as proof that a source is nonsense. If they did issue a pile of corrections and changes, this post would instead be "the thousands of errors the NYT has made."
- covfiefy 6y ago
  Instead of trying to engineer trust, why not actually be trustworthy, admit your mistakes and become better?
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Because for many people, the making of mistakes is what makes you unreliable and untrustworthy. Superficially, they have a news agency with seemingly no errors in one hand and one with a thousand corrections in the other. Unless you are willing to consider that the errorless news agency is just not admitting it, one seems nice and consistent and reliable and one seems clumsy and stupid.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - tacitusarc 6y ago
      This is only the case until it comes to light the one not admitting mistakes has been making them, at which point all trust is lost.
      - mike_hearn 6y ago
        But people are getting their information from those sources, so how would it come to light for them?
  - savanaly 6y ago
blitz_skull 6y ago
I stopped reading after the extremely misguided first line. I work with, live with, and generally am surrounded by “educated” people. I don’t know any of them who would agree that the premier news outlets are mostly trustworthy. Educated people understand what pays the bills for the major news outlets and it sure as hell ain’t trust.
hnburnsy 6y ago
If you are student of grammar and journalism, do your self a favor and follow @nyttypos. I was stunned by the large number of mistakes that professional journalists make, that their editors miss, and that they refuse to correct. Here is an article about @nyttypos and his/her obsession... https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/18/21372181/nytimes-typo-twitter-account-copy-editing https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/18/21372181/nytimes-typo-tw...
- ameister14 6y ago
  I find that the NY Post has a better grasp of written copy - their writers are often cleverer and a cut above the Times even though they're writing for a worse paper.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    The NYP has to be entertaining; the NYT is just a reliable guide to what people are supposed to believe.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
  This comment is a prime example of Muphry’s Law (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law).
  - hnburnsy 6y ago
    That's great, thanks for sharing that! I am not a professional journalist but @ntytypos does make mistakes when pointing out errors in Times, but of course they are corrected, unlike what takes place elsewhere.
throwawaysea 6y ago
What happens when the NYT makes mistakes is they don’t admit fault, defend their work like zealots, market it broadly to the point that schools adopt it, and then they quietly edit their work so that it is less visibly flawed but still fundamentally flawed. Behold the saga of the 1619 Project: https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memory-hole/ https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memo...
jariel 6y ago
It would be more helpful to correct for bias than to have quick turnaround on fact fixing.
TrispusAttucks 6y ago
For most news organizations in our new world order it's not an error if it's intentional bias. Those are called lies. Lies have a purpose. We need to ask, "Why lie?". And then use the answer to fix the news.
- chmod775 6y ago
  I don't think it's quite as nefarious as that. Like most humans journalists have opinions, and they are more likely to listen to things that confirm their opinions. Most people are not likely to ask "Is this really true?" of things that align with what they believe is probably true. Professional journalists are supposed to know about these kinds of biases - because if they do not they are professional only in name. Further, if someone was repeatedly making these kinds of mistakes in their job, you'd be right to call them incompetent, because they literally are. For some reason it appears to be taboo to say these journalists are bad at their job. However that isn't very helpful because it doesn't encourage them to change their behavior. Even the article here appears to dance around the bush. So here it is: The NYT and The New Yorker are unprofessional, incompetent, and their reputation is in no way justified. They should be ashamed, apologize, and vow to do better. Where they stand in relation to other outlets doesn't even factor into it. And the above goes for any group of journalists who played their part in the inversion of the profession's reputation in recent years. Anyways, that's my take on the matter. I don't think the vast majority of journalists who make these kinds of errors are intentionally lying - they are just bad at their job.
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    Don’t be too hard on them. The Internet destroyed most reporting, because now all the primary source material is available to anyone. I say “most” because there is still plenty of space for deep investigative work.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      Somehow that same effect has made it in many ways harder to find the primary material. A million secondary sources (and search engines that recognize that most people just want secondary sources) means that instead of unavailable, now it’s a needle in a haystack problem. I think a deeper problem the internet created was that you’re just as likely to read the New York Times as your local paper now, hurting your local paper. Or if not NYT, then something else brought to you by the non—local Twitter/fb/Reddit/apple news/HN/etc aggregators. That and the whole expectation of freeness that they have to compete with.
frankydp 6y ago
Nothing happens. They just keep printing.
john_moscow 6y ago
>Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy. The switch from printed to online distribution changed the game completely. If you are selling printed copies, you are physically limited in how much text you can cram into a single issue. So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues. With digital ad-sponsored distribution the competition is about churning out as much low-quality clickbait as possible. If you spend time researching the topic and validating your sources, while your competitor hires 5 fresh graduates to write 5 slightly different nonsensical articles on the same topic, you will quickly be out of business. You don't care that most of your readers will forget what they read in less than an hour. You don't care that the most clickbaity articles end up being the most divisive. You are now competing for 30 seconds of attention from 10 million of readers, and that's the only way to win that competition.
- wernst 6y ago
  I dont think this exactly applies to the NYT and the New Yorker which are subscriptions based. I do think subscription based journalism can be just as pernicious. The most profitable route now is to find a niche group and produce content that they want. In general people "want" the objective truth, but its so much more tantalizing when it's spun to confirm your biases. There's likely a point where people will pay to get 90% of the truth and 10% confirmation bias, and if that's the most profitable route pubishers are going to report in that way (hence the left lean of NYT in particular, and right lean of other publications).
  - bzbarsky 6y ago
    Or 30% truth and 70% confirmation bias, as the case may be....
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues. That is true to some extent, but it forgets the second half of the revenue of all newspapers, which has always been advertising, or direct injections of capital by a rich owner looking for a mouthpiece. Which is to say, newspapers have always needed to be advertiser friendly, even if it meant avoiding certain topics. But you're right that this has become even worse in the move to the internet.
jkhdigital 6y ago
If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary. For the record, that is completely impractical for reasons so obvious that it's surprising people suggest it with the frequency they do. Take science reporting, for instance. You think science reporting makes too many mistakes, so you're going to just go to the source and read the raw papers instead (a suggestion I've seen dozens of times). Well, there are so many of those that even scientists don't read everything related to their specialty, and at best only read everything related to their sub-sub-sub specialty. How the hell are you, as a layman, supposed to wade through that stuff to stay informed about science? You can't, since there aren't enough hours in the day. It's a recipe for ignorance.
  - TheAceOfHearts 6y ago
    Reading inaccurate information and taking it all seriously still leaves the reader ignorant, it just gives a false illusion of being well-informed. I try to take everything I read with a giant grain of salt while remaining humble and recognizing my own ignorance. If a topic really catches my interest I'll try digging into it by going through primary sources, but otherwise I try to not hold very strong opinions about things I haven't researched extensively. Even after I've done a bit more research on a subject I try to remain humble since there's often many concepts with which I'm unfamiliar. With social media you can now follow many real experts on a wide variety of subjects and they'll happily help explain new and interesting developments in their field. Although even in that situation it's still important to exercise caution, since the illusion of expertise is often abused as a means of advancing some political or financial agenda. Another possibility is that the person explaining the topic might not actually be that well informed or they might've even misunderstood certain parts. I'd recommend reading Epistemic Learned Helplessness [0]. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
smitty1e 6y ago
I am skeptical that venues which exhibit a pattern of repeated "mistakes" with a common slant are in fact comitting simple accidents.
robin21 6y ago
When and why did NYT turn to trash? It feels like they completely sold out for clicks. As if someone was watching the revenue above all else. At the same time evolved into a liberal echo chamber. Was it a leadership change or an owners strategic vision or Trump or just a sign of the changing times. And what do they do now Trump is gone ans there is no more outrage to sell if they were after clicks.
Context_free 6y ago
About a week after the US invasion of Iraq happened, something which New Yorker editor David Remnick heavily pushed, the magazine ran a 10000+ word hit piece on anti-war critic (and theory of computation Chomsky Normal Form creator) Noam Chomsky https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/the-devils-accountant https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/the-devils-acc... To pull one thing from this long article - one of the thousands of petitions Chomsky signed over the years was one regarding a French professor named Robert Faurisson. The piece's author wrote: "Robert Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon-2, in France, who had been suspended from his teaching duties after a mob of students protested his denials of the Holocaust." This is correct, but something is left out. Faurisson was threatened with prison as well. In fact he got a suspended prison sentence. Chomsky said at the time people should not be imprisoned for publishing books. The piece's author excluded this information from the reader. "He is against governments imprisoning people for writing books" doesn't have quite the ring of the two paragraphs the author wrote on the topic.
- rendall 6y ago
  These sorts of hit pieces from formerly respectable media have, more than anything else the traditional media have done, chipped away at their credibility for me over the last 2 decades. It has now become my operating assumption that they're lying, to the point that it's difficult for me to communicate about current events with people who look to newspapers for a source of truth. Our operating assumptions are so different.
gnicholas 6y ago
I haven't used it much myself, but Newsdiffs [1] seems like a good way to track these sorts of things. Unfortunately it is limited to a handful of outlets. Fortunately these are some of the most-read. 1: http://newsdiffs.org/ http://newsdiffs.org/
rootusrootus 6y ago
Okay, so they have problems. Let's say that I am convinced, and I will be looking for a better source of journalism. What would that be?
- akvadrako 6y ago
  I don't think there is such a thing and I'm not sure why. It seems like everybody that writes something does it to convince you of something they believe, insteading of providing a neutral informed review of the facts. You just can't trust reporters to be honest or to know what they are talking about. The best bet seems to be finding subject matter expects with opposing views and listening to their arguments and the evidence behind them, then coming to your own conclusions. I.e. a lot for work.
- MrMember 6y ago
  I use RSS feeds for Reuters's business section for business and finance news and the AP for general news. I guess I don't know how either of them handle retractions or updates but I like my news to be as dispassionate as possible and I think Reuters and the AP are as close to that as you can get. I'm sure the journalists for both have their biases but at least they aren't as obvious as other outlets.
  - jaks6 6y ago
    Didn't Reuters kill off their RSS service? How did you set it up? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576022
    - MrMember 6y ago
      I've been cycling through free services that create a feed from a webpage. The latest one I'm using is PolitePol. https://politepol.com/en/ https://politepol.com/en/ The free version of it meets my needs perfectly.
- bordercases 6y ago
  Independent analysts on Twitter collated with your own common sense developed by reading broadly for general knowledge and history. Go back to basics and learn the fundamentals of informal logic and conversational implicature, to help discern between logic, rhetoric and opinion. Allow for multiple interpretations of the facts. Compensate (incompletely) for narrative bias through valuing first-hand sources (if it's admissible in court, even if it's inconclusive, it's still evidence). The key questions to ask are, what's missing? what's being emphasized? Who benefits? Where are the contradictions? Why not use an alternative phrase? What's simply a lie? Why do so? In the "post-truth" era, everyone needs to become a diet version of a counterintelligence operative. The point of post-truth is that all sources of credibility are no longer impartial. They are instead persuasive media looking out for different interests through errors of omission and commission. As such you are not left with any ground to stand on other than the relative inconsistency of different narratives. No story can be taken in its own right – it has to be contextualized in a greater fabric of understanding and information and experience such that what is bullshit and nonsense can be ignored without harm. The good news is that there is much literature in the field of deception, counterintel, language manipulation, power plays etc to work this angle. The bad news is that it's work. At the risk of irony in providing an unsourced quote: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” ― Mark Twain
astkaasa 6y ago
Cannot compete with The Big Hack by Bloomberg, LOL
doc_gunthrop 6y ago
The NY Times can be just as bad as any other online rag. They're incentivized to publish hit pieces, stories to spark outrage, anything to get clicks. Seems for many at the NYT, journalistic integrity is just some antiquated notion. Take this admission, straight from the horse's moouth [1]: > I’ve made my way up as a reporter in the time of social media and most-read lists. I know what will make a piece pop to the top of that list as soon as I write it down in my notebook. No one has ever pressured me to get clicks, but I’ve been praised all my career with euphemisms like “really knowing my audience.” I can see on the site when my story is above someone else’s. I like it when it is. And I love the warm embrace of the social media scrum. > One easy path toward the top of the list and toward that embrace is communal outrage. Toss something (someone) into that maw, and it’s like fireworks. I have mastered that game. For a couple years, that desire for attention — to feel the crack of my byline hitting the conversation — propelled me more than almost anything else. I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon. I learned how to weaponize charm, which everyone does, but I do exceptionally well. I would call some stories kills. Resisting virality when you know exactly how to get it is like resisting a cigarette (I love smoking but do not smoke). When I wanted another viral story, I would talk about needing a hit. > Stirring outrage can be good. It can very well be the right thing to do. I won an award for working on an investigation series into predators using social video games to groom children. I’m glad that series made people mad. > But it’s extremely hard to control this tool. I would other times thrust a massive spotlight onto a person who would suffer from it and for no good reason. As an intern at the Chronicle, I got a man fired because he talked to me for a story, and some part of me knew it would happen. The story was a completely silly one, about private women’s clubs in the city, and he was a sweet and gentle man. I still feel sick when I think about him. And I think about him a lot. > In becoming increasingly driven by the pleasure of attention and conflict, I was sharpening my cruelest edges. The roar of Twitter on my side meant the kill was justified and good. I was using the tools that had been gifted to me — my love of people, my ability to write — but pursuing only attention, which is just the affection of the mob. > I do not want to cultivate sociopathy in myself. And cultivating sociopathy was exactly what I was doing. [1]: https://chosenbychoice.substack.com/p/learning-how-to-and-how-not-to-kill https://chosenbychoice.substack.com/p/learning-how-to-and-ho...
ardy42 6y ago
What exactly is the "Save Journalism Committee," and what's it's agenda? The link "What is the Save Journalism Commitee" at the bottom of their pages brings you to this nothingburger: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/about https://savingjournalism.substack.com/about, https://archive.is/pY8rd https://archive.is/pY8rd. The author's Quora profile describes him as a "Messaging Consultant" (https://www.quora.com/profile/Jeremy-Arnold-4 https://www.quora.com/profile/Jeremy-Arnold-4, https://archive.is/ch3uz https://archive.is/ch3uz), which sounds like PR to me.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  From his Quora profile: "In support of making the internet less wrong, I happily encourage and reward all corrections (details and past examples here)." Last I checked, major American newspapers barely run corrections anymore. Anyway I've watched Jeremy Arnold do this project for a while and I really do believe his heart is in the right place.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Last I checked, major American newspapers barely run corrections anymore. I'm not so sure about that, I see them fairly often and I'm not even looking for them.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I read a few of his articles after seeing this one. He seems very even-keeled to me.
aaron695 6y ago
The death of Brian Sicknick by a fire extinguisher at the capital riots is false. It is still uncorrected on the NYT. It matters because it might have been due to irritants used inside the building and we need to know this stuff. But NYT won't risk passing blame.
- robin21 6y ago
  You don’t know it’s false. However your comment made me curious and I was amazed that it’s still inconclusive what caused his death. And why was that... > on Wednesday, pro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support. He died on Thursday evening. - NYTimes > He died the day after he was <overpowered and beaten> by rioters from the mob at the Capitol. NYTimes now links to the above article when referencing the incident. > Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, 42, a 13-year veteran of the force, died as a result of injuries sustained while engaging with rioters. The exact cause of his injuries has not been made public, with investigators lacking evidence that could prove somebody caused his death.[349] Reuters reported that Sicknick suffered a thromboembolic stroke[350] and collapsed after returning to his division office - Wikipedia So the cause is not known yet, there is no evidence, and he wasn’t rushed to hospital after immediately sustaining injuries but instead returned to the precinct and then felt unwell. Also texted his brother that he was maced twice but felt fine. NYTimes is such bullshit, I can’t believe how brazenly they do this stuff. If someone is “beaten on the ground and rushed to hospital” you don’t really question that or feel you need to fact check - because it seems like something that would be easily falsified if it weren’t true. Yet the NYT manage to do it.
andrewprock 6y ago
It's odd to call out the New York Times and New Yorker here. Most news outlets have well documented systemic bias. Given the statement at the beginning which suggests otherwise, I would lump this piece into the same bucket as other media outlets : biased with an agenda.
bordercases 6y ago
Good resource from the comments: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff https://twitter.com/nyt_diff
finnthehuman 6y ago
Want to know what the NY Times thinks of the NY Times' trustworthiness? https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1311088158516195328 https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1311088158516195328
creamytaco 6y ago
The NYT is nothing more than a den of yellow journalism at this point, calling it a tabloid would be giving it too much credit. A complete waste of time. Aaron Schwartz was prescient in his disgust for the mainstream media, if only he could have seen how much worse they’ve gotten..
ycombigator 6y ago
Lol. I stopped reading after the first paragraph.
tpoacher 6y ago
> "Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy." ~ a journalist. Hah. Reminds me of that funny quote: "I always thought as fact that my brain is the most important organ in my body. Then I realised who was telling me this."
Smaug123 6y ago
> Why does random newsletter guy have a better system than two “we care a lot about the truth” news corporations each worth billions? Because the news corporations are solving a very different (and much harder) problem. It's the same reason the rationalist community was ready for the pandemic weeks or months ahead of the general populus. A small entity (such as a newsletter) has the slack to actually optimise for truth. A large entity must instead optimise for power. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-... and https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/why-i-am-not-in-charge/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/why-i-am-not-in-char... .
amrx101 6y ago
NYT last Feb had published article encouraging readers to go to China amidst the pandemic, the logic being that China is safe and our xenophobic bias might be responsible for us considering China unsafe.
- bestnameever 6y ago
  Sounds like an opinion piece.
Tycho 6y ago
For an ordinary citizen, is there any real benefit in following 'the news?'
rendall 6y ago
"And it’s not like any of those outlets are pro-Trump! And neither am I!" What is spectacularly frustrating about today's climate is that one cannot criticize the extremely poor, biased coverage of Trump as illustrated in the article without discussion-ending accusations of being pro Trump and even a Russian asset. This quoted qualifier needed to be in there or else people would forever henceforth refer back to this article as evidence that the author supported Trump. As I said elsewhere here, hit pieces more than anything else have eroded the credibility of traditional media for me, and the last 4 years have been unending, overlapping series of anti-Trump hit pieces. Speaking as a non-supporter of Trump, I found their coverage disheartening
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Everything potentially controversial seems to need an “As a ____, ...”
  - rendall 6y ago
    Indeed
nailer 6y ago
> It wasn’t just Twitter that pointed out how misleading this framing was. So did Politifact. So did Vox. And The Washington Post did so rather scaldingly. > And it’s not like any of those outlets are pro-Trump! And neither am I! I can't remember where I first heard it, but there's a general sense that journalists view themselves as a 'priestly class' that perform a sacred role not only to report, but to shape the narrative. The idea that author should have to state they don't support Donald Trump (which has no bearing on the facts) to counteract potential heresy charges for pointing out the NYT's mistakes seems to fit well with that.

333 points by apsec112 6y ago

> On June 10th they wrote, in reference to LA teachers going on strike, that “the average classroom had forty-six students”. (This was in the lede, where the author was setting context for how upset the reader should be.) When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an average across a large sample? Never.) ...Except the figure given was obviously in context of Los Angeles, not the entire US. Here's the context: > On Monday, January 14, 2019, Los Angeles’s thirty-four thousand public-school teachers went on strike. They demanded smaller classes (the average classroom had forty-six students) However, finding out actual figures for LA schools is hard, as you have differing figures published by differing sites, based on sources who are on either side of a dispute that involves class sizes. That said, based on this one I found, it looks like the average isn't 46, that's more of an outlier, but neither is it in the "most have a number of students that start with two. More rarely it's a one or three". https://edsource.org/2019/class-size-conundrum-at-the-heart-of-los-angeles-teachers-strike/607412 https://edsource.org/2019/class-size-conundrum-at-the-heart-... > Science teacher Michelle Levin has only 33 kids in each of her classes — which makes her fortunate. That’s not because a class of 33 is “small.” Levin’s class sizes at Daniel Webster Middle School in West Los Angeles are larger than national averages for similar middle schools, which range from 26 to 28 students. But Levin says 33 students is small by L.A. Unified School District standards. In most LAUSD middle schools, the largest core classes have 37 kids — and can sometimes be as large as 46. Noted caveat - this is only for middle schools. Other caveat - I really can't find any non-partisan figures on this. However, I am happy to contend the author is taking claims out of context in this particular instance to make a point, and backs it up with tweets, one of which is no longer available, and the other is from someone who works for a right wing think tank. So... yeah. Qui custodet custodes? If you're publishing from "savingjournalism.substack.com", perhaps try to properly source (Cato Institute associate scholars are a biased source on union disputes for obvious reasons) the objections you're making. And treat the claims you're 'debunking' in context, please.

apsec112 6y ago
The New Yorker themselves corrected it from "the average classroom had forty-six students" to "as many as forty-six students". They published a "fact", in the lead paragraph, that they themselves eventually agreed was wrong. How is that "taking claims out of context"?
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  Did you read my comment? 1) Author contrasted claims made to _national_ averages, not _LA_ averages. 2) I agree with you that they got it wrong, I even said as such: > However, finding out actual figures for LA schools is hard, as you have differing figures published by differing sites, based on sources who are on either side of a dispute that involves class sizes. That said, based on this one I found, it looks like the average isn't 46, that's more of an outlier, but neither is it in the "most have a number of students that start with two. More rarely it's a one or three". However, the author's assertions of _how they got it wrong_, are, from a cursory reading, also misleading.
  - edbob 6y ago
    I don't see any assertions of "how they got it wrong" in the article, at least about the class sizes. The article states that the number was wrong, that it was obviously wrong, and investigates how the mistake was "corrected". The article is not concerned with "how they got it wrong" at all, only "how they corrected it". The obviousness of the error is brought up because it's relevant to these bullet points: "Both correction notices are notably vague as to how bad the errors were" and "They don’t seem to have reviewed the teacher strike piece for other mistakes".
edbob 6y ago
The original text, before you clipped it out of context and framed it, says "When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an average across a large sample? Never.)" This is accurate, as is the claim that The New Yorker's figure of an average of 46 is completely off base. As your own figures clearly show. > someone who works for a right wing think tank. This kind of bias contributes nothing and makes good-faith discussion impossible. It's openly insulting and can only produce a flame war. Edit: Reworded to be a little nicer.

newintellectual 6y ago

It would be far more accurate to assume that the paper of Walter Duranty's record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty) is routinely wrong than right. Their correct statements are the exception, not the rule.

denimnerd42 6y ago

I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-... > Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking > Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States. My company has banned Jetbrains now and received questions from regulators about it. Don't see them banning Microsoft anytime soon.

ZeroCool2u 6y ago
Glad someone else brought this example up. Honestly, what a staggeringly low quality piece of journalism.
whoisstan 6y ago
Interestingly I just had an unrelated discussion on goodreads about that. The first mentioned author of the NYT article is supposedly a cybersecurity expert. The article lacked any evidence and called the company russian and obscure, they edited that but it’s still on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20210106195835/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-hack.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210106195835/https://www.nytim... I left a goodreads comment on the NYT authors latest cybersecurity book calling her knowledge and practice in question. How can article like this stand, if it cannot be backed up, bad journalism and a lack understanding of the matter?
- notimetorelax 6y ago
  This makes me wonder, 3 branches of government exist to balance each other out. Journalism stands on its own, what’s the counter balance to journalism?
  - nradov 6y ago
    Social media

reureu 6y ago

I appreciate this article is about how bad the NYT is, but let's never forget their most epic correction of all time: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/movies/room-237-documentary-with-theories-about-the-shining.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/movies/room-237-documenta...

nojito 6y ago

What happens when substacks make mistakes?

apsec112 6y ago
Someone starts a competing Substack and steals their subscribers. It's much harder to do that with the NYT and New Yorker, which are big institutions with all kinds of privileges and insider access.
fullshark 6y ago
Sometimes they correct it in a tweet or follow up substack and no one reads that one, the previous one confirming their biases was much more entertaining.
spamizbad 6y ago
Doesn't matter because most of substack isn't really journalism - it's punditry and navel-gazing. It's basically disrupting the op-ed page. And op-eds, even in NYT, have been full of factual errors across the entire political spectrum of personalities who write for it.
jkhdigital 6y ago
Nobody cares, because Substack isn’t treated as the “paper of record”. The problem is not that NYT etc. needs to be perfect, but that these news outlets are privileged sources that are used in crafting “evidence-based” arguments about all sorts of important things (but especially public policy).
- fsh 6y ago
  I would say that on hn it very much is treated as such.
yoz-y 6y ago
When "a" substack who knows, from the TFA: > Purely for comparative purposes, a two-bullet rundown of my own corrections policy: > If a reader points out anything untrue or unfair, I (i) pay out a bounty, (ii) make in-line and end-note edits to the original, (iii) update my public corrections log > If the mistake is serious, I also publish reflections on where things broke down and what I’m doing to limit future risk (example) > [...]

cccc4all 6y ago

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... NYT and New Yorker and other establishment media outlets are corporate businesses. Their only interest is to push their propaganda narratives to further their own interests and protect their owners and other corporations.

alex_young 6y ago

From the NYT article this blogger is upset about: “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi” “Mistake” he’s highlighting: “ The Sanofi portion of those holdings totalled a max of $1,485”. Sounds like accurate reporting. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it’s something, and it has the appearance of a conflict of interest. Edit: before you downvote me, please consider that politicians have historically been held to account for the _appearance_ of conflict of interest, and that this is a good thing for a democracy. They have historically avoided this in high office by divesting or placing assets in a blind trust, something Trump did not do. NYT has a journalistic duty to report this conflict of interest and did so while saying it is small.

apsec112 6y ago
The article further explains: "HCQ is a cheap generic drug that was widely being given away for free Pharma firms don’t benefit much from picking one generic over another Sanofi was never going to make meaningful money on Plaquenil The disclosures in question were already over a year out of date The disclosures actually show net sales of the Sanofi-related fund (More sourcing for all that here.) It wasn’t just Twitter that pointed out how misleading this framing was. So did Politifact. So did Vox. And The Washington Post did so rather scaldingly.
- alex_young 6y ago
  What is misleading about saying Trump “small personal financial interest”? That seems pretty clear cut and truthful.
  - NDizzle 6y ago
    What do you think a “small personal financial interest” is to a billionaire?! A few million? A few hundred thousand?! Not less than $2k. C’mon man.
    - ajkjk 6y ago
      It... doesn't matter? The criticism that the statement is wrong isn't right if the statement isn't wrong.

joe_the_user 6y ago

Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy. And this is healthy, in a way. No it's not. The NYTimes engages in journalism, which is a particular way of gathering and presenting facts. Which to say, among other things, they rely on publicly available information, gathering facts on the ground and sources. Sources are people with information, often but not always powerful people. They check facts/claims but according to their viewpoint. Often they're a conduit for the powerful people they like to present their story, sometimes a true story, sometimes not. Which is to say they'll take claims that look like obvious bs and are actually bs stand IF these come from the sources they like and if they can't be clearly and directly be refuted. And smart, powerful people can craft such claims, indeed enhance their power by crafting such things. I mean, I can see the comments are filled with places the NYtimes got it wrong. I think my link is good for showing the dynamics of how they got it wrong. "Russian Bounties!!!" and all that jazz[1]. Edit: also should note, the over-the-top claims for "objectivity" of the OP is transparently full-of-shit. Just so you know I know. "Retraction bounties" - NYTimes may have it's problems but that's never how journalism worked. [1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/bounty-tales/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/bounty-tales/

mcguire 6y ago
Welcome to postmodernism! Nothing anyone says can be taken at face value! Deconstruct everything! :-)
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  That attitude has always existed about news, post-modernism just tried to wrongly apply it to literally everything.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Why did you say that?
    - tsimionescu 6y ago

underseacables 6y ago

“ Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.” Let’s stop right there. I think the last 8 years have shown the media to have lost significant amounts of public trust. I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.

markdown 6y ago
> I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer. Yup. These days I only get my news from The Daily Wire and Joe Rogan. I'm educated, and I just can't trust the lamestream media.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Poe’s law is pretty strong here.
- slacka 6y ago
  Is this comment missing a /s? The Daily Wire is actual fake news, with a long track record of misinformation and poor quality content[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]... While not perfect, NYT has a long track record of quality journalism that goes back hundreds of years, winning 130 Pulitzer Prizes. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-daily-wire/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-daily-wire/ [2] https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-wing https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-wing [3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/shadowy-right-wing-network-behind-ben-shapiros-facebook-success https://www.thedailybeast.com/shadowy-right-wing-network-beh... [4] https://www.factcheck.org/2017/04/carson-didnt-find-hud-errors/ https://www.factcheck.org/2017/04/carson-didnt-find-hud-erro... [5] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-we-know-what-really-causes-climate-james-barrett-the-daily-wire/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-we-know-wh... [6] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/global-quackery-earth-not-warmed-past-19-years-new-study-finds-joseph-curl-the-daily-wire/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/global-quackery-earth... [7] https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/daily-wire-article-misunderstands-study-carbon-budget-along-fox-news-telegraph-daily-mail-breitbart-james-barrett/ https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/daily-wire-article-mi... [8] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-mohammed-popular-name-netherlands/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-mohammed-popular-name-n...

TeeMassive 6y ago

And not only that, those news organizations often stealth edit their articles months or years after the fact.

aimor 6y ago

"Even so, never once has that led to a public correction." It's not just you, the US government has this same problem with the NYT where the Times publishes false and damaging (damaging to the public, not to the government) information. In one case I heard of the NYT wouldn't so much as add a link to the government website where people could get the help that the article denied existed.

seventytwo 6y ago

Yes, and these are some of the most reputable and accurate in the business. Imagine the tripe with places like OAN, the gateway pundit, epoch times, etc...

rangoon626 6y ago

Nothing. They’re mouthpieces of the establishment and they have to retract nothing.

seventytwo 6y ago

Seems like it would be easy to have a change log at the bottom of every article that tracks edits. There’s probably three free widgets like this on GitHub that would work just fine.

vharuck 6y ago
I've seen articles on NPR and Reuters that have brief summaries of edits at the bottom. Stuff like "Edited to correct affiliation of Dr X. The article originally and incorrectly said she worked at Y University." They'll also put an "edited at" time at the top.
- 0xy 6y ago
  More often they stealth edit to remove evidence of their inaccuracies or lies, though.
  - zaik 6y ago
    Source?
    - 0xy 6y ago
      https://twitter.com/jerrydunleavy/status/1308586151771549698 https://twitter.com/jerrydunleavy/status/1308586151771549698 https://twitter.com/JerylBier/status/1239624136118468608 https://twitter.com/JerylBier/status/1239624136118468608 That's just dishonest stealth editing. Reuters in particular has been known to spread intelligence/CIA propaganda (particularly during the Turkey coup).
- seventytwo 6y ago
  Yes, those are good. But it would be so easy to have a GitHub-style change log, and/or a Wikipedia-style “talk” section where rationale for changes is discussed. It could increase attention and time on the site as well, good for the bottom lines at the outfits too.
throwawaysea 6y ago

tehwebguy 6y ago

Headline, abstract and URL edits to NYT are tracked by @nyt_diff on Twitter, it can be very interesting to see: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff https://twitter.com/nyt_diff Not sure if they only catch front page article changes or what. Newspaper article content is a big game that’s worth tracking, but what’s more difficult (probably nearly impossible right now) is local television news. Tons of news is pushed through to a wide audience and then it’s gone as quickly as it came with any damage due to errors or omissions being done instantly and probably permanently.

db48x 6y ago
The Internet Archive captures both television and radio news, though obviously it's only a fraction of the total. https://archive.org/details/tv https://archive.org/details/tv and https://archive.org/details/radio https://archive.org/details/radio
jonnyone 6y ago
That looks like a great follow, thanks. Speaking of Twitter, their "trending" section introduces yet another level of possible editorializing/bias. They have started to try and summarize trending topics in a digestible way, but this introduces the perceived authority of their interpretation. I haven't seen anything particularly egregious on their part, but it's definitely something to be aware of.
soared 6y ago
Seems weird that every post is in image. Yes changelogs with text would be challenging, but you can't search/etc images.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  Because Twitter sucks and let you post lots of text in images but not in text. It's awful.
  - tehwebguy 6y ago
    Also no rich text so it would be difficult to indicate what text was removed, added and unchanged in a readable format without the image.

MattGaiser 6y ago

One of the problems with trust is that people see corrections and admitting ignorance as signs of unreliability and confidence and stubbornness as signs of reliability. I can't count the number of times someone arguing with me has dug up a correction or retraction page on something unrelated as proof that a source is nonsense. If they did issue a pile of corrections and changes, this post would instead be "the thousands of errors the NYT has made."

covfiefy 6y ago
Instead of trying to engineer trust, why not actually be trustworthy, admit your mistakes and become better?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Because for many people, the making of mistakes is what makes you unreliable and untrustworthy. Superficially, they have a news agency with seemingly no errors in one hand and one with a thousand corrections in the other. Unless you are willing to consider that the errorless news agency is just not admitting it, one seems nice and consistent and reliable and one seems clumsy and stupid.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tacitusarc 6y ago
    This is only the case until it comes to light the one not admitting mistakes has been making them, at which point all trust is lost.
    - mike_hearn 6y ago
      But people are getting their information from those sources, so how would it come to light for them?
- savanaly 6y ago

blitz_skull 6y ago

I stopped reading after the extremely misguided first line. I work with, live with, and generally am surrounded by “educated” people. I don’t know any of them who would agree that the premier news outlets are mostly trustworthy. Educated people understand what pays the bills for the major news outlets and it sure as hell ain’t trust.

hnburnsy 6y ago

If you are student of grammar and journalism, do your self a favor and follow @nyttypos. I was stunned by the large number of mistakes that professional journalists make, that their editors miss, and that they refuse to correct. Here is an article about @nyttypos and his/her obsession... https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/18/21372181/nytimes-typo-twitter-account-copy-editing https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/18/21372181/nytimes-typo-tw...

ameister14 6y ago
I find that the NY Post has a better grasp of written copy - their writers are often cleverer and a cut above the Times even though they're writing for a worse paper.
- philwelch 6y ago
  The NYP has to be entertaining; the NYT is just a reliable guide to what people are supposed to believe.
Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
This comment is a prime example of Muphry’s Law (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law).
- hnburnsy 6y ago
  That's great, thanks for sharing that! I am not a professional journalist but @ntytypos does make mistakes when pointing out errors in Times, but of course they are corrected, unlike what takes place elsewhere.

throwawaysea 6y ago

What happens when the NYT makes mistakes is they don’t admit fault, defend their work like zealots, market it broadly to the point that schools adopt it, and then they quietly edit their work so that it is less visibly flawed but still fundamentally flawed. Behold the saga of the 1619 Project: https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memory-hole/ https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memo...

jariel 6y ago

It would be more helpful to correct for bias than to have quick turnaround on fact fixing.

TrispusAttucks 6y ago

For most news organizations in our new world order it's not an error if it's intentional bias. Those are called lies. Lies have a purpose. We need to ask, "Why lie?". And then use the answer to fix the news.

chmod775 6y ago
I don't think it's quite as nefarious as that. Like most humans journalists have opinions, and they are more likely to listen to things that confirm their opinions. Most people are not likely to ask "Is this really true?" of things that align with what they believe is probably true. Professional journalists are supposed to know about these kinds of biases - because if they do not they are professional only in name. Further, if someone was repeatedly making these kinds of mistakes in their job, you'd be right to call them incompetent, because they literally are. For some reason it appears to be taboo to say these journalists are bad at their job. However that isn't very helpful because it doesn't encourage them to change their behavior. Even the article here appears to dance around the bush. So here it is: The NYT and The New Yorker are unprofessional, incompetent, and their reputation is in no way justified. They should be ashamed, apologize, and vow to do better. Where they stand in relation to other outlets doesn't even factor into it. And the above goes for any group of journalists who played their part in the inversion of the profession's reputation in recent years. Anyways, that's my take on the matter. I don't think the vast majority of journalists who make these kinds of errors are intentionally lying - they are just bad at their job.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Don’t be too hard on them. The Internet destroyed most reporting, because now all the primary source material is available to anyone. I say “most” because there is still plenty of space for deep investigative work.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    Somehow that same effect has made it in many ways harder to find the primary material. A million secondary sources (and search engines that recognize that most people just want secondary sources) means that instead of unavailable, now it’s a needle in a haystack problem. I think a deeper problem the internet created was that you’re just as likely to read the New York Times as your local paper now, hurting your local paper. Or if not NYT, then something else brought to you by the non—local Twitter/fb/Reddit/apple news/HN/etc aggregators. That and the whole expectation of freeness that they have to compete with.

frankydp 6y ago

Nothing happens. They just keep printing.

john_moscow 6y ago

>Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy. The switch from printed to online distribution changed the game completely. If you are selling printed copies, you are physically limited in how much text you can cram into a single issue. So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues. With digital ad-sponsored distribution the competition is about churning out as much low-quality clickbait as possible. If you spend time researching the topic and validating your sources, while your competitor hires 5 fresh graduates to write 5 slightly different nonsensical articles on the same topic, you will quickly be out of business. You don't care that most of your readers will forget what they read in less than an hour. You don't care that the most clickbaity articles end up being the most divisive. You are now competing for 30 seconds of attention from 10 million of readers, and that's the only way to win that competition.

wernst 6y ago
I dont think this exactly applies to the NYT and the New Yorker which are subscriptions based. I do think subscription based journalism can be just as pernicious. The most profitable route now is to find a niche group and produce content that they want. In general people "want" the objective truth, but its so much more tantalizing when it's spun to confirm your biases. There's likely a point where people will pay to get 90% of the truth and 10% confirmation bias, and if that's the most profitable route pubishers are going to report in that way (hence the left lean of NYT in particular, and right lean of other publications).
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  Or 30% truth and 70% confirmation bias, as the case may be....
tsimionescu 6y ago
> So, publishers (in non-yellow segments) compete on the ability to create well-researched informative content that will be relevant to a large group of readers. You want your readers to trust you as a reputable source, so they will keep buying your issues. That is true to some extent, but it forgets the second half of the revenue of all newspapers, which has always been advertising, or direct injections of capital by a rich owner looking for a mouthpiece. Which is to say, newspapers have always needed to be advertiser friendly, even if it meant avoiding certain topics. But you're right that this has become even worse in the move to the internet.

jkhdigital 6y ago

If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary.

ardy42 6y ago
> If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary. For the record, that is completely impractical for reasons so obvious that it's surprising people suggest it with the frequency they do. Take science reporting, for instance. You think science reporting makes too many mistakes, so you're going to just go to the source and read the raw papers instead (a suggestion I've seen dozens of times). Well, there are so many of those that even scientists don't read everything related to their specialty, and at best only read everything related to their sub-sub-sub specialty. How the hell are you, as a layman, supposed to wade through that stuff to stay informed about science? You can't, since there aren't enough hours in the day. It's a recipe for ignorance.
- TheAceOfHearts 6y ago
  Reading inaccurate information and taking it all seriously still leaves the reader ignorant, it just gives a false illusion of being well-informed. I try to take everything I read with a giant grain of salt while remaining humble and recognizing my own ignorance. If a topic really catches my interest I'll try digging into it by going through primary sources, but otherwise I try to not hold very strong opinions about things I haven't researched extensively. Even after I've done a bit more research on a subject I try to remain humble since there's often many concepts with which I'm unfamiliar. With social media you can now follow many real experts on a wide variety of subjects and they'll happily help explain new and interesting developments in their field. Although even in that situation it's still important to exercise caution, since the illusion of expertise is often abused as a means of advancing some political or financial agenda. Another possibility is that the person explaining the topic might not actually be that well informed or they might've even misunderstood certain parts. I'd recommend reading Epistemic Learned Helplessness [0]. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

smitty1e 6y ago

I am skeptical that venues which exhibit a pattern of repeated "mistakes" with a common slant are in fact comitting simple accidents.

robin21 6y ago

When and why did NYT turn to trash? It feels like they completely sold out for clicks. As if someone was watching the revenue above all else. At the same time evolved into a liberal echo chamber. Was it a leadership change or an owners strategic vision or Trump or just a sign of the changing times. And what do they do now Trump is gone ans there is no more outrage to sell if they were after clicks.

Context_free 6y ago

About a week after the US invasion of Iraq happened, something which New Yorker editor David Remnick heavily pushed, the magazine ran a 10000+ word hit piece on anti-war critic (and theory of computation Chomsky Normal Form creator) Noam Chomsky https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/the-devils-accountant https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/the-devils-acc... To pull one thing from this long article - one of the thousands of petitions Chomsky signed over the years was one regarding a French professor named Robert Faurisson. The piece's author wrote: "Robert Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon-2, in France, who had been suspended from his teaching duties after a mob of students protested his denials of the Holocaust." This is correct, but something is left out. Faurisson was threatened with prison as well. In fact he got a suspended prison sentence. Chomsky said at the time people should not be imprisoned for publishing books. The piece's author excluded this information from the reader. "He is against governments imprisoning people for writing books" doesn't have quite the ring of the two paragraphs the author wrote on the topic.

rendall 6y ago
These sorts of hit pieces from formerly respectable media have, more than anything else the traditional media have done, chipped away at their credibility for me over the last 2 decades. It has now become my operating assumption that they're lying, to the point that it's difficult for me to communicate about current events with people who look to newspapers for a source of truth. Our operating assumptions are so different.

gnicholas 6y ago

I haven't used it much myself, but Newsdiffs [1] seems like a good way to track these sorts of things. Unfortunately it is limited to a handful of outlets. Fortunately these are some of the most-read. 1: http://newsdiffs.org/ http://newsdiffs.org/

rootusrootus 6y ago

Okay, so they have problems. Let's say that I am convinced, and I will be looking for a better source of journalism. What would that be?

akvadrako 6y ago
I don't think there is such a thing and I'm not sure why. It seems like everybody that writes something does it to convince you of something they believe, insteading of providing a neutral informed review of the facts. You just can't trust reporters to be honest or to know what they are talking about. The best bet seems to be finding subject matter expects with opposing views and listening to their arguments and the evidence behind them, then coming to your own conclusions. I.e. a lot for work.
MrMember 6y ago
I use RSS feeds for Reuters's business section for business and finance news and the AP for general news. I guess I don't know how either of them handle retractions or updates but I like my news to be as dispassionate as possible and I think Reuters and the AP are as close to that as you can get. I'm sure the journalists for both have their biases but at least they aren't as obvious as other outlets.
- jaks6 6y ago
  Didn't Reuters kill off their RSS service? How did you set it up? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576022
  - MrMember 6y ago
    I've been cycling through free services that create a feed from a webpage. The latest one I'm using is PolitePol. https://politepol.com/en/ https://politepol.com/en/ The free version of it meets my needs perfectly.
bordercases 6y ago
Independent analysts on Twitter collated with your own common sense developed by reading broadly for general knowledge and history. Go back to basics and learn the fundamentals of informal logic and conversational implicature, to help discern between logic, rhetoric and opinion. Allow for multiple interpretations of the facts. Compensate (incompletely) for narrative bias through valuing first-hand sources (if it's admissible in court, even if it's inconclusive, it's still evidence). The key questions to ask are, what's missing? what's being emphasized? Who benefits? Where are the contradictions? Why not use an alternative phrase? What's simply a lie? Why do so? In the "post-truth" era, everyone needs to become a diet version of a counterintelligence operative. The point of post-truth is that all sources of credibility are no longer impartial. They are instead persuasive media looking out for different interests through errors of omission and commission. As such you are not left with any ground to stand on other than the relative inconsistency of different narratives. No story can be taken in its own right – it has to be contextualized in a greater fabric of understanding and information and experience such that what is bullshit and nonsense can be ignored without harm. The good news is that there is much literature in the field of deception, counterintel, language manipulation, power plays etc to work this angle. The bad news is that it's work. At the risk of irony in providing an unsourced quote: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” ― Mark Twain

astkaasa 6y ago

Cannot compete with The Big Hack by Bloomberg, LOL

doc_gunthrop 6y ago

The NY Times can be just as bad as any other online rag. They're incentivized to publish hit pieces, stories to spark outrage, anything to get clicks. Seems for many at the NYT, journalistic integrity is just some antiquated notion. Take this admission, straight from the horse's moouth [1]: > I’ve made my way up as a reporter in the time of social media and most-read lists. I know what will make a piece pop to the top of that list as soon as I write it down in my notebook. No one has ever pressured me to get clicks, but I’ve been praised all my career with euphemisms like “really knowing my audience.” I can see on the site when my story is above someone else’s. I like it when it is. And I love the warm embrace of the social media scrum. > One easy path toward the top of the list and toward that embrace is communal outrage. Toss something (someone) into that maw, and it’s like fireworks. I have mastered that game. For a couple years, that desire for attention — to feel the crack of my byline hitting the conversation — propelled me more than almost anything else. I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon. I learned how to weaponize charm, which everyone does, but I do exceptionally well. I would call some stories kills. Resisting virality when you know exactly how to get it is like resisting a cigarette (I love smoking but do not smoke). When I wanted another viral story, I would talk about needing a hit. > Stirring outrage can be good. It can very well be the right thing to do. I won an award for working on an investigation series into predators using social video games to groom children. I’m glad that series made people mad. > But it’s extremely hard to control this tool. I would other times thrust a massive spotlight onto a person who would suffer from it and for no good reason. As an intern at the Chronicle, I got a man fired because he talked to me for a story, and some part of me knew it would happen. The story was a completely silly one, about private women’s clubs in the city, and he was a sweet and gentle man. I still feel sick when I think about him. And I think about him a lot. > In becoming increasingly driven by the pleasure of attention and conflict, I was sharpening my cruelest edges. The roar of Twitter on my side meant the kill was justified and good. I was using the tools that had been gifted to me — my love of people, my ability to write — but pursuing only attention, which is just the affection of the mob. > I do not want to cultivate sociopathy in myself. And cultivating sociopathy was exactly what I was doing. [1]: https://chosenbychoice.substack.com/p/learning-how-to-and-how-not-to-kill https://chosenbychoice.substack.com/p/learning-how-to-and-ho...

ardy42 6y ago

What exactly is the "Save Journalism Committee," and what's it's agenda? The link "What is the Save Journalism Commitee" at the bottom of their pages brings you to this nothingburger: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/about https://savingjournalism.substack.com/about, https://archive.is/pY8rd https://archive.is/pY8rd. The author's Quora profile describes him as a "Messaging Consultant" (https://www.quora.com/profile/Jeremy-Arnold-4 https://www.quora.com/profile/Jeremy-Arnold-4, https://archive.is/ch3uz https://archive.is/ch3uz), which sounds like PR to me.

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
From his Quora profile: "In support of making the internet less wrong, I happily encourage and reward all corrections (details and past examples here)." Last I checked, major American newspapers barely run corrections anymore. Anyway I've watched Jeremy Arnold do this project for a while and I really do believe his heart is in the right place.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Last I checked, major American newspapers barely run corrections anymore. I'm not so sure about that, I see them fairly often and I'm not even looking for them.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
I read a few of his articles after seeing this one. He seems very even-keeled to me.

aaron695 6y ago

The death of Brian Sicknick by a fire extinguisher at the capital riots is false. It is still uncorrected on the NYT. It matters because it might have been due to irritants used inside the building and we need to know this stuff. But NYT won't risk passing blame.

robin21 6y ago
You don’t know it’s false. However your comment made me curious and I was amazed that it’s still inconclusive what caused his death. And why was that... > on Wednesday, pro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support. He died on Thursday evening. - NYTimes > He died the day after he was <overpowered and beaten> by rioters from the mob at the Capitol. NYTimes now links to the above article when referencing the incident. > Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, 42, a 13-year veteran of the force, died as a result of injuries sustained while engaging with rioters. The exact cause of his injuries has not been made public, with investigators lacking evidence that could prove somebody caused his death.[349] Reuters reported that Sicknick suffered a thromboembolic stroke[350] and collapsed after returning to his division office - Wikipedia So the cause is not known yet, there is no evidence, and he wasn’t rushed to hospital after immediately sustaining injuries but instead returned to the precinct and then felt unwell. Also texted his brother that he was maced twice but felt fine. NYTimes is such bullshit, I can’t believe how brazenly they do this stuff. If someone is “beaten on the ground and rushed to hospital” you don’t really question that or feel you need to fact check - because it seems like something that would be easily falsified if it weren’t true. Yet the NYT manage to do it.

andrewprock 6y ago

It's odd to call out the New York Times and New Yorker here. Most news outlets have well documented systemic bias. Given the statement at the beginning which suggests otherwise, I would lump this piece into the same bucket as other media outlets : biased with an agenda.

bordercases 6y ago

Good resource from the comments: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff https://twitter.com/nyt_diff

finnthehuman 6y ago

Want to know what the NY Times thinks of the NY Times' trustworthiness? https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1311088158516195328 https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1311088158516195328

creamytaco 6y ago

The NYT is nothing more than a den of yellow journalism at this point, calling it a tabloid would be giving it too much credit. A complete waste of time. Aaron Schwartz was prescient in his disgust for the mainstream media, if only he could have seen how much worse they’ve gotten..

ycombigator 6y ago

Lol. I stopped reading after the first paragraph.

tpoacher 6y ago

> "Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy." ~ a journalist. Hah. Reminds me of that funny quote: "I always thought as fact that my brain is the most important organ in my body. Then I realised who was telling me this."

Smaug123 6y ago

> Why does random newsletter guy have a better system than two “we care a lot about the truth” news corporations each worth billions? Because the news corporations are solving a very different (and much harder) problem. It's the same reason the rationalist community was ready for the pandemic weeks or months ahead of the general populus. A small entity (such as a newsletter) has the slack to actually optimise for truth. A large entity must instead optimise for power. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-... and https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/why-i-am-not-in-charge/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/why-i-am-not-in-char... .

amrx101 6y ago

NYT last Feb had published article encouraging readers to go to China amidst the pandemic, the logic being that China is safe and our xenophobic bias might be responsible for us considering China unsafe.

bestnameever 6y ago
Sounds like an opinion piece.

Tycho 6y ago

For an ordinary citizen, is there any real benefit in following 'the news?'

rendall 6y ago

"And it’s not like any of those outlets are pro-Trump! And neither am I!" What is spectacularly frustrating about today's climate is that one cannot criticize the extremely poor, biased coverage of Trump as illustrated in the article without discussion-ending accusations of being pro Trump and even a Russian asset. This quoted qualifier needed to be in there or else people would forever henceforth refer back to this article as evidence that the author supported Trump. As I said elsewhere here, hit pieces more than anything else have eroded the credibility of traditional media for me, and the last 4 years have been unending, overlapping series of anti-Trump hit pieces. Speaking as a non-supporter of Trump, I found their coverage disheartening

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Everything potentially controversial seems to need an “As a ____, ...”
- rendall 6y ago
  Indeed

nailer 6y ago

> It wasn’t just Twitter that pointed out how misleading this framing was. So did Politifact. So did Vox. And The Washington Post did so rather scaldingly. > And it’s not like any of those outlets are pro-Trump! And neither am I! I can't remember where I first heard it, but there's a general sense that journalists view themselves as a 'priestly class' that perform a sacred role not only to report, but to shape the narrative. The idea that author should have to state they don't support Donald Trump (which has no bearing on the facts) to counteract potential heresy charges for pointing out the NYT's mistakes seems to fit well with that.