4 ms·

Link to the pre-print since jounalists always seem incapable of doing so: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.04.21251134v1 https://www.medrxiv.org

• corty 6y ago
  Journalists' job isn't to point you at real original information, it is to keep you from accessing the real stuff and to come back to their newspaper.
  • ravenstine 6y ago
    This is implicitly true, as much as people don't want to hear that journalists aren't saints. The incentive structure in place doesn't motivate the journalism indistry to rigorously cite or investigate sources. There's no more money in it for most publications, and no other regulatory pressure. Why would anyone believe that the first duty of a journalist today is to anything besides their publication? It's the same reason that we on HN complain about privacy violations, censorship, annoying web ads, Google AMP, scrolljacking, sticky headers, and yet we are the ones who implement all that crap. At the end of the day, we are being paid to make our companies money. Any idealism is a nice-to-have on the side, but rarely is it our delegated mission.
    • tomjakubowski 6y ago
      > Why would anyone believe that the first duty of a journalist today is to anything besides their publication? Your point about news websites' disincentive to link outbound is taken, but plenty of journalists (most?) are freelancers. Probably it's the paper's editors who feel those incentives.
  • simonh 6y ago
    Because if they didn't, everyone would just go to Medrxiv and browse the latest academic papers every day directly I suppose.