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The parent comment to the subject of my response established the scope of this discussion as including legacy media in general, one comment invoked the NYT, and

The parent comment to the subject of my response established the scope of this discussion as including legacy media in general, one comment invoked the NYT, and I can bring up another publication as well. The general point is that there are plenty of subtle ways to present/disseminate new that allows bias to seep through. In this example the WP reported it in the least effective way possible - as an edit to an existing article that most people would never revisit. Even then, they choose to keep the first half of that head line - as opposed to at the forefront presenting a piece of update that will have actual material impact on the case, which to an unbiased/oppositely-biased publication would be a separate headline. Instead, it’s more important that you know Grosskreutz “feared for his life”, which is even more subtly manipulative. Edit: Just to harp on this point of how ridiculous Grosskreutz fearing for his life is as a headline by that point: his friend, who posed for a photo with him together in the hospital, had posted an deleted on facebook a post stating that Grosskreutz had said that his only regret was not emptying his mag into Rittenhouse. And the fact that there has always been video of the incident showing Grosskreutz approaching a downed Rittenhouse and drawing his handgun as he was shot - even before his corroborating admission. And their headline emphasizes that Grosskreutz had feared for his life without mentioning any of the evidence contrary to this narrative. I bring this up to support the argument in the parent comment to the one I responded to, this example betrays a blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts on the part of at least this one member of the mainstream media.

tablespoon 5y ago
> The parent comment to the subject of my response established the scope of this discussion as including legacy media in general, one comment invoked the NYT, and I can bring up another publication as well. I suppose you can, but your comment needed a better transition to make it clear what you were doing. The original comment brought CNN's coverage of a topic (in an unverifiable way) to make a general claim that "mainstream media lies, constantly and blatantly." Someone responded that the NYT article is a counterexample to that claim, and you quoted that link but started randomly talking about a Washington Post headline without even mentioning the publication's name, which made it seem like you were talking about the NYT's headline. > In this example the WP reported it in the least effective way possible - as an edit to an existing article that most people would never revisit. What else would you have them do? I see this kind of criticism often, but when I actually think about what would satisfy the critic vs. the other users of the product, it seems like a situation where one users wants the product tailored to their unusual wants in a way that would degrade user experience for the bulk of other users or would require an investment that would be hard to justify, e.g.: 1. Headlining errata on the front page: that would be annoying and take space away from what 99.999% of users are actually looking for (today's news as of now). 2. Featuring errata prominently in the actual article: again, it's annoying because 99.999% of users want to read today's news as of now, not errata. 3. Article version control accessible to the users: relatively expensive, and 99.999% of users don't care and would never use it. Even if they have some internal version, my guess there's all kinds of unpublishable or unpolished stuff in the history that they're now going to have to edit for publication. 4. Issuing corrected articles, keeping the erroneous ones online: now you have different links flying around for more-or-less the same stuff, but the most popular ones are likely the early ones with errors. Even if you put a link to the correction, most people want to read the best version, and the links aren't taking them there. 5. Etc. > I bring this up to support the argument in the parent comment to the one I responded to, this example betrays a blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts on the part of at least this one member of the mainstream media. That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline? If they had a "blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts" wouldn't they have kept the initial headline because it "misrepresented the facts"? In reality, the corrected the headline, which is evidence that they don't indent to "misrepresent the facts."
- potato7890 5y ago
  > What else would you have them do? The video was public well before Grosskreutz admitted to drawing his weapon at Rittenhouse as he approached him, the Facebook post after the incident was known about. They should’ve informed their audience of these facts more so than they were informed of Grosskreutz’s fear of his life, however the latter was the most broadly disseminated piece of info by being a headline item. “Video shows Kenosha shooting victim drawing gun as he was shot” was not a headline, “Kenosha shooting victim testifies” was not the headline and would’ve been a less blatantly biased choice. It’s very simple. A WP reader is more likely to find out from being their audience that Grosskreutz feared for his life than the other facts that I’ve mention that are much more interesting and critical to the case, and it’s by design > and you quoted that link but started randomly talking about a Washington Post headline without even mentioning the publication's name I did not quote the NYT link. The name of the WP is in the url that I posted. Sorry I didn’t make clear the context > That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline? It would’ve been worse had they been completely silent of that part of the testimony, I agree. It would’ve been harder for me to verify though, that a publication mentioned it not even once, so I choose this example to save time. But no, your response completely missed my main point, they don’t have to not update it, dissemination of a certain piece of information in terms of its reach can be diminished without it reaching zero. Statements can be used push a false narrative without being outright untrue. There are more tactful ways to mislead than simply lying, obviously. Edit: To answer your question, to enable the defense that you’ve just made
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > The video was public well before Grosskreutz admitted to drawing his weapon at Rittenhouse as he approached him, the Facebook post after the incident was known about. They should’ve informed their audience of these facts more so than they were informed of Grosskreutz’s fear of his life, however the latter was the most broadly disseminated piece of info by being a headline item. > It’s very simple. A WP reader is more likely to find out from being their audience that Grosskreutz feared for his life than the other facts that I’ve mention that are much more interesting and critical to the case, and it’s by design. I'm obviously not following this story as closely as you. However, I think the issue here may be that you wished you read a different story than the Washington Post was actually writing. What it looks like they were writing was an account of this Grosskreutz's testimony, and his accounting of his mental state at the time may have been the most newsworthy part of that. It seems like you want something more like a Wikipedia article offering a definitive account of the event based all known sources (e.g. "the video", "the Facebook post"), which is not what the article you linked actually was. If I want a hammer, but have a screwdriver, it's not the screwdriver's fault for not being a hammer. Furthermore, you're almost exclusively focused on a headline, which can never tell the full story. Usually there are multiple legitimate possibilities for a headline, and there's no perfect one that will satisfy everyone. >> That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline? > But no, your response completely missed my main point, they don’t have to not update it, dissemination of a certain piece of information in terms of its reach can be diminished without it reaching zero. Statements can be used push a false narrative without being outright untrue. There are more tactful ways to mislead than simply lying, obviously. Edit: To answer your question, to enable the defense that you’ve just made That's getting into paranoid conspiracy territory. It's pretty unbelievable that the Washington Post would be trying to mislead, but then fix it to "enable the defense that [I've] just made." The actual evidence here is pointing to a different theory that better fits the evidence than that one (i.e. the Washington Post headline writer is trying to get it right, but it's an iterative process). Now, don't get me wrong. It's totally believable that they have good intentions to report the truth, but, being human, also have biases and other constraints that subvert those intentions to a degree (and may be particularly irksome to those with different biases), but it's going way too far to attribute malicious intent to them.

tablespoon 5y ago

> The parent comment to the subject of my response established the scope of this discussion as including legacy media in general, one comment invoked the NYT, and I can bring up another publication as well. I suppose you can, but your comment needed a better transition to make it clear what you were doing. The original comment brought CNN's coverage of a topic (in an unverifiable way) to make a general claim that "mainstream media lies, constantly and blatantly." Someone responded that the NYT article is a counterexample to that claim, and you quoted that link but started randomly talking about a Washington Post headline without even mentioning the publication's name, which made it seem like you were talking about the NYT's headline. > In this example the WP reported it in the least effective way possible - as an edit to an existing article that most people would never revisit. What else would you have them do? I see this kind of criticism often, but when I actually think about what would satisfy the critic vs. the other users of the product, it seems like a situation where one users wants the product tailored to their unusual wants in a way that would degrade user experience for the bulk of other users or would require an investment that would be hard to justify, e.g.: 1. Headlining errata on the front page: that would be annoying and take space away from what 99.999% of users are actually looking for (today's news as of now). 2. Featuring errata prominently in the actual article: again, it's annoying because 99.999% of users want to read today's news as of now, not errata. 3. Article version control accessible to the users: relatively expensive, and 99.999% of users don't care and would never use it. Even if they have some internal version, my guess there's all kinds of unpublishable or unpolished stuff in the history that they're now going to have to edit for publication. 4. Issuing corrected articles, keeping the erroneous ones online: now you have different links flying around for more-or-less the same stuff, but the most popular ones are likely the early ones with errors. Even if you put a link to the correction, most people want to read the best version, and the links aren't taking them there. 5. Etc. > I bring this up to support the argument in the parent comment to the one I responded to, this example betrays a blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts on the part of at least this one member of the mainstream media. That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline? If they had a "blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts" wouldn't they have kept the initial headline because it "misrepresented the facts"? In reality, the corrected the headline, which is evidence that they don't indent to "misrepresent the facts."

potato7890 5y ago
> What else would you have them do? The video was public well before Grosskreutz admitted to drawing his weapon at Rittenhouse as he approached him, the Facebook post after the incident was known about. They should’ve informed their audience of these facts more so than they were informed of Grosskreutz’s fear of his life, however the latter was the most broadly disseminated piece of info by being a headline item. “Video shows Kenosha shooting victim drawing gun as he was shot” was not a headline, “Kenosha shooting victim testifies” was not the headline and would’ve been a less blatantly biased choice. It’s very simple. A WP reader is more likely to find out from being their audience that Grosskreutz feared for his life than the other facts that I’ve mention that are much more interesting and critical to the case, and it’s by design > and you quoted that link but started randomly talking about a Washington Post headline without even mentioning the publication's name I did not quote the NYT link. The name of the WP is in the url that I posted. Sorry I didn’t make clear the context > That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline? It would’ve been worse had they been completely silent of that part of the testimony, I agree. It would’ve been harder for me to verify though, that a publication mentioned it not even once, so I choose this example to save time. But no, your response completely missed my main point, they don’t have to not update it, dissemination of a certain piece of information in terms of its reach can be diminished without it reaching zero. Statements can be used push a false narrative without being outright untrue. There are more tactful ways to mislead than simply lying, obviously. Edit: To answer your question, to enable the defense that you’ve just made
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > The video was public well before Grosskreutz admitted to drawing his weapon at Rittenhouse as he approached him, the Facebook post after the incident was known about. They should’ve informed their audience of these facts more so than they were informed of Grosskreutz’s fear of his life, however the latter was the most broadly disseminated piece of info by being a headline item. > It’s very simple. A WP reader is more likely to find out from being their audience that Grosskreutz feared for his life than the other facts that I’ve mention that are much more interesting and critical to the case, and it’s by design. I'm obviously not following this story as closely as you. However, I think the issue here may be that you wished you read a different story than the Washington Post was actually writing. What it looks like they were writing was an account of this Grosskreutz's testimony, and his accounting of his mental state at the time may have been the most newsworthy part of that. It seems like you want something more like a Wikipedia article offering a definitive account of the event based all known sources (e.g. "the video", "the Facebook post"), which is not what the article you linked actually was. If I want a hammer, but have a screwdriver, it's not the screwdriver's fault for not being a hammer. Furthermore, you're almost exclusively focused on a headline, which can never tell the full story. Usually there are multiple legitimate possibilities for a headline, and there's no perfect one that will satisfy everyone. >> That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline? > But no, your response completely missed my main point, they don’t have to not update it, dissemination of a certain piece of information in terms of its reach can be diminished without it reaching zero. Statements can be used push a false narrative without being outright untrue. There are more tactful ways to mislead than simply lying, obviously. Edit: To answer your question, to enable the defense that you’ve just made That's getting into paranoid conspiracy territory. It's pretty unbelievable that the Washington Post would be trying to mislead, but then fix it to "enable the defense that [I've] just made." The actual evidence here is pointing to a different theory that better fits the evidence than that one (i.e. the Washington Post headline writer is trying to get it right, but it's an iterative process). Now, don't get me wrong. It's totally believable that they have good intentions to report the truth, but, being human, also have biases and other constraints that subvert those intentions to a degree (and may be particularly irksome to those with different biases), but it's going way too far to attribute malicious intent to them.