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How prestige outlets get away with copypasta
- thematrixturtle 4y agoIt's obviously gotten worse, but print syndication is hardly a new thing: an article written by eg Associated Press gets recycled into hundreds of publications, often with only the tiniest "(AP)" tag hinting that it's not their original work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication It's a shame Wikinews never really got off the ground, this would at least address the sourcing and linking concerns to some exent. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page
- kqvamxurcagg 4y agoSome good points here. I think the lying by omission is a key issue. It makes it very difficult to be informed. I wouldn’t hold The Guardian up to the same standard as The New York Times though. The NY Times is a paper of record while the Guardian has a deliberate left slant. The opinion articles in the guardian are often ridiculous.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoAre you suggesting the New York Times does not have a "deliberate left slant"?
- namdnay 4y agoI'd say the NYT has an "educated big coastal city american slant", not sure it's a question of left or right. I seem to remember they were pretty gung-ho about invading Iraq, hardly a left-wing position
- AmericanChopper 4y ago> hardly a left-wing position It’s a nobody position in 2022, but the Iraq Resolution passed through congress and the senate with a substantial level of bi-partisan support. So really, it was a popular left-wing position at the time.
- dagw 4y ago"bi-partisan" support in congress/parliament doesn't map neatly onto left/right support. In the UK, the Labour party (ostensibly the left wing party) pushed for the Iraq war and the vote passed with bi-partisan support, but it was still about as far from a "popular left-wing position" as you could get.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoI’d say that’s just the difference between whatever ideals you hold the left to represent, and the ideas they champion in reality. To say the Iraq invasion didn’t have a substantial level of left wing support is simply to rewrite history.
- yeahforsureman 4y agoI think you Americans should stick to calling this group as liberals or move to progressives where appropriate (identity politics, woke "ideology" etc.), and leave "left" to those who can still perceive it as a somewhat coherent concept in their politics (although perhaps every day less so). What I mean is just that if you toned down their woke/progressive evangelism and posing, the Democrats would be a firmly center-right party in large parts of western and central continental Europe, for example.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoThis is just a no-true-scotsman though. The term “left”, whilst representing an extreme generalization, means just as much (or as little) in the US as it does continental Europe, or any other western democracy.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y agoyes, of the groups left, center, and right, it means those left of center, regardless of party currently the Democratic party best represents "center" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because their platform better represents most Americans (but not the ones on the right or left) than that of another major parry platform
- ggm 4y agoOpinion pieces have opinions clutches pearls and you think the times under Murdoch's hands is still worthy of being valued as a paper of record? The graun's reportage is good. Just ignore the editorial.
- docdeek 4y agoDoes Murdoch own the New York Times? I didn't think he did...
- chrisseaton 4y agoThe Guardian is definitely well off the deep end quite often. https://twitter.com/somuchguardian/status/768335723846049792 https://twitter.com/somuchguardian/status/768335723846049792 Does anyone else remember ‘The Sunday Format’ on Radio 4? Was a (audio!) parody of the Guardian’s Sunday paper the Observer.
- failingslowly 4y agoGosh yes, I loved The Sunday Format, and it deserves to be remembered. I used to have mp3s of all the episodes, but they didn't survive an HDD fault.
- chrisseaton 4y agoSome are on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GibzbTY9V8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GibzbTY9V8.
- MattieTK 4y agoMurdoch owns The Times" in London, not "The New York Times" (commonly referred to in the US as just The Times*). In the US his holdings are the Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoInterestingly, "The New York Times no longer considers itself a newspaper of record in the original, literal sense." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record#Etymology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record#Etymolog...
- MattieTK 4y agoBut that's because the definition of a paper of record has changed, not because they no longer align themselves with the current definition. By that traditional definition the only paper of record in existence today is the internet itself.
- shric 4y agoAccording to [1] and [2] they both have roughly equal left bias [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/ [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
- dagw 4y agoAre they measuring on the same scale or relative to what 'left' and 'right' means in their respective countries?
- closewith 4y agoIt looks like it, from the explanation of the ratings on the site. It would be impossible to consider the capitalist bastion of the New York Times to be left-leaning anywhere outside the Overton window of the United States.
- yeahforsureman 4y agoProbably the same scale, although you can understand that in several ways. In any case, they clearly use the American typology, conflating the liberal-conservative axis with left-right. So it's next to impossible to tease out how left or right a publication is on more traditional markers, such as economic policy, in particular, but also labour issues, ideological orientation (e.g. Marxist/Social Democrat/Third Way/Social Liberal, or an even more mixed crowd on the right) etc.
- pydry 4y agoIt bugs me whenever i see something like this. Left/Right isnt really a useful continuum to measure bias over. Realistically most outlets feigns independence but demonstrate fealty to particular power centers. It's obvious how little point there is when you try to "measure" RT on the left wing/right wing scale (theyre pro russia above all) but what applies to them applies equally to all other outlets. It's particularly galling when the power center is authoritarian/corporatist but wears a progressive mask for sake of fooling the naive.
- mattigames 4y agoAt this point there are facts that are true but deemed as biased, in the current political climate stating that countries with legal abortion have less deaths when undergoing that procedure than where is ilegal its seen as taking a strongly left stance; meanwhile in other countries stating the exact same it's completely apolitical because even if a lot of people there have strong opinions about it these are not concentrated in one of the two major political parties.
- netsharc 4y agoNY Times delayed a report about the Iraq war until after the 2004 re-election of G. W. Bush because his administration asked them to do so. Snowden has also mentioned that he went to Glenn Greenwald, who was working at The Guardian, because he trusted their integrity and he wasn't sure NY Times would work with him or sell him out to the government. As a former fan of Greenwald, I do think he's gone a bit mad and is now just screaming "I know what I'm talking about, and I know I'm right! Why won't you believe me!!!" instead of presenting the plain facts.
- dilap 4y agoYeah Glen can be pretty over the top / grating stylistically recently, but he still seems to be rigorously honest, which is definitely more than you can say for the NYT or Guardian.
- YawningAngel 4y agoThe Guardian is considered to be a paper of record in the UK
- aaa_aaa 4y agoHonestly I don't know why these outlets are considered `prestigious`. To me they are just `popular`.
- namdnay 4y agoThe Sun or the Daily Mail are far more "popular" than the Guardian. The Guardian is more prestigious, you won't see the top students in journalism studies saying that their dream is to work for at the Mail on Sunday :)
- aaa_aaa 4y agoThey just have different audiences. It does not make one more prestigious.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- quietbritishjim 4y agoThe difference is, even a reader of the Sun would probably agree that the Guardian is more prestigious (they just wouldn't necessarily think that that's a good thing).
- hgazx 4y agoThat’s pretending that there’s prestige in being a student in journalism.
- uniqueuid 4y agoWell, some people consider it a great sign of prestige to be personal nemesis of some of the world's most powerful people. Or, as Nixon's attorney general allegedly said about the washington post's publisher Katie Graham: "Katie Graham … is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published" [1]. [1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/08/the-nixon-gang-s-obsession-with-katharine-graham-s-breasts-continued.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/08/the-nixon-gang-s...
- bloat 4y agoThis author sets up a lot of his own personal standards for scientific reporting, and then calls outlets "dishonest" for failing to meet them. Its fair enough if he doesn't like their reporting, but pretending that they are deliberately and dishonestly subverting standards that he alone has invented is nonsense.
- scarmig 4y agoMost people have the notion that journalists build some level of expertise in a topic and interview multiple relevant experts before offering their honest take which, although as vulnerable to human error as anything, has incorporated feedback from principal sources. The fact that most journalism is aggregating snippets from press releases and recombining them into a particular favored narrative stance is surprising to many and takes away from the imagined value that journalists add.
- Veen 4y agoOne reason The Guardian etc don’t include references to authoritative sources is because they believe they are the authoritative source for their readers. They expect readers to implicitly trust their writing.
- dazc 4y agoThe Guardian is second only to Wikipedia when 'here is a link to prove I am right...' comes into play.
- sph 4y agoI don't get your comment. The point is The Guardian doesn't link its sources, at least Wikipedia does.
- swores 4y agoI'm 50/50 whether they're claiming Guardian is good enough to be as accepted as a Wikipedia link, or claiming that Guardian readers are the only ones who consider their newspaper to be as trustworthy a source as Wikipedia. Probably the latter, but a pointless and biased (in one direction or the other) statement regardless.
- bell-cot 4y agoWhether $Source is good enough to be cited is context-dependent. Top three things to consider: - How much does this really matter? - How quickly could I find a better source? - When $Source [published the article | made the statement], how authoritative was $Source on the specific facts in question? (The Iowa State Univ. student newspaper is fairly authoritative if the subject is a major building fire on the ISU campus. But on some scientific breakthrough? Maybe, if it's only a biographical fact about an ISU professor who was involved in the research...) I like reading The Guardian, but I'd generally call them "too fluffy" to cite as a source.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoI think it can be both. The point being, whatever it is, it's not the higher standard it's supposed to be. The lack of will to strive for that standard is where things go sideways.
- gadders 4y agoI think an awful lot of journalism is re-writing press releases, whether scientific, corporate or government.
- defrost 4y agoSadly a majority don't even rewrite press releases any more. It's a major complaint that many banner outlets verbatim echo PR handouts w/out doing any follw up fact checking or much in the way of actual rewriting.
- rewiuoeriouf 4y agoThey get away with it, because the selected news stories fit the predisposed beliefs and biases of their readers. Just like all media. A related point - The Guardian makes much of the fact that they are funded by a trust fund, arguing that it makes them "independent". I doubt they would make the same argument about other companies or individuals sustained by old wealth.
- swores 4y agoThere is quite a difference between a newspaper owned by a wealthy trust (that doesn't have owners extracting profit from it) and one owned by a wealthy company (that has one or more people whose goal is to make as much money as possible). Obviously that doesn't remove all biases, it doesn't remove all the ways people in the non-profit might still be motivated by agendas either related to wanting to be paid more by the non-profit or to make more money in their other business interests, and it of course doesn't mean they've done the impossible and become a perfect, infallible news organisation. But it's still a hell of an improvement over the way nearly all other major newspapers are owned.
- rewiuoeriouf 4y agoI understand the argument. What makes their trust-funded operation better than all the others? Do we just have to take their word that they are the morally superior trust fund baby? After all, that phrase is typically used as a slur against someone's character and/or moral and social worth.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago> What makes their trust-funded operation better than all the others? the answer to this question is well-explained in the post you replied to
- defrost 4y agoHis first point is a major personal bugbear: > First, there is the practice that undermines any notion their purpose is to inform their readers. Which is that they don’t fucking cite anything. I generally try and track down primary sources for and "reports" mentioned in material that crosses my desk .. and banner media have gotten increasingly sloppy in the provision of accurate titles, let alone actual footnotes or hotlinks to a source.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoYep,i hate this a lot too... "a recent study by german scientists" .. when is recent? Which german scientists? Atleast name the institution and main authors ("a recent study by John Smith et al., from the institute of biochemistry in Berlin..."), but nope, not even that.
- darkerside 4y agoI actually find the underlying study hyperlinked surprisingly often. Big improvement from print newspapers.
- vr46 4y agoA modern extension of "Churnalism", coined by Nick Davies in Flat Earth News (that has its own issues but it's still a good read) whereby news rooms are overly keen (or forced into) using external PR fluff. Link to WikiP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_(book)
- lbriner 4y agoIs it even lawful to do this? Surely Copyright would forbid them quoting someone elses words/images without permission or citation? Although I have zero legal qualifications so might be completely wrong.
- gampleman 4y agoOften they quote places which are basically designed to be quoted from, like AP or press releases.
- hugh-avherald 4y agoThe bar for copyright infringement is quite high for reporting current events.
- Barrin92 4y agoThis is a silly piece. The author just doesn't seem to be aware that the two things he complains about are just simply industry standards in journalism. He wants journalism something to be that it isn't and has never been, and then critiques it for not being that thing. What he calls "copypasta", is called print syndication[1] and has always been standard practice in the news. Newspapers purchase the rights to some essay, piece of information or what have you and disseminate it to readers. There's no secrecy or lie by omission here, that's just how it works without anyone hiding it. It's been a thing since the 1800s. It's no different from a TV news channel purchasing the rights to some footage or program and rebroadcasting it. Ever heard of the AP or Reuters? That's what they do. As to citations, journalistic articles are not scientific pieces. The target audience of the NYT pays them to provide authoritative information, they're not an aggregator for links or a repository of a sort. If that's what you're going for a popular scientific journal is probably what you want, not The Guardian the NYT or some other paper of record whose very purpose is to talk to a general lay audience. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication
- Doctor_Fegg 4y agoIt's not even print syndication. It's a press release. In the Moncrieff case, he says "pawn off the quote as if they just did a bunch of investigative journalistic legwork and tracked it down but really all they did was poach it from another organization". Nope. A press release is where an organisation puts out a statement _specifically_ for the purposes of reuse. There is no sleight-of-hand or "poaching" involved. If I voluntarily give you £1, you haven't "poached" it from me. In this case, the press release - as Erik Hoel could have found out, as I did, with 10 seconds' googling - is at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-caused-low-serotonin-levels-finds-comprehensive-review https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-c... . It has the full Moncrieff quote, verbatim. UCL will have sent it to the Guardian with the expectation that the quote is used.
- jrochkind1 4y agoI think the practice of writing an article-by-press release is worth commenting on. It essentially helps launder marketing into consensus "journalistic" truth. It is, of course, done because it is far cheaper and easier for a journalist to repackage a press release than to actually do reporting. You are right that it is widespread (which op certainly recognizes, that's their point), and it's not new (not sure if OP recognizes) -- Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) originally brought this practice (and others) to my attention, along with in general thinking about what mainstream journalism actually does and how and why. (Because it is in large part, as a standard practice, driven by economics, it's possible it has accelrated as newsrooms and reporting budgets have been, literally, decimated. But that's just a guess). It is still definitely worth commenting on. That what standard journalism actually does, for the most part, even well-respected outlets, is not quite the model most people have of it, is quite a bit lazier and less reliable than the outlets would like you understand them as.
- mcintyre1994 4y agoI think this is an interesting and valid criticism, but his framing feels a bit dishonest to me. He gives 2 examples of articles in The Guardian a year apart, both of which don't cite sources and use quotes without citing their origin. I agree these are bad practices and rubbish articles. But then he makes this conclusion which he admits he can't prove: > And while it’s pretty much impossible to figure out what percent of articles these criticisms don’t apply to (perhaps by tracking, say, the pieces of investigative journalism that these outlets break), there is simply no way that the copypasta approach isn’t the majority, perhaps 95% or more in some places. Most of the article before this, which is called "How prestige outlets..." has been about these outlets he describes as "the supposedly most prestigious organizations". Well, just The Guardian, but that's how he's describing them. But I don't think he's actually claiming that 95% or more of their output is this copypasta stuff. Because right before this he's introduced a bunch of outlets that nobody would argue are prestigious, that wrote about a paper he published. IFSL, Gizmodo, iHeartRadio. He wouldn't argue that they're in the same category that he places The Guardian. He's probably right that some of the ones he named are basically all copypasta! But it feels like there's an unearned conclusion that this is widespread in the outlets he describes as prestigious, when actually he's just given 2 examples a year apart. If he hadn't named any of those other outlets, that nobody would argue are prestigious, he never could have justified extrapolating like that from what he's presented.
- unhammer 4y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
- dash2 4y agoI thought this argument was a bit overblown: > That quote by Moncrieff is from an earlier source, which they use without crediting, essentially making it look like they did investigative legwork for the piece when really they just copy/pasted from somewhere else. Here’s the exact same quote, published the day before at a much smaller outlet called Eureka Alerts. How does he know that they aren't copying it from the press release? I'm also not sure that disallowing comments is very informative. Small substacks can have intelligent curated comment sections. The comments sections of big newspapers are, as a Daily Telegraph journalist admitted to me, "a painting from Hieronymous Bosch".
- netsharc 4y agoFor a real copy-pasta issue, Tim Bray blogged about his resignation from Amazon, and because his blog was licensed under Creative Commons, The Guardian republished it on their site (as a comment piece), with his name as the author's...
- eurasiantiger 4y agoThere really needs to be a verifiable ”chain of custody” for news articles, perhaps even from primary sources, through editors, to publications and other news outlets picking up the story. It would also make it much more difficult to create fake news.
- 999900000999 4y ago>You may think this conspiratorial, but imagine if I wrote a post about the recent evidence contradicting the chemical imbalance theory of depression and included links precisely where you would expect them, but it turned out they all only went to my own Substack? That would be sociopathic. But it’s somehow just fine for a prestige outlet. What a funny bit, of course the Guardian wants to nudge you into staying on their website. Most people will just accept whatever they say as fact regardless, who needs citations. Gonna be real fun for Grad students studying this time period in 100 years.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoAs much as journalists like to point to their high standards for fact checking, journalistic integrity, and off-the-record handling, I’m always surprised that the practices in this article remain so mainstream. Even basic links to original studies or reporting sources would make a world of difference. I’ve noticed that a lot of Substack authors have embraced these same practices but to a less subtle extreme. In fact, a lot of the Substacks I’ve tried to get into read like they’re just reporting on what actual journalists are reporting on. One particularly popular Substack among engineers frequently just parrots good reporting from The Information (a paywalled source), even including large excerpts from The Information in between summaries of the rest of the article. It feels like I’m just reading The Information but through someone else’s eyes, as shared on their Substack in pursuit of more subscribers. Generally speaking, I find that I get the best information when I stop reading summary articles and move up a step to the information source. When I read an article summarizing a scientific paper and then read the actual paper, there is almost always some major discrepancy between what the paper authors claim and what the journalist claims.
- motohagiography 4y agoThere's an entire other experience of mind I think we miss when we complain about media. Growing up in a family where the news and politics were the default topic of discussion, like when there was a lull, someone would make a comment about legislation or policy to break the silence, it's worth looking at who The Guardian is writing for. By telling or repeating a story, you get to become the reporter in the conversation. You get to become the voice of authority by channeling it. It doesn't matter what it actually says, just the effect it has. The Guardian could be a random number generator, and the game among readers would still be to compete to see who can repeat it more faithfully. I would argue the people who edit the Guardian now believe, "we're the newspaper, the truth is whatever we say it is." Most of the facts Guardian prints can be demonstrated as concretely true, but where they and other media become unreliable is that the conflict they use as a vehicle for their story is often fabricated from ideology. "Dog bites man," becomes, "Oppressor gets his just due, and here's why that's ok." To someone whose understanding of the world (and even theory of mind and self) operates as just a kind of axis of language and power, this is consistent. What does it matter if something is true if it doesn't alter the balance of power in a relationship or in society? What does it matter if something is false if it does alter that balance in the subjects? The whole definition of "mattering," is whether it has an effect on that balance, and truth and falsehood are immaterial - insomuch as there are no legal blowback consequences. Meanwhile, outright fabricating and lying is not only taking one for the team, it's a necessary signal of your own status and alignment that you can lie in support of the party line, and the impunity you have shows your status to others. A certain economist with a newspaper column comes to mind as the exemplar of this view in practice. I sympathize with the author, but I think his expectation that The Guardian and other news media are even intended to be faithful representations of reality is the source of his disappointment. He's just not their audience.
- klelatti 4y agoThe Guardian piece now does include a link to the paper cited - replacing the previous internal link. No mention that a change has been made though.
- permo-w 4y agoit would be brilliant if newspapers sourced every quote, and it’s an especially feasible goal in a progressive newspaper like The Guardian. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having high expectations like this, but I do think he’s being too harsh on them specifically for what is essentially standard quoting practice
- ploppyploppy 4y agoThe Guardian is not prestige. It is gutter-level media outlet