> Is it so bad when anti-racist, pro-fact views are considered orthodoxy?
No it's good, but pro-fact views are going to be anti-racist by default, if the facts are presented honestly. The problem is that NYT more often than not acts allergic to facts that they don't like, creating stories that bend (often already questionable) studies or accounts to fit what their subscribers want to hear.
> Every publication has to draw the line somewhere of what the acceptable bounds of discourse are.
And they also have to follow those rules themselves. Including not doxxing private citizens for zero public benefit, which the heroes at NYT think is a very noble cause. NYT breaks their own 'rules' all the time.
> Finally, she says "stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences", but seeing that the NYT is the third-most popular newspaper in the country, that would seem to be objectively untrue or else people wouldn't still be buying it.
This is the worst logic to go at this issue with. It being the third most popular newspaper has exactly nothing to do with whether or not it has gotten worse or more narrow in appeal. It can get loads worse and still be one of the most popular newspapers, especially since the problems in media exist through practically all major publications. How many newspaper subscriptions do you think the average person actually has?
That doesn't even get into the various negative effects of the subscription model, and the fact that there is an obvious and undeniable economic incentive to manufacture and publish stories that hit with your subscribers. It's true that it has become the standard income method for these companies, but it's hardly any better than clickbait, if not worse.
> You admit it's a rag, that publishes some of the lowest quality journalism. It's also very politically biased, in a way that damages the very fabric of society. Restricting its reach is the responsible thing to do in their case.
Let's just let tech monopolies determine what information we can or cannot communicate. Definitely nothing wrong will come of it. In fact, it's "the responsible thing to do"!
Also, stating that NYP "publishes some of the lowest quality journalism" is an insane hyperbole with no basis in reality. It may not be a top newspaper, but it's also far from being the worst paper in the US.
This story, specifically, had more verifiable sources than plenty of recently published stories which cite only "anonymous" sources and are therefore completely unverifiable.
> Hiring journalists with a strong homogenous political agenda is a poor way to produce neutral, fact-based reporting.
Have you considered the possibility that these SJW's are actually representative of today's youth? If they are, shouldn't NYT be hiring even more of them?
I really don't care about what the backgrounds of Journalists are, as long as they adhere to the principles of journalism (honesty, a desire to question authority and find the truth at all costs etc.).
>> The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least the level of the individual story and/or writer.
> And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing?
All editing is selective, that's pretty much definitional.
I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The alternative to the NY Times (and similar publications) isn't some ideal publication that gives an accurate picture without distortion, it's talk radio and other opinionated sources that give pictures that are even more distorted.
The NY Times is like a plate of food with a fly in it. There are salesmen out there that spend a lot of time talking about the fly, reminding you how gross it is and how bad they must be for it to get there, etc. Then they'll offer a plate of dogshit as a substitute, and distressingly a lot of people will take it because they've been successfully fixated on that damn fly.
> The NYT has wide latitude to do as it wishes in any given case and isn’t obliged to be perfectly consistent.
I think the NYT is perfectly within its legal rights to publish bad journalism. If the NYT decided tomorrow to transform itself into the left-wing equivalent of Breitbart, that would be entirely legal, and so it should be.
But just as NYT has every right to publish what it wants, others have just as much a right to judge it negatively for doing so.
It is not legally obliged to be consistent, and I don't think it should be legally obliged to be consistent either. Giving the legal system the power to police journalism is very risky business, and I don't think the risk is worth it.
However, I personally think it is morally obliged to be consistent, and I will judge it negatively if it fails to be so – you may disagree, but maybe that's a sign that you and I have different moral values.
> The only interesting question here
Maybe the questions that interest you are different from the questions that interest me.
>It doesn't seem fair to look at modern news conglomerates (which typically combine news and opinion) and complain that the non-news content bismirches the journalism.
And it's just this attitude that has caused the era of fake news.
> A fair shot would be saying "I do not feel like this article is appropriately declared as opinion." Which, maybe. But I think that's debatable, and the NYT certainly differentiates a helluva lot better than Fox News and MSNBC.
This is exactly the point. Fox News and MSNBC are some of the worst offenders - this does not excuse the NYT from it.
Also I remind people that journalism is not just reporting of facts. If it was all newspapers would be lists of factoids.
"Journalism, the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary"
> does their utterly childish reaction to Scott Alexander's
> wish to be anonymous invalidate the whole newspaper's
> integrity?
There is some content I consumed years ago and thought was quite reliable, until recently, something that was published just rubbed me the wrong way. I did some digging and found that I was right, that there was some issue. I then went back and applied this same skepticism to some of the previous publications - and found that some of them also had problems, and that I had overlooked them. At the time, they seemed correct, but I had simply overlooked some issues based on their perceived credibility.
My point is - now you have seen that it is at least possible for NYT to publish biased and outright incorrect content, they have shown their capability to do so, therefore you must consider that other publications may also be incorrect. I would suggest that at least in the immediate future, you perform your own cross-referencing. You need to determine if this was just a slip up, or one obvious misstep in a long line of non-obvious missteps.
Generally, I encourage people to read both a moderate left-wing and right-wing source. Where they conflict is usually where you have to do your own digging. For example, was that Tweet taken out of context? Did that image/video really show that? Is this person really as they claim? I feel like a lot of modern journalism is really hidden in the framing of the evidence.
> Experts who read the NY Times know how to read through the intentional narrative/propaganda
The parent already cited the Iraq War coverage, in which they incited the country to violence with known lies, leading to hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian deaths. If this isn’t enough to swear you off their coverage, I honestly don’t know what else would.
But to your point, the NY Times has millions of readers and this is a very small subsection of their audience. Which do you think is a more important function of journalism: lying to the masses in a way that is understood to be propaganda by your so-called “experts” or telling the majority of people the truth in the first place?
>The New York Times compulsively analyzes and scrutinizes everything Trump ad nauseam because it pays the bills by cultivating an audience, flattering them, and keeping them stimulated.
This coming from a self labeled Socialist. I think she has some other good points about the paper losing its status in the WH, obviously, and now makes its money by going as negative as their readership will take while ignoring the effects NAFTA and Welfare reform and other measures implemented by Clinton had on middle America. In other words, they care little about most people, but their audience.
In other words, the paper doesn’t deserve thd lofty status it hold because it’s no better than any other politically inclined news outlet.
So? I'm not sure how this means that news orgs won't suffer from losing business to competitors with superior tracking.
> Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around
Markets change. Advertisers have different expectations. Readers have more news to choose from. This is a silly argument.
> The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere
Sure, but why? Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they trim the fat elsewhere AND keep the tracking to make more money?
The point you make doesn't really make sense. Yeah, it's theoretically possible for news orgs to stop tracking in the same way that it's theoretically possible for me to take out a knife right now and cut off my legs. News orgs can make up their losses elsewhere and survive in the same way that I can still get around with a wheelchair.
But why on earth would I or the NYT do that?
I respond to you with these questions because it seems to me that both you and the OP speak out against these practices because you feel they are unnecessary. My point is that they are necessary. You just don't acknowledge the forces that make them so.
> Abstract appeals to “free speech” and “liberal values” obscure the fact that what’s being debated is not anyone’s right to speech, but rather their right to air that speech in specific platforms like the New York Times without fear of social backlash.
Well, yeah, isn't that concerning? How can a paper of record seriously discuss & analyze controversial issues of the day if journalists are afraid to even air controversial speech? Is it not their journalistic duty to inform readers of other prominent views so they can make decisions in a democracy? Doesn't that duty lie at the heart of liberal values, isn't that why we value the abstract concept of free speech in the first place?
The entire point of the Opinion section is to bring in relevant outside views into the public eye, yet the NYT editorial page editor was pushed out for allowing a sitting Congressman to say what he thinks [1]. How can the NYT credibly claim to inform its readers on what's going on in the world when they won't even publish the views of an elected representative?
I don't care what you think of gender critical theory or Tom Cotton or neo-Nazi views, they are increasingly relevant in American discourse and journalists should not be hiding them from the public. If you're a journalist, use your Pulitzer-prize-winning words to contextualize it, to argue against it, to expose us to your perspective. It is cowardly to passive aggressively cut professional ties with colleagues you disagree with in order to effectively silence them.
> The problem here is the narrative that is built based on the facts is not accurate and conclusions weren’t scientifically drawn.
Yeah, I think you always have to read things like the NYT with an eye towards their demonstrated institutional biases. I think they can be trusted to get the facts right (even if that fact is "ABC made claim XYZ," when XYZ turns out to have been wrong), and I don't really see a better alternative for getting facts about current events.
That said, I don't think journalists at the NYT are the right people to be writing revisionist histories of events that are very much not current. If they want to publish stuff like that, it would better if the hired some actual historians to do these projects (instead of just trying to use them as QC).
> Nah. The paywalled stuff is just as full of lies, biases and bullshit as they free stuff. It's just more polished and better marketed as a sophisticated alternative. ...
> But they really expect me to believe that, say, the paywalled NY Times is a better purveyor of truth than many interesting free sources of info because it charges you?
I think that it's totally valid to acknowledge these are both true:
1) So-called trusted paywalled journalistic institutions like the NY Times can have significant issues with "lies, biases and bullshit,"
and
2) institutions like the NY Times have significantly more resources available for uncovering, gathering, and analyzing information than any "interesting free sources of info."
>> And to achieve that you're going to force businesses to host content that hurts their bottom line (the loss of income from the advertisers that will pull out from working with a company that hosts such content).
NYT makes more money from subscriptions than from ads (60% vs 30%), and as a (formerly) paying subscriber I'd like to think it lends them some independence. That aside, many other news sources would find Sen. Cotton's opinions pretty mainstream (certainly these opinions may have even had majority across the general public) and publish such views just fine, without advertisers pulling out.
>> In the country where you live all news organizations are forced to publish everything a politician says?
Of course not. They publish on their own accord, and extremists get an outsized exposure because they are interesting to read (just like click baits, right?). It's how I'd have expected most news organizations to work, you know: reporting on the unusual and unexpected.
For me, NYT stopped being a news organization the moment it decided some opinions are forbidden from being published: not because they are fringe (a significant part of the American public agreed with Cotton), not because they come from fringe sources (he's a Senator after all), but because they are contrarian.
> I think the problem is the addition of "opinionated" content media outlets publish to generate outrage. E.g. IMO the NYT is the gold standard of journalism but a lot of their opinion pieces are not even fit to print
A lot of their journalism isn’t that great anymore either. (In the last 3-5 years, there has been a massive upheaval in the ranks as revenues have declined and experienced journalists have left.)
> One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper
Interesting also that the overwhelming majority of the readers who commented on the article itself seem to find it pure nonsense. It's somewhat telling when a newspaper stubbornly keeps serving its readers one specific opinion which they keep refusing to subscribe to. You would expect a news outlet to publish a diversity of opinions centered around their readership's average- roughly half of the readers will be challenged every time. But what's the point in consistently presenting an opinion all your readership rejects? Who are you serving exactly?
> You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall.
Excuse me but why would I want to pay for that ? I don't earn by reading articles online and the news websites are already littered with advertisements and autoplay videos. I get tracked around the web by these ads and I'm supposed to even fund that ?
Thank you but I will pass.
> The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times.
... and can't you do the same with Infowars ? Critically read it and look past the headlines ? Perhaps the truth will be there somewhere too. (albeit as a total negation of the Infowars article)
No it's good, but pro-fact views are going to be anti-racist by default, if the facts are presented honestly. The problem is that NYT more often than not acts allergic to facts that they don't like, creating stories that bend (often already questionable) studies or accounts to fit what their subscribers want to hear.
> Every publication has to draw the line somewhere of what the acceptable bounds of discourse are.
And they also have to follow those rules themselves. Including not doxxing private citizens for zero public benefit, which the heroes at NYT think is a very noble cause. NYT breaks their own 'rules' all the time.
> Finally, she says "stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences", but seeing that the NYT is the third-most popular newspaper in the country, that would seem to be objectively untrue or else people wouldn't still be buying it.
This is the worst logic to go at this issue with. It being the third most popular newspaper has exactly nothing to do with whether or not it has gotten worse or more narrow in appeal. It can get loads worse and still be one of the most popular newspapers, especially since the problems in media exist through practically all major publications. How many newspaper subscriptions do you think the average person actually has?
That doesn't even get into the various negative effects of the subscription model, and the fact that there is an obvious and undeniable economic incentive to manufacture and publish stories that hit with your subscribers. It's true that it has become the standard income method for these companies, but it's hardly any better than clickbait, if not worse.
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