I have a counter example, just look at the debacle when the New York Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton and the editorial page editor had to resign because of the outrage about its content:
Read that, and you tell me: was Blake Neff canceled? Sure seems like it. Mainstream journalists found "vile" material in his online history, showed it to his employer, he's canned (well, resigned it seems like, technically).
So are you going to defend Neff? Please do. Or if you won't, please tell me why your carefully curated worries about "cancel culture" somehow don't apply to this case.
Because I can tell you why: because "vile".
So now tell me why your personal, entirely subjective definition of "vile" is more important that those of other people with different priorities. Because that's the only difference here.
You can imagine that there are similarly draconian editorial guidelines and policies for topics regarding North Korea, China, Russia, and the other Big Bads; the proof is in the pudding.
I'm not saying there are no examples. In the one you bring up, though, I recall the piece and ensuing hullaballoo: The original NYT author, Charles Duhigg, basically admired and defended the Forbes writer's job (re taking the story in a different direction; providing more exposure to an audience outside his own; providing a prominent book plug), and then O'Neill backed off his own "link-baity" headline.
In general (though, agreed, ~off-topic here), more can be done w/r/t quality assurance of a distributed content network. Something like "report blogspam" is highly subjective and rife with abuse potential. Slashdot's moderation / meta moderation, in combination with straight up and down votes by the wider community, can be effective. Relying on a "central editorial functions" to handle it all is inefficient and doesn't scale well.
This - reputation, rewards, quality (of writers, content, community) - has been an area of interest for me for years. I'm actively working on same currently. I'll put an Ask HN together and see if it gets any traction.
(Disclaimer: I work at Forbes and speak here only for myself)
I.e. the interests of the readers are in conflict with interests of the paper.
Frankly, if they want to bury the lede to make me read their hard work, then I'll gladly not read the article at all, unless forced to (rare these days).
Why is it that a critique of newspapers in which the very first criticism is about not linking to source material fails itself to link to the papers which it rips on?
Actually I don't want a link to the actual live offense, but a link to a full screenshot of the entire visible page seems to be warranted. Because I'd like to see a) the context of these screwups (in the first panel, is it actual content produced by the paper, or wire material in which re-editing presents other logistical obstacles?) and b) I want to know what paper made the alleged screwup. Because if the article has a nice link bait headline slamming the entirety of the news industry, yet uses examples from the Podunk Gazette and similarly sized papers, that's also worth knowing.
They don't have to remove content whenever someone just says its defamatory.
They have to remove defamatory content once someone has told them it's defamatory. Essentially the ball is put into Google's court at the point, with the question: are you willing to defend this as non-defamatory? Which is the same question all primary publishers face.
In this case it may actually be how it works. When Glenn Greenwood co-founded The Intercept, he wrote some degree of editorial freedom into his contract.
"The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression."
> Obviously, you can’t remove the newspaper article, even if it is heavily editorialized.
Wouldn't it be easier to have a law requiring that if the newspaper article is online, then they MUST have some sort of Editor's Note or retraction in bold before the actual article.
How is that different from what happens now with links being added?
Also, journalists (or let's call them news media agencies) often abuse this by reporting of "claims by this" on the topic rather than the topic and in that way refusing any iota of responsibility for what they put on the spotlight.
This is a career ender -- instantaneously -- if you do it to another print publication. Somebody at the Washington Post lifted a few paragraphs of one article from a newspaper you've never heard of in Arizona. Bam, lost her job the same day it was brought to the ombudsman's attention.
However, if you just run a website, you are not a journalist and the unwritten rules do not apply. (This is one of the cultural reasons why newspapers cannot conceive of getting out of the dead tree distribution business, even if it is killing them -- that is the source of their power and privilege, after all.)
Interesting item here is how apparently newspapers with fairly large circulation see absolutely no problem in taking the content from other people and their websites but go absolutely hysterical when someone so much as deeplinks to an article on theirs.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/07/nyt-opinion-bennet-...
reply