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Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

reich.hms.harvard.edu

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Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#41

Post by dwighttk »

dylan604 wrote: post #29
sjroot wrote: post #13

The thing that annoys me about this the most is the use of anonymous sources. If you are writing a scientific article, or generally hope to establish some scientific fact, I do not think it is appropriate to hide behind a veil of anonymity.

I totally agree. People speaking on condition of anonimity because they are not authorized to discuss is one of the most annoying things about news today. As the reader, I just don’t trust the info. In recent news, BuzzFeed seems to have been recently burned and the SuperMicro hack sources seemed to have burned the journalists as well (don’t remember which outlet that was). It seems like people are fed up enough to b…

Bloomberg

Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#42

Post by Symbiote »

pcstl wrote: post #22
da_chicken wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put, editorial and opinion sections are supposed to be like that. It's not an error; it's by design, and it's a design that has existed for as long as editorial and opinion sections have existed. You, as the reader, are expected to be know enough about how newspapers are organized to tell that you're reading part of the opinion or editorial sections and what that means. In an ideal newspaper practicing journal…

Which would be perfectly fine, except that digital newspapers have a pesky habit of putting "Opinion" or "Editorial" in very tiny font on the piece's header, with no other indication that the piece being read is, in fact, an opinion/editorial piece.

Choose a better paper!

The Guardian labels comment articles with a big orange “ in the headline on the homepage, an orange "Opinion" on the article page, a pastel orange background in both places, the author's name under the heading in orange, and "commentisfree" in the URL.

Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#43

Post by [deleted] »

da_chicken wrote: post #8
seibelj wrote: post #4

The opinion section of the NYT, and also many of the long form articles, are selected and shaped by the editorial staff which has an agenda. I’ve noticed that popularized science articles are especially bad, and if the science touches even slightly a controversial issue like race or ancestry the meaning and nuance can be warped to match their agenda. This isn’t only the NYT but given their status as the premier news…

Simply put, editorial and opinion sections are supposed to be like that. It's not an error; it's by design, and it's a design that has existed for as long as editorial and opinion sections have existed. You, as the reader, are expected to be know enough about how newspapers are organized to tell that you're reading part of the opinion or editorial sections and what that means. In an ideal newspaper practicing journal…

[deleted]

Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#44

Post by faster »

13415 wrote: post #27
pcstl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would be perfectly fine, except that digital newspapers have a pesky habit of putting "Opinion" or "Editorial" in very tiny font on the piece's header, with no other indication that the piece being read is, in fact, an opinion/editorial piece.

You can increase the font size in your browser if you're unable to read the indications for editorials and opinions. But it's also kind of odd that you consider there to be a problem in the first place, because it's also trivial to distinguish news articles from opinions and editorials just from their writing stile.

it's also trivial to distinguish news articles from opinions and editorials

It turns out that's not true for most people any more.

https://www.bu.edu/research/articles/native-advertising-in-f...

Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#45

Post by khq »

da_chicken wrote: post #8
seibelj wrote: post #4

The opinion section of the NYT, and also many of the long form articles, are selected and shaped by the editorial staff which has an agenda. I’ve noticed that popularized science articles are especially bad, and if the science touches even slightly a controversial issue like race or ancestry the meaning and nuance can be warped to match their agenda. This isn’t only the NYT but given their status as the premier news…

Simply put, editorial and opinion sections are supposed to be like that. It's not an error; it's by design, and it's a design that has existed for as long as editorial and opinion sections have existed. You, as the reader, are expected to be know enough about how newspapers are organized to tell that you're reading part of the opinion or editorial sections and what that means. In an ideal newspaper practicing journal…

>You, as the reader, are expected to be know enough about how newspapers are organized to tell that you're reading part of the opinion or editorial sections and what that means.

No. They know most people take news articles, editorials and opinion articles as the same thing and exploit it.

Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#46

Post by Kadin »

pcstl wrote: post #22
da_chicken wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put, editorial and opinion sections are supposed to be like that. It's not an error; it's by design, and it's a design that has existed for as long as editorial and opinion sections have existed. You, as the reader, are expected to be know enough about how newspapers are organized to tell that you're reading part of the opinion or editorial sections and what that means. In an ideal newspaper practicing journal…

Which would be perfectly fine, except that digital newspapers have a pesky habit of putting "Opinion" or "Editorial" in very tiny font on the piece's header, with no other indication that the piece being read is, in fact, an opinion/editorial piece.

I think part of the blame is also on aggregators like Google News; I've noticed that GN mixes opinion/editorial content in with real news articles, especially on the sidebar (e.g. "Spotlight" section).

It also seems like the ratio of opinion content to actual news has been increasing lately. In the print version of the NYT, opinion pieces were generally only found on two pages, sometimes maybe overflowing a bit, but you'd never see them on the front page and they certainly weren't the bulk of the paper. Now it seems like the majority of "news" content from some outlets are actually opinion pieces.

Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#47

Post by jrd259 »

As a recent reader of Reich's book "Who We Are and How We Got Here" I concur that he explicitly and forcefully refutes the notion of racial or ethnic categories as having any meaning over the lifetime of our species. Simply put, humans have migrated a lot and interbred with whoever. Your ancestry is a "tangled tree" (to borrow Quammen's term https://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Tree-Radical-History-Life/dp/...)

Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#48

Post by arkades »

burlesona wrote: post #10

I heard it this way once: You open the paper and read an article about your field. “This thing is crap, they got all the details wrong and are drawing ridiculous conclusions!” Then you click to the next article, about something else. “Wow, this is really fascinating. We need to do something about this!” ... I think this idea has a name, though I don’t remember it.

Keep this in mind every single time you read a piece about the American healthcare system.

Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times

#50

Post by dominotw »

seibelj wrote: post #4

The opinion section of the NYT, and also many of the long form articles, are selected and shaped by the editorial staff which has an agenda. I’ve noticed that popularized science articles are especially bad, and if the science touches even slightly a controversial issue like race or ancestry the meaning and nuance can be warped to match their agenda. This isn’t only the NYT but given their status as the premier news…

Isn't neutral opinion just a fact.
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