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I Am Deleting the Blog

slatestarcodex.com

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Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#231

Post by yawboakye »

brnt wrote: post #126
Uhrheber wrote: post #75

I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper. It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse. I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly st…

Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it. I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course ag…

I was going to say that we could defer to whistleblowers instead but I realized that that term has also been loosely used. That said, it’s not journalists but news organizations that shouldn’t be trusted.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#232

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pritovido wrote: post #165
jwilber wrote: post #128

I’ve seen a lot of criticism for the NYT as of late, and, sadly, it’s almost all been warranted upon inspection. I’m not sure if it’s a case of the top dog getting all the scrutiny, but it’s crazy to me how a company with so many good journalists can seem to have so many bad. Much criticism is not even new (Manufactured Consent, Judith Miller).

The problem is in who owns the mass media. Newspapers are bankrupt, specially the NYT,that earns more money in real state(newspapers own properties in the center of cities that are very expensive) than with journalism. Newspapers gold days are long gone. So when someone buys it, it is not for making good journalism but for buying a propaganda channel for the owner's own interest. The good journalist do not matter, if…

I'm not convinced that this is a new problem. Newspapers used to make money, but they have always been owned by someone rich enough to buy a printing press.

What's different now is that people have more access to primary sources. The story says that the boy was 11, because kids in that grade are usually 11 and the reporter was lazy, but the boy was really 12.

In the world where only one organization in the city has a printing press, the boy is now officially 11 years old because nobody who knows any better has the means to contradict it. In the world where your cat can get more hits on YouTube than there are people in New York City, the inaccuracies get publicized left and right, and then, rightly or wrongly, people lose faith in the news media.

This is kind of what we asked for. Give everyone a chance to speak to the world instead of only a privileged few and you get all the stories instead of only the rich man's story.

The problem now is instead of one party telling you a lie you didn't know was a lie, you have two parties saying contrary things and you know they can't both be right but the average person has no way to know who to believe and also doesn't have the capacity to verify everything personally.

So we end up with camps who are absolutely convinced that the other camp is nothing but angry malicious idiots who can't see the truth, even though that's what they think about you.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#233

Post by rorykoehler »

andrewksl wrote: post #195
rorykoehler wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Fox News for psuedo-intellectuals. My mother is a subscriber so I read a bit and it is absolutely atrociously biased and blatantly misleading in a similar way to how Fox News operate. The main difference is NYT add a minor sheen of intellectual language over the top to try obfuscate it.

Do you have any links to articles you find particularly egregious?

Would you ask the same question about Fox News? It's a little redundant no?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#235

Post by [deleted] »

Fiveplus wrote: post #129

Seeing all this negative press about NYT (their website's weird trackers) and spotting increasingly more propaganda articles in their editorial section in the recent past, I am now going to stop my NYT subscription. The last thing they deserve is my money.

[deleted]

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#237

Post by johan_larson »

I'm sorry Scott has decided to shut down his blog. He posted many interesting things over the years, and the community of commenters that clustered in the blog's open threads was usually a joy to deal with. I was part of that for years. I'm sorry to see it go.

That said, this decision to shut down the blog looks like an overreaction to me. Scott seems to think that he should be able to be both a prominent online pundit, on the one hand, and completely anonymous, on the other. That just isn't realistic. If you're someone who matters, people are going to want to know who you are. And there are people who make it their business to uncover such information.

A part of being famous is a certain level of unwelcome attention. It's not just the good and kind that pay attention to you. It's the weird and threatening too. This should not be news to anybody. It seems to me Scott got his first brush with real fame (in the form of an article by a top newspaper), and discovered that even a modest helping of it was was more than he was willing to deal with.

Goodbye SSC. It was good while it lasted.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#239

Post by zozbot234 »

jychang wrote: post #214
Tinyyy wrote: post #204

I’m not trying to dox the author, but I just want to point out that he blogged about his own name on SCC(in 2019 no less), which is quite counterproductive if he wanted his last name private. https://archive.vn/d9HrI Edit: The linked blog post was still live prior to the site takedown, so I’m assuming it’s acceptable to link to an archive of it.

You can easily find Scott's last name in multiple places. He makes a point though, being able to dig out his last name is very different from publishing it in the New York Times.

He was also concerned about people finding his blog starting from his name, mostly for reasons having to do with his work. He even mentions this in his post. People are saying that he didn't do a good job of protecting his privacy anyway - that's quite wrong, dude knows what he's doing.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#240

Post by snet0 »

natrik wrote: post #118

Any thoughts on the importance of deleting the blog when various backups such as archive.org exist?

There's a difference between "Scott, who blogs at slatestarcodex.com" and "Scott, who used to blog before we threatened him, and now can be found only on archive sources".
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