This is really sad. I hope SSC comes back. What the NYT is doing here is almost incomprehensibly shitty. I can't imagine why they would think it's so important to publish Scott's real name.
I Am Deleting the Blog
291–300 of 1001 posts
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#292Anyone saying that it would be a non-issue because people could find out the information is they looked hard enough obviously haven't personally or had their friends/family subject to the Times' entirely unaccountable abuse of power and absence of ethics. There is a big difference between something being buried where people with the interest and competence could go find it and it being put up in lights. Particularly…
"people could find out the information is they looked hard enough" is also ridiculous because, yeah, that's trivially true - the journalist already found the information.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Also stopped reading any news and reports from big media about 3 years ago. Just curious are there any independent investigation journalists that work on the patreon/subscription model? Would consider donation them rather than NYT or WSJ.
There's plenty of independent journalists on YouTube/Patreon/Alt-Tech, some more reliable than others. Hopefully, in the future, more people will start getting their news from the independent YouTube/Alt-Tech journalists who wound up migrating to those platforms after they were laid off from their mainstream media publications during the past decade of layoffs for that industry. Anyone can find a list of such YouTube/Alt-Tech channels by searching Reddit. Of course, that also means having to go through the process of weeding out the biased low quality journalists. Hard hitting debates are rather rare on YouTube, but, as a general rule, I have found that the YouTubers who are willing to debate others (and who present facts during that debate) are better sources of information than those who are unwilling to ever debate anyone.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#294I’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.
I would delete it. He deleted his posts. His name was protected through security by obscurity. A weak defense, but it had been enough so far.
Highlighting a way people can find the name encourages others to dig.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#295This was in a piece specifically about the blog that was going to be positive, which makes this all the more inexplicable.
Why are you so sure about this? Because the journalist who wanted to disclose his name said so? I've also been interviewed once by a magazine that assured me (and the marketing folks) that it would be a positive piece when in fact it was a hit piece apparently initiated by a major advertiser.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And there's the rub. What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"? In theory I would gladly support the theory of "quality investigative reporting", but the reality is a propagandist machine where opinion pieces replaces actual unbiased, adjective-free objective news. Some examples of "oligarch news": https://www.youtube…
> What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"?
I don't think better ownership changes anything. The Guardian is owned by a trust, yet falsely reported Mark Duggan was unarmed in a front page headline (if you're unaware, this was false and the Gruan had to retract the claim after a PCC ruling).
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#297I 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…
> "I don't trust anything they write without checking the facts."
I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever.
How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?
What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector?
The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases.
The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - "I don't trust journalists" translates in most cases to "I don't trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint."
This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information.
Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn't mean you should distrust all apples.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
A standards body maybe. But do you not see some ethical concerns of licensing that tells people how to conduct journalism? Freedom of the Press, but only for those who the governing body deems fit? The whole point of a license is to reduce the gamut of people who can practice a profession to just those people who do it the way the license specifies. In a world such as ours, and a country such as the US, it will inevi…
There is no accountability, no repercussions [1] for causing any amount of personal and economic damage. No real need to offer retraction and corrections even when reporting isn't just unethical, but also blatantly wrong. If you want an easy example look at this Super Micro spy chip story [2] by Bloomberg Businessweek. It's absolutely unsubstantiated [3], caused 40% drop for SM share price, but two years later it's s…
I'm not saying there aren't consequences to the freedom, and the effects of social media make me wish we could ban entire publications at will, but it's the wrong direction to be thinking.
I must admit, the ability to sway stock prices is pretty far from what I worry about when I think of bad ethics in press, but it does happen to be the kind of thing that would make licensing prone to corruption. The money influencing that kind of corruption would be right at the door of the licensing body, just waiting for the first person to crack the door open.
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#299Being named is EXACTLY what ((([redacted])))’s (((kind))) fears the most.
(((They))) will flag this comment to silence the truth.
THEIR NAMES ARE (((SCOTT [redacted]))) AND (((CADE METZ)))
Re: I Am Deleting the Blog
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why the NYT is going to blink. If they doxx this guy, then this becomes a huge grassroots story about how they are "fake news media" that doesn't uphold journalism ethics standards. (Even more so if the article is a negative hit piece w/ politicized overtones, as some people are - rightly or wrongly - speculating here. People _will_ stand up for him over his views, however controversial in some places.) He ma…
Lets be honest here. This will be a big story here in Hacker News for a few days, then we will get on with our lives. It will not spread out from that. This is ironically how the News works. It's new - novel, interesting, unique, temporary. We will stand up for Scott - but it won't really change anything, and it will be temporary. It's naive to think that what we find important for a bit will have any impact on the r…
I don't know what "Standing up for Scott" means. His concerns are that he could lose his job, his patients might not want or be able to connect with him after reading his blog or about it, and dangerous people both online and in his real life would have an easier time finding him in person.
Given these concerns, I have no clue what benefit a supportive forum like this would be. We might all be cheering him on and thinking highly of him, but that wouldn't change any of his concerns.