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Resignation Letter

bariweiss.com

451–460 of 716 posts

Re: Resignation Letter

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 1,600 journalists last year that were sent to 150 countries [1]. What other organization is doing anything like that effort to gather facts around the world? Who is doing more collective discovery (and making it accessible to the public at a price an average person can afford)? I can only think of a handful of organizations that are serious candidates (Reuters? The BBC? Wikipedia?). Weird puff pieces, drama…

the FT do a pretty good job, without as much of the problematic editorials. Probably not as useful to you if you're US based, but I find it really useful for living in Europe.

I would have agreed with you 5 years ago. Unfortunately pretty much every article in the FT has become politically motivated, following very much the NYT's "only the facts that fit the narrative". The FT is openly running campaigns on many topics, and then you aren't reading news, you are reading propaganda.

The editor changed in January, I unsubscribed a month before. Perhaps things have changed since.

Re: Resignation Letter

#452

"People were mean to me and other opinion writers who weren't fact-checked and frequently got facts wrong. I'm not considering these complaints Free Speech, but our hurt feelings mean that Free Speech was hurt. My boss, James Bennett, solicited a piece from Tom Cotton that called for the state to take arms against protesters (protesting might called… speech?), and didn't read the piece before publishing it. The peopl…

Are these quotes from something? I don't see these in the OP. I don't understand the "boosting" that you're referring to either.

Re: Resignation Letter

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noam Chomsky says a lot of interesting stuff but he published his writings on 9/11 a couple months after the attacks (and he certainly has his own ideological filters). He's an essayist, a linguist, but not a news source. I'm looking for the better alternative to the NYT here. Where would you go for information if I told you about some surprising event occurred and people on Twitter are posting very different stateme…

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Stop trusting outlets. Find journalists with integrity and follow everything they do, no matter the outlet.

I've been saying somewhat similar things lately. Although, I do believe some worthwhile outlets exist.

But, do you believe this is a new problem? Was it always bad to trust outlets?

Re: Resignation Letter

#454
post #3

"Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at [the New York Times]: that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else." This is a very key point, and what are the consequences of "informing everyone of a truth" that doesn't accurately reflect -- of even contradicts! -- reality? Harm to the reput…

Bari Weiss doesn't realize it, but she's painting an accurate picture of herself here.

Re: Resignation Letter

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 1,600 journalists last year that were sent to 150 countries [1]. What other organization is doing anything like that effort to gather facts around the world? Who is doing more collective discovery (and making it accessible to the public at a price an average person can afford)? I can only think of a handful of organizations that are serious candidates (Reuters? The BBC? Wikipedia?). Weird puff pieces, drama…

> They have 1,600 journalists last year that were sent to 150 countries ... to gather facts around the world Journalism is not our fact gathering apparatus. It is our sense making and relevance deciding apparatus based on those facts. If we don't have good journalists providing those functions, we are left with the ersatz, AI based versions to decide what to pay attention to; twitter's, youtube's recommendation algor…

Thats only one thing she is saying. The other thing she is saying is that there is no room for anyone who falls outside the orthodoxy of the new progressive religion.

Re: Resignation Letter

#456
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's little evidence this is the case. This post could be summarized in one sentence: Bari Weiss wanted people fired because they called her names and the NYT refused, so she quit and threatened legal action.

I support the Harper's letter and sympathise with many of Weiss' criticisms, but I agree that she flirts with cancel culture territory herself with her language about a hostile work environment. Do you want robust debate or not?

if represented truthfully, the behavior she described doesn't sound anything like "robust debate" to me.

Re: Resignation Letter

#457
post #446
post #3

"Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at [the New York Times]: that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else." This is a very key point, and what are the consequences of "informing everyone of a truth" that doesn't accurately reflect -- of even contradicts! -- reality? Harm to the reput…

What makes this really ugly right now is that the New York Times thinks that the coronavirus pandemic is going to get Trump voted out of office, and their need to push hard on the idea that it's all his fault has really done a number on their reporting about the biggest crisis facing the world. Especially once it turned out all that the success story countries they pointed to as proof America could've done better if…

> America went from having a terrible testing program to one of the best

Any sources on nCoV-2 testing program in the US? Genuinely curious, social media (that I can see from inside my bubble) is mostly buzzing with how bad things are all around, but then people rarely take the time to voice positive changes.

Re: Resignation Letter

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are getting low level employees fired from their jobs This is an interesting intersection. It either implies that all employers are left-aligned (not true) and therefore willing to fire employees that hold right-leaning opinions, OR that low level employees are so expendable that it literally any reason can get them fired if enough people complain.

I think HR departments just want to offload risk and they'll take advantage of loose labor laws to offload an employee who got mobbed online. I don't ascribe a right or left bias to them. It's the mob that has the bias (perhaps because of age or ideology or certainty or something else) and the mob uses the technology and then the HR department responds by firing the employee.

> the mob uses the technology and then the HR department responds by firing the employee.

Do we need to coin the term "DDoE"? Distributed Denial of Employment. It's a hack against the socio-political system that targets find themselves in, not too dissimilar to Swatting.

Re: Resignation Letter

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even ten times that many journalists will do you no good, when what they report is filtered according to some pre-concieved view of the world (or the journalists themselves are only hired if they share that view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nBx-37c3c8 ).

Noam Chomsky says a lot of interesting stuff but he published his writings on 9/11 a couple months after the attacks (and he certainly has his own ideological filters). He's an essayist, a linguist, but not a news source. I'm looking for the better alternative to the NYT here. Where would you go for information if I told you about some surprising event occurred and people on Twitter are posting very different stateme…

One solution: bypass the propaganda and the editorialising, go straight to the source of information which is news agencies.

Re: Resignation Letter

#460

> Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I…

>> Can't anyone there see past the current insanity and think? "To be inclusive, we have to get rid of her"? Don't they even hear the words coming out of their own mouths? This confuses a lot of people, but the explanation is simple: it is the Paradox of Tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Namely, not tolerating someone, who themselves espouse intolerant views and give voice to intolerant ex…

This gets quoted in every online conversation as if it solves the issue neatly. It more often than not functions as a mental shortcut, and skips over the concerns raised above.

Why should we tolerate the given 'just' intolerance?

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