The best part about newspapers is that they are primary source material when it comes time to write the history books...
The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
411–420 of 503 posts
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "By you saying, "they're actively misleading," I'm assuming you're attributing malice to the NYT author." Not so much malice, but having what they want to say predetermined and looking to frame support in what they already believe to be true. (Rather than trying to find out what's true and reporting that). Basically the writer believes X to be true or wants to write a story that X is true and digs through things to…
Ahhh, yes, I think that may have been the case. I still think if the author just put "might" instead of "would," then the article would be quite accurate. However, to your point, I find myself doing that sometimes without even realizing it and I wonder what drives it internally and externally.
Me too, I think to some extent everyone does it and learning to recognize your own motivated reasoning and pushing back against it is an important way to think better. I think motivated reasoning is probably the default behavior (and once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere).
This post dives into it a bit: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom...
Just because an argument comes from motivated reasoning doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but I think it's more likely to be wrong (and it's also likely to be framed in a misleading way or ignoring good contradictory examples). It's also hard to discuss things with the person to learn what's true because they're often not arguing in good faith.
I think this is actually a reason people are often skeptical of debate (since a clever arguer can argue a wrong position and win against someone who is right, but not as good at manipulating rhetorical devices). Also why lawyers can have a bad reputation. People can know something is wrong, but may themselves be bad at articulating why. Other people that are wrong may be good at making themselves seem right. The smarter the person is the more they can effectively rationalize bullshit.
A good example of this is Ben Shapiro and a lot of his arguments (particularly the ones I've seen around religion/abortion) are mostly motivated reasoning nonsense.
That said, while this may be true on an individual level debate should still be true at scale (the best argument from one side should still be pitted against the best argument from another). I think this is what free society and liberal democracy is all about.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's actually a named psychological effect for when people read a news article that they know to be inaccurate and don't believe that lack of standards carry forward into the rest of the paper's articles... Unfortunately both my memory and Google are failing me on this one. Maybe someone in the comments will contribute.
I can't readily find this either, but the New York Times employs 1,700 journalists and publishes about 150 stories every day. I don't think treating it as a big singular monolithic entity is helpful.
And those 1700 journalists and 150 stories per day go through their much smaller editorial board before they get published. There can be costly legal ramifications if they do not have their editors carefully go over stories.
Stop giving them excuses.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's actually a named psychological effect for when people read a news article that they know to be inaccurate and don't believe that lack of standards carry forward into the rest of the paper's articles... Unfortunately both my memory and Google are failing me on this one. Maybe someone in the comments will contribute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speeches_by_Michael_Crichton#G...
THAT'S IT! Thank you.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#415> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp t…
It's a mistake to judge an organization on one, or even a handful of incidents. There should be a pattern of inaccuracy and bias before you "cancel" a news source. This is one of the unsung problems of the modern world, the growing impossibility of keeping an accurate "reputation" in your brain. Virtually everyone and everything has been accused of being evil, in general, or specifically. It's no longer good enough t…
Why is it a mistake to judge on one incident? If I worked with someone who seemed like a professional, and then one day he spat on me and never apologized and denied he did so, I'd probably judge that guy even though it was just one incident.
There is a difference between making a mistake or being wrong while trying to be right, and intentionally doing something bad or refusing to acknowledge error. Everyone is in the first category sometimes, but you don't really have to be in the latter category.
If the NYT is intentionally doing bad things, even once or a handful of times, then I don't think it makes sense to forgive and forget until they show me they understand and have corrected the issue.
The problem is that for most things I can't tell if they're right or wrong or arguing in good faith or not. If something comes up where I can definitively tell, and they are definitely acting wrong - it destroys lots of credibility because that's really one of my rare chances to evaluate their performance. I can't trust them in domains I don't know about if they aren't very good in domains I do know about.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm German. Public broadcasting, including ARD/ZDF but also countless of local radio station is without a doubt significantly better in quality than BILD/RTL or other private tabloid media, and it's one of the reasons the country still has by and large a shared reality when it comes to political discussion. I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic, because entertainment is part of…
Agree wholeheartedly. And I'd like to add that there is by no means a uniform opinion propagated. For example, the ARD (one of the major public broadcasting networks) hosts both the rather left-leaning "Monitor", and the more conservative "Report aus München". However, as you highlighted, they share a common understanding of the world, and therefore Germany doesn't suffer extreme polarisation. (I'd argue that the fri…
>I'd argue that the fringes, as seen with the anti-lockdown demonstrations in Berlin recently, are actually sustained by newfangled social media.
My impression was that they were mostly older people (50+), and from their style of clothing I could tell that they were mostly poor people, maybe people who got wrecked by Hartz4 reforms in the 90s and early 2000s, and grew a deep hate on German politics and the mainstream. Fringe social media groups and conspiracy nuts just take advantage of pre-existing hate.
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a long, long history of false-flag operations undertaken during protests. Some caution is advised when deciding whether any one action is taken by genuine protesters, especially when it's as comically "unpatriotic" as burning the bible and flag.
Obviously, just as it's important to be cautious in general when reporting on hot issues. But to claim that it's a lie because they might be false flag seems ridiculous. Your reporting might always turn out to not be accurate in hindsight, but I wouldn't consider it a lie unless you knew it to be inaccurate at the time of publishing.
If it makes our side look bad then it's fake news
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right; but it's one thing to say "they no longer have industry-leading editorial standards" and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect. I don't read the NYT front page – just articles linked here and elsewhere – so my view of it is far from complete and biased; I don't see "ZOMG ALIES!"-type articles for example, but there certainly still seems plenty of content of value on the NY…
> and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect The newspaper's ombudsman declined to punish the reporter in any way, or admit anything other than "oops, mistakes were made". That's what makes it a failure of the newspaper and not just "less-than-perfect" reporting. It's one example from a pattern of behavior, and the reason people are saying the NYT no longer have industry-leading e…
They seem even less serious publishing op-eds like this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/trump-biden-presi...
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#419Reminds me a lot of google's effort to create high-quality scans of every book ever written. They got pretty far before the publishers stopped them. They now sit on a sizeable percentage of all books published, locked away in their servers where nobody can access it.
Could they still use this to train an AI model, legally speaking?
Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
1.65 is not the average ratio, it's the smallest ratio among the group of countries under consideration. So, it's intentionally misleading. Regardless, even if the average WERE 1.65, that's still a damning enough number that the meter shouldn't be all the way to the "False" side.
Since the statement they're fact checking is "twice as much... than any other nation," averages don't apply; the smallest ratio is the strongest counterexample. Politicians can avoid being fact checked like this by using less absolute statements in their rhetoric.
They are also using exchange rate $ equivalent instead of PPP, the ratio then is 1.93 for the Netherlands to the US.
This is a lie by the fact checkers. One that pushes an agenda that's obvious to see for everyone who cares to look.