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What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

savingjournalism.substack.com

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Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#11

Post by EdwardDiego »

edbob wrote: post #8
EdwardDiego wrote: post #2

> On June 10th they wrote, in reference to LA teachers going on strike, that “the average classroom had forty-six students”. (This was in the lede, where the author was setting context for how upset the reader should be.) When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an a…

The original text, before you clipped it out of context and framed it, says "When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an average across a large sample? Never.)" This is accurate, as is the claim that The New Yorker's figure of an average of 46 is completely off base.…

[flagged]

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#12

Post by alex_young »

From the NYT article this blogger is upset about: “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi”

“Mistake” he’s highlighting: “ The Sanofi portion of those holdings totalled a max of $1,485”.

Sounds like accurate reporting. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it’s something, and it has the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Edit: before you downvote me, please consider that politicians have historically been held to account for the _appearance_ of conflict of interest, and that this is a good thing for a democracy. They have historically avoided this in high office by divesting or placing assets in a blind trust, something Trump did not do. NYT has a journalistic duty to report this conflict of interest and did so while saying it is small.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#13

Post by apsec112 »

alex_young wrote: post #12

From the NYT article this blogger is upset about: “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi” “Mistake” he’s highlighting: “ The Sanofi portion of those holdings totalled a max of $1,485”. Sounds like accurate reporting. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it’s something, and it has the appearance of a conflict of interest. Edit: before you downvote me, please consider that politicians have h…

The article further explains:

"HCQ is a cheap generic drug that was widely being given away for free

Pharma firms don’t benefit much from picking one generic over another

Sanofi was never going to make meaningful money on Plaquenil

The disclosures in question were already over a year out of date

The disclosures actually show net sales of the Sanofi-related fund

(More sourcing for all that here.)

It wasn’t just Twitter that pointed out how misleading this framing was. So did Politifact. So did Vox. And The Washington Post did so rather scaldingly.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#14

Post by joe_the_user »

Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy. And this is healthy, in a way.

No it's not. The NYTimes engages in journalism, which is a particular way of gathering and presenting facts. Which to say, among other things, they rely on publicly available information, gathering facts on the ground and sources. Sources are people with information, often but not always powerful people. They check facts/claims but according to their viewpoint. Often they're a conduit for the powerful people they like to present their story, sometimes a true story, sometimes not. Which is to say they'll take claims that look like obvious bs and are actually bs stand IF these come from the sources they like and if they can't be clearly and directly be refuted. And smart, powerful people can craft such claims, indeed enhance their power by crafting such things.

I mean, I can see the comments are filled with places the NYtimes got it wrong. I think my link is good for showing the dynamics of how they got it wrong.

"Russian Bounties!!!" and all that jazz[1].

Edit: also should note, the over-the-top claims for "objectivity" of the OP is transparently full-of-shit. Just so you know I know. "Retraction bounties" - NYTimes may have it's problems but that's never how journalism worked.

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/bounty-tales/

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#15

Post by apsec112 »

nojito wrote: post #7

What happens when substacks make mistakes?

Someone starts a competing Substack and steals their subscribers. It's much harder to do that with the NYT and New Yorker, which are big institutions with all kinds of privileges and insider access.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#16

Post by ZeroCool2u »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #4

I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-... > Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking > Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States. My company has banned Jetbr…

Glad someone else brought this example up. Honestly, what a staggeringly low quality piece of journalism.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#17

Post by alex_young »

apsec112 wrote: post #13
alex_young wrote: post #12

From the NYT article this blogger is upset about: “Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi” “Mistake” he’s highlighting: “ The Sanofi portion of those holdings totalled a max of $1,485”. Sounds like accurate reporting. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but it’s something, and it has the appearance of a conflict of interest. Edit: before you downvote me, please consider that politicians have h…

The article further explains: "HCQ is a cheap generic drug that was widely being given away for free Pharma firms don’t benefit much from picking one generic over another Sanofi was never going to make meaningful money on Plaquenil The disclosures in question were already over a year out of date The disclosures actually show net sales of the Sanofi-related fund (More sourcing for all that here.) It wasn’t just Twitte…

What is misleading about saying Trump “small personal financial interest”? That seems pretty clear cut and truthful.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#18

Post by edbob »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #10
apsec112 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The New Yorker themselves corrected it from "the average classroom had forty-six students" to "as many as forty-six students". They published a "fact", in the lead paragraph, that they themselves eventually agreed was wrong. How is that "taking claims out of context"?

Did you read my comment? 1) Author contrasted claims made to _national_ averages, not _LA_ averages. 2) I agree with you that they got it wrong, I even said as such: > However, finding out actual figures for LA schools is hard, as you have differing figures published by differing sites, based on sources who are on either side of a dispute that involves class sizes. That said, based on this one I found, it looks like…

I don't see any assertions of "how they got it wrong" in the article, at least about the class sizes. The article states that the number was wrong, that it was obviously wrong, and investigates how the mistake was "corrected". The article is not concerned with "how they got it wrong" at all, only "how they corrected it".

The obviousness of the error is brought up because it's relevant to these bullet points: "Both correction notices are notably vague as to how bad the errors were" and "They don’t seem to have reviewed the teacher strike piece for other mistakes".

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#19

Post by underseacables »

“ Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy.”

Let’s stop right there. I think the last 8 years have shown the media to have lost significant amounts of public trust. I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.

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