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What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

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

#241

Post by mike_hearn »

tacitusarc wrote: post #222
MattGaiser wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because for many people, the making of mistakes is what makes you unreliable and untrustworthy. Superficially, they have a news agency with seemingly no errors in one hand and one with a thousand corrections in the other. Unless you are willing to consider that the errorless news agency is just not admitting it, one seems nice and consistent and reliable and one seems clumsy and stupid.

This is only the case until it comes to light the one not admitting mistakes has been making them, at which point all trust is lost.

But people are getting their information from those sources, so how would it come to light for them?

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

#242

Post by mcguire »

tsimionescu wrote: post #142
mcguire wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to postmodernism! Nothing anyone says can be taken at face value! Deconstruct everything! :-)

That attitude has always existed about news, post-modernism just tried to wrongly apply it to literally everything.

Why did you say that?

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

#243

Post by cyberlurker »

mike_hearn wrote: post #239
cyberlurker wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Thank you for the response and resources. 2. As a paid NYT subscriber, I am becoming increasingly aware that they make some big mistakes in their reporting. They deserve some criticism, absolutely. I continue to expand my sources outside of the bubble and think critically when reading the NYT. 3. In 2012, Mitt Romney was mocked after a debate with Obama for saying Russia was a threat to the USA. That has aged poor…

I agree the Russian government (as opposed to all of Russia) is absolutely a legitimate threat to the integrity of US networks, as are the governments of many other countries. And of course the US government is a proven threat to the integrity of both US and non-US networks. Unfortunately the reporting on purported Russian hacking events seems invariably to collapse when examined. My conclusion from all this is that…

Attribution is always hard but SolarWinds has some obvious fingerprints.

If you consider it hacking, the Russian bot farms (IRA) is well documented too.

Maybe they are good at not leaking, I’m not sure. I will say, I’ve heard some grudging respect for the SolarWinds operation in security circles. They have a functioning offensive cyber organization, that’s for sure.

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

#244

Post by aksss »

tsimionescu wrote: post #139
aksss wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It surprised you that MSNBC, NYT, and NPR have primarily left-leaning audiences? Their coverage leans left like Fox News leans right, particularly MSNBC. If you asked the surveyed Republicans how much they trust Fox News specifically , I’m sure the stats would be a mirror image. Similarly, democrats trust a news industry which, outlet-for-outlet, is more aligned with what they want to hear. After all, it’s never “our…

> Their coverage leans left like Fox News leans right, particularly MSNBC. I don't think it detracts from your points, but the coverage of all these outlets leans Democrat, but not left. They are centrist papers. Left voices (think Chomsky) are almost completely absent from mainstream media.

The context is different when referring to politics in a two-party system like the US, versus political philosophy. In the US political system, the center is relative to where the two parties are - there is no “absolute truth” of the center. The democrats are the party of the left like republicans are the party of the right — meaning political views will roughly trend according to party membership. Centrists are defined by being able to keep a foot in both sides, so democrats are by definition not centrist anymore than republicans. Either party may be comprised by more or less centrist politicians, but if that holds it just moves the center over time. Both parties change their stances on issues periodically in ways that would seem to violate first principles of a philosophical left/right philosophy. But political philosophy is always more accurately measured in a quadrant system[0] than a linear one. In a two-party system, or one of a forced synthesis/aggregation of viewpoints and dialectic conflict, a Democrat will tend to hold views left of center in the US, or at least support politicians who hold such views, and the reverse for Republicans.

[0] the intersection of two axes measuring social and economic positions, popularized as the “political compass”

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

#245

Post by hnburnsy »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #174
hnburnsy wrote: post #41

If you are student of grammar and journalism, do your self a favor and follow @nyttypos. I was stunned by the large number of mistakes that professional journalists make, that their editors miss, and that they refuse to correct. Here is an article about @nyttypos and his/her obsession... https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/18/21372181/nytimes-typo-tw...

This comment is a prime example of Muphry’s Law ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law) .

That's great, thanks for sharing that! I am not a professional journalist but @ntytypos does make mistakes when pointing out errors in Times, but of course they are corrected, unlike what takes place elsewhere.

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

#246

Post by slacka »

throwawaysea wrote: post #54
slacka wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this comment missing a /s? The Daily Wire is actual fake news, with a long track record of misinformation and poor quality content[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]... While not perfect, NYT has a long track record of quality journalism that goes back hundreds of years, winning 130 Pulitzer Prizes. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-daily-wire/ [2] https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-wing [3] https://…

Ironically the Media Bias / Fact Check site you have linked also has a long track record of being arbitrary and reflecting the author’s opinions, basically. See what CJR wrote about them in the section titled “armchair academics” here: https://www.cjr.org/innovations/measure-media-bias-partisan.... > [Media Bias / Fact Check’s] efforts suffer from the very problem they’re trying to address: Their subjective assessmen…

Discounting the fact check, accusing the journalist as being biased because of who they worked for is intellectually lazy and a fallacious argument. If you had read the content, you'd see that the fact checks are accurate and well sourced. From the examples I listed and lack of retractions associated with them, it's clear that Daily Wire has no journalistic integrity. They are not in the same ballpark as NYT.

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

#247

Post by savanaly »

covfiefy wrote: post #70
MattGaiser wrote: post #32

One of the problems with trust is that people see corrections and admitting ignorance as signs of unreliability and confidence and stubbornness as signs of reliability. I can't count the number of times someone arguing with me has dug up a correction or retraction page on something unrelated as proof that a source is nonsense. If they did issue a pile of corrections and changes, this post would instead be "the thousa…

Instead of trying to engineer trust, why not actually be trustworthy, admit your mistakes and become better?

There probably are outlets out there doing that rather than engineering trust. It's just that you haven't heard of them because guess what...definitionally hardly anyone trusts them!

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

#248

Post by lordloki »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #159
notimetorelax wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me wonder, 3 branches of government exist to balance each other out. Journalism stands on its own, what’s the counter balance to journalism?

If you’re in the US, or any country with comparable speech/press protection: the same rights that give them protection to publish. I know it’s unpopular here but social consequences punishing bad press behavior are effective, just like punishing bad politician or famous people behavior. This is sometimes paraphrased as “vote with your feet” or “vote with your wallet”, but lately it’s been maligned as “cancel culture”…

"Cancel culture" isn't choosing not to consume media. "Cancel culture" is actively trying to destroy it, like advocating lawsuits against Fox News, or deplatforming media hosts.

What you describe is how it's always been. Current "cancel culture" is nefarious as it actively tries to remove other's ability to access it. "Cancel culture" is authoritarian and undemocratic.

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

#249

Post by tsimionescu »

mcguire wrote: post #242
tsimionescu wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That attitude has always existed about news, post-modernism just tried to wrongly apply it to literally everything.

Why did you say that?

Because your comment, while clearly a joke (that I did enjoy), somewhat insinuated that postmodernism sort of invented the idea of doubting sources and looking for their biases, or at least that's how I perceived it.

I think doubting sources based on their expected motivations and biases is a part of human rationality since time immemorial, and that postmodernism simply applied this way of thinking to some of the areas where it was traditionally not applied, like science and literary analysis.

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

#250

Post by tsimionescu »

aksss wrote: post #244
tsimionescu wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their coverage leans left like Fox News leans right, particularly MSNBC. I don't think it detracts from your points, but the coverage of all these outlets leans Democrat, but not left. They are centrist papers. Left voices (think Chomsky) are almost completely absent from mainstream media.

The context is different when referring to politics in a two-party system like the US, versus political philosophy . In the US political system, the center is relative to where the two parties are - there is no “absolute truth” of the center. The democrats are the party of the left like republicans are the party of the right — meaning political views will roughly trend according to party membership. Centrists are def…

Politics in the US is not limited to the two parties. The population of the US has a wide range of political opinions that don't neatly aligned to the mainline Democratic or Republican views. Especially in the US, with its system of primaries, the real politics of the population are relevant even when the official election essentially only offers 2 candidates.

And in the real US, the Democratic party is to the right of a vast majority of its own voters' views, on issues such as Medicare for All most prominently, but others as well. It's even to the right of the views of large swaths of Republican voters on many issues, such as withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democratic party is much closer to the Center of the political opinions of the US population, at least on economic and foreign policy matters (I would say it's well in the center-right of American political views actually on those matters). It may well be on the 'real left' on social and family matters, to be fair.

Not to mention, there are many other political forces and voices, which form a clear left pole far to the left of the Democratic party (I gave specific examples), and they have large amounts of increasingly organized support. They will likely pull the Democratic party to the left instead of establishing a pure leftist party, but that is far from having happened. You can look instead at how much the extreme right has been pulling the Republican party right to see the mechanisms

So the way I see it, the US population has left leaning people, right leaning people, and centrists. Looking at the relative opinions of the population, the Democratic party is overall in the Center, and the Republicans are well on the right (these are overall generalizations). Of course, in the absence of better choices, leftist voters will generally vote Democratic, as the Center is preferable to them than the Right.

More importantly for this claim, papers like the NYT and networks like CNN are explicitly cultivating centrist beliefs (especially on economic and foreign policy matters), often leaning far more to the right on such issues compared to the majority of the population (look at Brian Williams repulsive praise of the 'beauty of our weapons' on MSNBC[0] as they were reporting on a US missile attack on a Syrian base).

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNHOJwgZyfo

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