Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

If the theory is that advertising makes conflicts of interest more transparent, I don't think I agree. Advertisers can be stakeholders across diverse ranges of concerns - conflicts of interest are often indirect. They can influence what doesn't get written, as much as what does. The real bad actors can even just disguise ads as content. We still need to have some basic trust that institutions are respecting firewalls that - by and large - they have to self police

> The problem with the "philanthropic" funding is not only is there no firewall, but it's explicitly pay-to-play agenda pushing

> if you go to the AP website today and look at some random article paid for by these grants

Why do you say there is no firewall? Is that really true? The AP has their guidelines here and I don't see it as substantially different than what a publication might do for advertisers and other stakeholders who may be tempted to exert editorial control:

- https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/how...

If you have specific instances where these arrangements have clearly compromised their journalism, that would be good to see.

In the meantime, I think we can do two things at the same time here: resist overdosing on maximal cynicism, but also be clear eyed about the ways money can tempt institutions to throw integrity out the window.

> The right wing are saying things like, journalism is fake because they're just pushing a left wing agenda for money.

> But it turns out that the rightists are correct and that's exactly what journalists are doing, so it's hardly their fault that mistrust was created and cultivated.

Generally speaking, no they are not correct, and most of them are just outright cynically lying, while engaging in the very behaviors of which they accuse others.

Point (1) is why news institutions that cover a wide range of interests and have a broad audience have tended to fare better. Depending too much on a particular niche audience leads to audience capture.

WSJ and Fox News have the same owners but WSJ still has one of the best and most credible newsrooms in the business (their opinion section is another matter).

Meanwhile Fox News is a lie factory that only tells it's large (but niche) audience what it wants to hear. And now they have rival networks eating away at the pie by being more sensational and even more shamelessly obsequies. They're stuck in a radicalization doom loop.

> Replicability isn't enough to be scientific. Many studies have invalid methodologies, so replicating them by following the same method just propagates wrongness and makes the problems worse. And if you don't follow the same method the original authors will claim it's not a replication study.

Replicability test also happens in the real world. If gravity is not actually 9.81 m/s^2 then we will eventually have to come to term to that. For all we know, we could be completely wrong about quantum mechanics and the reality of subatomic particles, but it doesn't matter because we can use the predicted behavior and it actually works.

The question is to ask: what is one thing that I would never discard from a scientific principle. If you remove replicability, it does not matter if you have accurately captured a measurement of the universe once, it is completely pointless if you are not able to replicate it again.

Sure but I mean the community as a whole. Why has there been allowed to be a reproducibility problem at all? Why has the consensus not always been that without provably reproducible results it’s not to be taken seriously?

Yes, it's true. No more firewalls. Go read the article I originally linked, here it is again:

https://apnews.com/article/science-business-arts-and-enterta...

Some key paragraphs are:

> The Associated Press said Tuesday that it is assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues, in the news organization’s largest single expansion paid for through philanthropic grants.

> The grant is for more than $8 million over three years, and about 20 of the climate journalists will be new hires. The AP has appointed Peter Prengaman as its climate and environment news director to lead the team.

> For many years, Journalists and philanthropists were more wary of each other. News organizations were concerned about maintaining independence and, until the past two decades, financially secure enough not to need help. Philanthropists didn’t see the need, or how journalists could help them achieve their goals.

> Nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica and Texas Tribune led the way in changing minds. The Salt Lake Tribune, which in 2019 became a nonprofit to attract more donors, and The Seattle Times are other pioneers.

> “As far as we’re concerned, it has been really seamless,” said Monica Drake, assistant managing editor at the Times. “It has allowed us to focus on things we want to cover and to do it independently.”

> Both sides had things to learn. For Carovillano, it was getting used to the idea that funders weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve. “This is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” he said.

> “I feel like our language has gone from people talking about local news dying to there being a renaissance of local news,” she said. “If you can provide good, high-quality journalism, people are willing to pay for that, people are willing to support it. I think there’s a lot of room for optimism. The trick is, can we move quickly enough?”

The article leads with climate grants but is really about the phenomenon in general, which covers many topics.

The quoted journalists are duplicitous, trying to reassure themselves. The text says that what they're doing used to be taboo because rich guys had "goals to achieve", but now it's considered "pioneering" and "mutually beneficial". Their justification is they didn't have any money and felt sad, but now they've got lots of money and are happy. They say the transition has been "seamless", i.e. readers aren't aware of it. And hilariously, at the end Carivillano claims there's room for optimism because people are willing to pay for high quality news - except "people" aren't paying, that's the reason they need to take money from a handful of donors.

It's obvious this compromises their journalism, especially in the stories they don't publish. These news orgs have basically been bought by the donors, large chunks of their staff only exist because of these grants. Thinking it doesn't compromise their news would be like saying Facebook simply buying all the news teams that cover the internet wouldn't have any effect.