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The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

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Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#31

Post by humanrebar »

specialist wrote: post #29
koolba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting any kind of cap on efficiency of a middle man is asinine. The only outcome is the realization that the only way to make more profits is increase the top line number (i.e. Premiums).

Our government has capped APRs for credit cards. Then, banks added fees, reduced services. Then govt capped fees. Whackamole. Is this a legit analogy? If so, is either side wrong? How would you handle it, if you were King? My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. Reward wellness vs treat disease.

> My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives.

That's only a recipe for lobbying over what bureaucrats designate "wellness" and "disease".

The best way to fix healthcare is to cut out more middlemen. The person whose health is being cared for (or their loved ones) needs to decide when another $10k scan or $65k pill regimen is worth it compared to using the cash to pay off their (grand)kids' student loans.

If all of this is filtered through insurers, lawyers, and government officials, there is incentives to meet budgets and increase revenue, but there's no win for the actual people and families all this is supposed to be taking care of.

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#32

Post by specialist »

humanrebar wrote: post #31
specialist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our government has capped APRs for credit cards. Then, banks added fees, reduced services. Then govt capped fees. Whackamole. Is this a legit analogy? If so, is either side wrong? How would you handle it, if you were King? My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. Reward wellness vs treat disease.

> My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. That's only a recipe for lobbying over what bureaucrats designate "wellness" and "disease". The best way to fix healthcare is to cut out more middlemen. The person whose health is being cared for (or their loved ones) needs to decide when another $10k scan or $65k pill regimen is worth it compared to using the cash to pay off their (grand)kids' student loan…

Wellness is easily measured. Life expectancy, sick days, patient surveys. The fight happens during rationing (bureaucratic triage).

So you'd eliminate pharmacy benefit management companies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy_benefit_management#Li...

Or are you saying eliminate insurers (insurance) altogether?

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#33

Post by selllikesybok »

humanrebar wrote: post #31
specialist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our government has capped APRs for credit cards. Then, banks added fees, reduced services. Then govt capped fees. Whackamole. Is this a legit analogy? If so, is either side wrong? How would you handle it, if you were King? My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. Reward wellness vs treat disease.

> My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. That's only a recipe for lobbying over what bureaucrats designate "wellness" and "disease". The best way to fix healthcare is to cut out more middlemen. The person whose health is being cared for (or their loved ones) needs to decide when another $10k scan or $65k pill regimen is worth it compared to using the cash to pay off their (grand)kids' student loan…

Who has 65k cash to toss around like that? :)

If the doctor can't effectively predict what benefit said scan or pill regimen will provide (50% chance of 10 year life extension,90% chance of 2 years...? not even getting into quality of life), how does the consumer make informed choices? This approach devolves to if you have money you get care, if not, you don't, regardless of need or efficacy. Similar to any other market.

There or some easy decisions to make in medical care (set the broken bone, stop the bleeding), but less so when it comes to areas driving price increases.

Adding layers is potentially problematic, as is removing them. Single payer and no-payer are attractive solutions due to ideological simplicity.

I wonder if a tax funded provision of care rationed similarly to the organ transplant system would be workable...

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#34

Post by selllikesybok »

humanrebar wrote: post #31
specialist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our government has capped APRs for credit cards. Then, banks added fees, reduced services. Then govt capped fees. Whackamole. Is this a legit analogy? If so, is either side wrong? How would you handle it, if you were King? My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. Reward wellness vs treat disease.

> My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. That's only a recipe for lobbying over what bureaucrats designate "wellness" and "disease". The best way to fix healthcare is to cut out more middlemen. The person whose health is being cared for (or their loved ones) needs to decide when another $10k scan or $65k pill regimen is worth it compared to using the cash to pay off their (grand)kids' student loan…

Who has 65k cash to toss around like that? :)

If the doctor can't effectively predict what benefit said scan or pill regimen will provide (50% chance of 10 year life extension,90% chance of 2 years...? not even getting into quality of life), how does the consumer make informed choices? This approach devolves to if you have money you get care, if not, you don't, regardless of need or efficacy. Similar to any other market.

There or some easy decisions to make in medical care (set the broken bone, stop the bleeding), but less so when it comes to areas driving price increases.

Adding layers is potentially problematic, as is removing them. Single payer and no-payer are attractive solutions due to ideological simplicity.

I wonder if a tax funded provision of care rationed similarly to the organ transplant system would be workable...

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#35

Post by bitwize »

pg314 wrote: post #22
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ended up in a bubble? Yes they did. They know it. And they don't really give a fuck. After the election they did some public navel gazing about what went wrong. To prove they were serious, there was even an editorial about The Future of the Times . So I wrote to Ms Spayd. I challenged her, at the next meeting of journalists and editors, to say something like: "show of hands, who voted for Donald Trump for president".…

> So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump? You don't need to be a member of a certain group to be able to report on them. E.g. you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill, or member of the KKK to report on them.

No one is expecting liberal journalists to turn conservative. What we need is for liberal journalists to take conservatives seriously. If the liberals really are right (and I think they're righter than the right) then they should be able to address conservative grievances within their own framework. But in recent years, they haven't been. Encouraged by Obama's success, the liberal establishment has determined that conservatives are all racist sexist homophobic rubes and can be freely ignored. That's how you end up with Connecticut, currently a wasteland where the taxes are unusually high even for a New England state, but public satisfaction in public infrastructure and services is low.

If there are ZERO Trump voters among staff at the Times, that is a strong indicator that the Times reporters are spending a lot of time in a bubble, and could benefit by hiring a conservative just to function as devil's advocate (like Fox News did with Alan Colmes).

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#36

Post by specialist »

cwyers wrote: post #6

On one hand, having an ombudsman (whatever you want to call it) is a good thing for an institution like the Times. On the other hand... having Liz Spayd in that role is pointless, so this isn't a loss. The past year has shown us how the New York Times has let false equivalence and the need to sell newspapers to both sides of the aisle has severely damaged the quality of the paper's coverage, and Spayd has continually…

What's the alternative?

I remember similar things said of their prior ombudsmans (ombudsmen? ombudespersons? ha). I stopped reading NYT when they helped sell Bush's Folly in Iraq, so I don't have a dog in this fight.

I ask because I've been eagerly awaiting the next iteration of journalism. Though I can't guess what that'd look like.

Frederic Filloux (mondaynote.com) has some notions. Mostly how to make it viable.

And I really wanted the Nerd TV 2.0 format experiment to happen (publish all source material as-is, much like we're asking for academics).

And lastly I really wanted the wikipedia model, as envisioned by Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus, to become more mainstream, but I don't know why that format isn't replicated more widely.

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#37

Post by makomk »

matt4077 wrote: post #15
rdtsc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't be surprised if in a few years there will be studies about the "Russia" propaganda campaign. How first it was very effective, everyone repeating the same things, the infamous "dossier" with sexual allegations, communication via mass marketing emails and so on. How it was beautiful and effective, and then everyone went too far and it ended up as a very expensive, counterproductive and embarrassing affair. Als…

Did you read what you're replying to? The New York Times didn't buy into some sort of "propaganda campaign", nor were they part of it. If anything it proves that journalism is doing quite well at the NYT, and the narrative of "bias" and "propaganda campaigns" is undermining civil society, and unfairly accusing people doing the best they can and mostly succeeding.

Supposedly a good five or so publications passed over the Trump hotel communications with Russia story for the same reason, but ultimately it didn't matter that much because the moment one publication (Slate) was willing to publish their article went massively viral on social media, the Clinton campaign helped spread it, and huge numbers of people saw and believed it. We've effectively reduced the accuracy of the media as a whole to whatever the sloppiest, most view-hungry outlet is willing to put out that fits everyone's preferred narrative.

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#38

Post by lettergram »

matt4077 wrote: post #18
shard972 wrote: post #4

So they think that they can just replace that role with social media? Wasn't the whole issue with newspapers in the 2016 election was they relied far too much on social media and ended up in a bubble? I don't see anything in the article that makes me feel like they are interested in fixing that problem.

Nate Silver has done some good work on what exactly went wrong, and it was a combination of factors: - (some) polls were systematically off, mostly because they underestimated white non-college turnout and overestimated black turnout. Note that poll errors were actually lower than for any other election–only this time they actually got the winner wrong. - Most of the poll aggregators operated under the assumption of…

The system I've been working on actually predicted a Trump win: https://projectpiglet.com/

The problem was so many people just hated Clinton, and at the time, Trump had more people positive about him.

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#39

Post by mtberatwork »

bitwize wrote: post #35
pg314 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump? You don't need to be a member of a certain group to be able to report on them. E.g. you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill, or member of the KKK to report on them.

No one is expecting liberal journalists to turn conservative. What we need is for liberal journalists to take conservatives seriously. If the liberals really are right (and I think they're righter than the right) then they should be able to address conservative grievances within their own framework. But in recent years, they haven't been. Encouraged by Obama's success, the liberal establishment has determined that co…

> and could benefit by hiring a conservative just to function as devil's advocate

They do hire conservatives (Brooks, Douthat, Kristol, etc) and they just hired Bret Stephens.

> (like Fox News did with Alan Colmes)

You make it sound as if Alan Colmes, during his time at Fox, was there to give an equal voice to the liberal side of an issue, but in reality he was just marginalized to be the token "lefty" punching bag for Hannity.

Re: The New York Times Is Eliminating Its Public Editor Role

#40

Post by humanrebar »

specialist wrote: post #32
humanrebar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My only notion for healthcare is to change the incentives. That's only a recipe for lobbying over what bureaucrats designate "wellness" and "disease". The best way to fix healthcare is to cut out more middlemen. The person whose health is being cared for (or their loved ones) needs to decide when another $10k scan or $65k pill regimen is worth it compared to using the cash to pay off their (grand)kids' student loan…

Wellness is easily measured. Life expectancy, sick days, patient surveys. The fight happens during rationing (bureaucratic triage). So you'd eliminate pharmacy benefit management companies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy_benefit_management#Li... Or are you saying eliminate insurers (insurance) altogether?

The government can't be rational about what a balanced meal looks like or how tomatoes (fruit? veg?) fit in the picture.

There's a reason food lobbying groups exist.

> Or are you saying eliminate insurers (insurance) altogether?

I'm not saying there's an easy answer, but as long as all health transactions are paying for one party's health with another party's money, we'll have bad outcomes.

If the problem is that it's expensive to live, then let's talk about that problem (negative income tax credit, minimum income, optimize for cost of living, etc.) instead of trying to bureaucracy (private or public) our way into utopia.

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