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Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
61–70 of 146 posts
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#62I heard it this way once: You open the paper and read an article about your field. “This thing is crap, they got all the details wrong and are drawing ridiculous conclusions!” Then you click to the next article, about something else. “Wow, this is really fascinating. We need to do something about this!” ... I think this idea has a name, though I don’t remember it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Gell-Mann has to do with the contagiousness of poor logic, not the fact that there are stories you like and stories you don't.
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can increase the font size in your browser if you're unable to read the indications for editorials and opinions. But it's also kind of odd that you consider there to be a problem in the first place, because it's also trivial to distinguish news articles from opinions and editorials just from their writing stile.
it's also trivial to distinguish news articles from opinions and editorials It turns out that's not true for most people any more. https://www.bu.edu/research/articles/native-advertising-in-f...
It's trivial for New York Times articles. Your link is about advertisements disguised as news (which are illegal where I live).
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#64I heard it this way once: You open the paper and read an article about your field. “This thing is crap, they got all the details wrong and are drawing ridiculous conclusions!” Then you click to the next article, about something else. “Wow, this is really fascinating. We need to do something about this!” ... I think this idea has a name, though I don’t remember it.
I've heard about it too but I don't know what the solution would be. If a journalist was really knowledgeable about something they were writing, would they still be in journalism when their insight could fetch more elsewhere?
Journalists who know their stuff can make good money running a topical blog / journal. See Stratechery as an example.
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#65"I have mixed feelings about the NYT piece -- on the one hand it has a lot of valid criticisms and brings sorely needed critical eye to _________; on the other hand it is sensationalistic, too long, and very unfair to _________ -- I guess they needed a villain for the piece."
I cancelled my subscription to the NYT because I felt this way about many of their pieces.
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which would be perfectly fine, except that digital newspapers have a pesky habit of putting "Opinion" or "Editorial" in very tiny font on the piece's header, with no other indication that the piece being read is, in fact, an opinion/editorial piece.
Choose a better paper! The Guardian labels comment articles with a big orange “ in the headline on the homepage, an orange "Opinion" on the article page, a pastel orange background in both places, the author's name under the heading in orange, and "commentisfree" in the URL.
But then the Guardian also publishes opinion pieces outside of their opinion section as well.
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#67The thing that annoys me about this the most is the use of anonymous sources. If you are writing a scientific article, or generally hope to establish some scientific fact, I do not think it is appropriate to hide behind a veil of anonymity.
I totally agree. People speaking on condition of anonimity because they are not authorized to discuss is one of the most annoying things about news today. As the reader, I just don’t trust the info. In recent news, BuzzFeed seems to have been recently burned and the SuperMicro hack sources seemed to have burned the journalists as well (don’t remember which outlet that was). It seems like people are fed up enough to b…
> People speaking on condition of anonimity because they are not authorized to discuss is one of the most annoying things about news today.
This has likely annoyed people since the beginning of anything related to journalistic inquiry. If these people didn't have a guarantee of anonymity, the public would be in the dark most of the time.
> I still appreciate the Snowden method. Got fed up to the point that the info must be released, but did not hide to keep his job.
Not everybody is in Snowden's position; relatively young, unmarried, no kids. He may be able to take this "cool guys don't look back at explosions" approach, but most people can't. That doesn't mean that what they know should remain hidden from view because it doesn't meet your standards for what a 'real whistleblower' looks like.
Snowden is also essentially trapped in Russia. The only reason he was able to find refuge there at all is because his revelations are a useful symbol of American hypocrisy any time the words "surveillance state" are bandied about in discussions about Russia. He's a smart guy and probably knows that the Kremlin's generosity will last only as long as he doesn't try to rock the boat by commenting on domestic Russian matters.
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#68As someone who has (once) written an opinion piece for the NYT, I wonder how much the published piece resembled the author's original text. My experience: https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/nyt_opini...
I (once) wrote a Sports Illustrated opinion article years ago (similar situation to yours: made a comment on twitter to one of the popular talking heads, talking head took notice and replied, SI took notice, asked me to write something), your experience matched mine from the editing and review standpoint.
At first sitting back and reading the suggested edits and changes in place I had a similar first reaction as you did, but after doing the "walk away, do something else and come back to your writing later" thing, I found the opinion was still there though much less verbose.
Share that to say, the editorial process itself, even for opinion pieces-is rather....well... opinionated.
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#69As a recent reader of Reich's book "Who We Are and How We Got Here" I concur that he explicitly and forcefully refutes the notion of racial or ethnic categories as having any meaning over the lifetime of our species. Simply put, humans have migrated a lot and interbred with whoever. Your ancestry is a "tangled tree" (to borrow Quammen's term https://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Tree-Radical-History-Life/dp/... )
The problem is that politics doesn't deal with the lifetime of our species; it deals with the recent past, the present, and the near future. When you narrow the timeframe down like that, race and ethnic categories are meaningful, important, and real. You can look at someone and make some pretty good guesses about their life history and where their ancestors came from and what they experienced. I appreciate the sentiment behind the "race isn't real" position, but it's wrong and, in being wrong, it gives a toehold to people who really do care about race for all the wrong reasons. IMO, a much better position is to acknowledge that race is real, but just one part of what makes an individual who they are.
Re: Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which would be perfectly fine, except that digital newspapers have a pesky habit of putting "Opinion" or "Editorial" in very tiny font on the piece's header, with no other indication that the piece being read is, in fact, an opinion/editorial piece.
I think part of the blame is also on aggregators like Google News; I've noticed that GN mixes opinion/editorial content in with real news articles, especially on the sidebar (e.g. "Spotlight" section). It also seems like the ratio of opinion content to actual news has been increasing lately. In the print version of the NYT, opinion pieces were generally only found on two pages, sometimes maybe overflowing a bit, but…
Yes! I've noticed GN has succumbed to the right-wing pressure and started showing me a lot more right-wing propaganda sites. So I get news and opinion mixed together like "CBS: Government shutdown continues." "Washington Examiner: Why Democrats want migrants to kill you"