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The New York Times to disband its sports department

nytimes.com

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Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#71
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers. Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of t…

I subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was. Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.

> I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.

That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.

Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was. Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.

> I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed. That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.

That’s not the impression i notice, so far, with respect to agenda biases but it’s clear that the overtly biased sites do pick up and seemingly bias content from apnews and reuters.

It would be interesting (in this experiment) to find two articles if different bias both based on a single feed from apnews or reuters.

Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was. Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.

> I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed. That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.

Why do you say anyone other than backers of NYTimes or their editors sets their agenda?

Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#75
post #51

Damn. I haven’t read much of The Athletic (don’t have that subscription level) but I’ve enjoyed NYT sports coverage for forever. They always seemed to have interesting, subtle, and original takes on whatever they were covering. More “literary” than your typical ESPN or other major network coverage.

as someone who moved from dc to nyc in the 90s, i found the nyt sports page to be terrible relative to the wapo. one can compare how many national sports reporter/commentators (or even who have become bigger names in harder news) have come out of the wapo sports dept vs the nyt.

Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#76
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues. Yeah, you’re just factually wrong. Figures like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, all the way up to Kolin Kaepernick and Brittney Griner[1] are wrapped up in human rights and social issues. There isn’t some kind of magical barrier between sports and real life. It’s a social activity that takes place within wider society. To mi…

> Who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state. She was jailed for being a high-profile American, perfect bait to trade for a notorious weapons smuggler imprisoned in the US...she had played in Russia since 2014, so if anti-LGBT was the motivation, they could have grabbed her since.

>> Who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state.

> She was jailed for being a high-profile American, perfect bait to trade for a notorious weapons smuggler imprisoned in the US...she had played in Russia since 2014, so if anti-LGBT was the motivation, they could have grabbed her since.

Yeah, the theory that she was arrested because "an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state," doesn't even pass the smell test. The theory says a lot more about the person who proposed it than any kind of external reality.

Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the majority of sports watchers don't care about politics. >> Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues. > Yeah, you’re just factually wrong. Well, that's a very strong statement but I think you're correct. I'd rephrase the original comment as *Most* Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues.

Agreed, and also I think most people interested in reading about sports have not been going to the NYT for that particularly because they only use it as a backdrop for their stories, which are primarily about some other topic.

> Agreed, and also I think most people interested in reading about sports have not been going to the NYT for that particularly because they only use it as a backdrop for their stories, which are primarily about some other topic.

Are there better outlets for New York sports fans to read? I'm not from there, but I've gotten the impression that the New York Post might be better than the New York Times.

Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#78
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the majority of sports watchers don't care about politics. >> Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues. > Yeah, you’re just factually wrong. Well, that's a very strong statement but I think you're correct. I'd rephrase the original comment as *Most* Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues.

> I think the majority of sports watchers don't care about politics. 75% of Americans are sports fans and 48% of Americans say they follow government and public affairs most of the time. Only 10% of Americans are politically disengaged. Over 60% of Americans voted in the 2020 election, a record high. It's not out of the realm of possibility that over 50% of all Americans both watch sports and care at least somewhat a…

>> I think the majority of sports watchers don't care about politics.

> 75% of Americans are sports fans and 48% of Americans say they follow government and public affairs most of the time. Only 10% of Americans are politically disengaged.

> It's not out of the realm of possibility that over 50% of all Americans both watch sports and care at least somewhat about politics.

However, it's probably a true statement that "the majority of sports watchers don't care about politics [while watching sports]." I'm probably sure you could dredge up some statistic that most Americans like french fries, but that doesn't mean they'd like or even want every dish and every activity served with a side of fries.

Also, given partisan polarization, it's an error to treat the "48% of Americans say they follow government and public affairs" as a block. It's actually two more-or-less antagonistic blocks, and mixing sports and politics will be extremely distasteful to at least one of them.

Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#79
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state. She was jailed for being a high-profile American, perfect bait to trade for a notorious weapons smuggler imprisoned in the US...she had played in Russia since 2014, so if anti-LGBT was the motivation, they could have grabbed her since.

>> Who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state. > She was jailed for being a high-profile American, perfect bait to trade for a notorious weapons smuggler imprisoned in the US...she had played in Russia since 2014, so if anti-LGBT was the motivation, they could have grabbed her since. Yeah, the theory that she was arrested…

Well, you can argue about that detail all you want but the situation still shows you that sports players are important national figures that relate to politics, social issues, and global events. They don’t live in a vacuum where we only talk X’s and O’s because they are real human beings.

Re: The New York Times to disband its sports department

#80
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers. Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of t…

> You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not. They all have multiple dashboards that track site traffic minute by minute and make…

>The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not.

I thought about it and just had to rage recently.

What is _organic traffic_ for something like the NYTimes that is a subscribtion paper and not any public ad-invested news site.

I can tell you, nobody uses the NYTimes search function to find old articles, people inherently just open up the site or app and browse what's fed to them.

Are we saying NYTimes using the X free article day to bombard paid subscribers with shitty content when subscribers generally want curated good content?

But also if NYTimes is then curating what a subscriber sees as the daily paper, why do they go and gaslight the subscribers?

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