A lot of political extremists hate people like Scott, and it has caused him a lot of trouble in the past. This is why anonymity is more important now than ever, because just writing a scientific blog about interesting topics can make you the target of witch hunts designed to ruin your life and kill you.
It's hard to describe how bad these things can get out of nowhere without having been through some of it or seeing it yourself. But, having your real name attached to posts that are against certain political topics or narrives, can be borderline-lethal in 2020, and I can't blame him for what he's chosen to do. There's been plenty of scary situations and chilling effects in the past, and they're obviously only getting worse recently.
Is there any public figure on the internet who doesn't receive death threats? You could maintain a blog for photos of puppies, and some lunatic would have a deadly-serious problem with it. The web isn't working. The saner and wiser a person is, the less likely they are to contribute content. The design of the web selects for morons with neither any reputation to lose, nor foresight to worry.
A close friend and I have run a blog about 09/11/2001 since ~2009, timewise it's easily one of the longest in existance (~2004 911blogger.com/faq), and some odd stuff has happened, but never a death threat. The previous owner as far as I know has the same experience. There is a vid in my profile if anyone is curious.
Confounding factors are the subject is self-insulating and it breaks traditional party lines. Also, people who experienced that Tuesday are exceptionally good at avoiding it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571449 ... I certinally was.
It's extremely random. There are plenty of public figures that don't get that stuff and whom don't get what the fuss it about and plenty of other otherwise indistinguishable people that get piles of it.
> The saner and wiser a person is, the less likely they are to contribute content. The design of the web selects for morons with neither any reputation to lose, nor foresight to worry.
The paranoia coming from conservatives right now over this is almost hilarious if not sad. There are no squads going around beating up bloggers, they are beating up protestors though. Never miss an opportunity to play victim!
I don't think it's about being murdered. There are very real, non-lethal consequences to writing certain uncomfortable opinions. Just having one's name attached to controversial articles, tweets and posts would be enough for some employers to think "nope, not worth the effort / PR hit" and not hire that person.
E.g. I have written a bunch of outlandish stuff in my comment history, and some of it would cause people a lot of offense. Enough for them to want to call my employer out of some motivation and escalate to some sort of public/twitter witch hunt. But I promise you, I am not a bad person, and would not hurt a fly. That is the part that's missing here. Reasonable, innocent people are potentially being treated as if they're inciting violence.
This is the correct take. It's not so much about a worry of violence but the far more prolonged concern of never being able to have a normal job and provide for your family again.
I mean he has had people put out bounties to find him on reddit. No doubt it was for violent purposes, but losing your job or clients because of it can be just a slower death. I hope he finds a way to convince the NYT to not wreck his life.
Anonymity cuts both ways. You can keep your personal details secret for a while. It's becoming more and more difficult the more well known you become. On the other hand anonymous people are able to continue making threats, call for violence or otherwise making your life more difficult basically forever without consequences.
There are many problems with the way the Internet works. Having anonymous people with nothing to lose broadcasting political opinions and threats is one of them. This creates anonymous angry mob which is very successful at silencing interesting authors and ruining lives of those who have even slightly controversial thoughts.
I don't know what the solution is. It's not clear to me more anonymity is going to solve anything. I believe the world would be a better place if you had to work to have your opinion heard. Do something interesting, work in certain industry for a few years, achieve something, live through something. Just because you are able to make an account on a website doesn't make what you have to say in any way interesting or worthwhile.
> But, having your real name attached to posts that are against certain political topics or narrives, can be borderline-lethal in 2020
It's also unavoidable in 2020 to be doxxed eventually if you have a lot of enemies, unless you take care not to publish any personal details and hide your identity with the best methods available from the beginning. But when you make it easy to identify you with details such as those on the RationalWiki page, all bets are off and it's a bit late to mourn now.
I'm a moderator on Reddit for a gaming related television-show-turned-into-internet-streaming company with various shows and format.
The related circle jerk subreddit is very vocal and after some minor discussions about normal moderator actions of removing insulting posts, it kind of spiraled out of control and all of a sudden, lots of postings on the circle jerk appear, targeting me.
Somewhat amusing in the beginning but some of those posts were somewhat disturbing enough to let me actually consider for the first time how much information is out there for identifying me or persons in my personal circle.
My real name is easy enough to find out (I never tried to hide it) but it is kind of generic enough to have lots of hits so you can't go from there to where I live or work. But for other people which might even have different personas on the internet, this can be much more difficult.
Was certainly a chilling moment and this only on the topic of something completely apolitical.
What kind of "people like Scott", and what kind of political extremists?
I see a dead comment has cited "racial science" and "conservatives", seemingly out of nowhere. Has Scott written something "controversial" that I missed? Something that would offend the left wing?
If so, I can well believe that NYT would take it into their heads to write a semi-hit-piece on someone they perceive to be some sort of Jordan Peterson type.
Scott in his open thread a few weeks ago [0], posted a brief request for help by Steve Hsu, an MSU professor who endorses research into using genetic modification to increase human intelligence and blogs on scientific racism [1].
No. There is a slightly higher chance with NYT than say TMZ but still. I've read many people saying the journalist told them it was for a fluff piece or positive article.
Journalists obviously never tell their subject their piece is going to be negative. In fact, as far as I can tell from the few people I know who have been in that situation, they appear to routinely say the opposite.
In the News, to normal people reading an article, it's more interesting to hear about about a real person with a real life, with a real family, home etc than a pseudonym with no background. It sucks but that is how the News usually works, and how people like reading stories about other humans. Hopefully in this case they might see the damage that this might do.
I'm pretty sure Scott would have been more keen to share details about his personal life if his pseudonymity had been guaranteed; I know I personally would have in his stead.
...and who would know if they'd just used his pseudonym?
It's not like a large % of the NYT readers are going to know straight away that no one exists with the name used in the article deviate from it at all?
Why are you so sure about this? Because the journalist who wanted to disclose his name said so? I've also been interviewed once by a magazine that assured me (and the marketing folks) that it would be a positive piece when in fact it was a hit piece apparently initiated by a major advertiser.
Edit: I'm 50:50 on whether they take the negative press hit of publishing this anyway. If they publish without name included - everyone still finds out the name of the "flippant" writer. If they don't it just concedes that their attitude was wrong to begin with. They are in a tough spot now - hard to feel sorry for them given the asympathetic position they assumed.
~~~
SlateStarCodex shutting down in direct response to the hubris/disregard of one NYT reporter hungry for a story. This parasitic appetite for airtime come-what-may approach to journalism needs to be checked. There's no reason the writer couldn't leave the real full name out of the article once requested and with legitimate concern aired by the person hes naming.
I'm glad "Scott" is taking this stance if only for the fact that it puts the onus of hard/difficult decisions back on the NYT - i.e. why despite legitimate concerns are your writers comfortable doxxing people?
The key highlight for me -
"When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he just said that me having enemies was going to be part of the story. He added that “I have enemies too”. Perhaps if he was less flippant about destroying people’s lives, he would have fewer.
(though out of respect for his concerns, I am avoiding giving his name here.)
After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks."
It's not just the New York Times either. Take a look at what happened to the NightJack blog in the UK (and in that case, it turned out that the Times had illegally hacked the blogger's email to get their information and then lied about it in court to dodge an injunction).
> why despite legitimate concerns are your writers comfortable doxxing people?
This is especially important to ask when a big complaint of the NYT staff about the Tom Cotton is editorial was that it was directly endangering their safety.
Apparently the NYT does not have the same concern about other’s safety.
> He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article. Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. ... When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he just said that me having enemies was going to be part of the story. He added that “I have enemies too”. Perhaps if he was less flippant about destroying people’s lives, he would have fewer.
NowThis and that entire network of brands collaborating on radical politics. There has to be way to make this more obvious to people.
I've watched VICE and NowThis alone radicalize perfectly decent people. I knew someone for over 10 years who was always highly observant, emotional but self-aware, would drop what he was doing to sit in my car with me in a dark parking lot and let me go through the wild ride of emotions I have about my ex. He knew we wouldn't ever be a thing. I sat with him one evening in a dark parking lot and let him go through his emotions on us just not falling into place, the existential crisis of seeing something desired within reach and being able to touch but not keep it. He's the person who taught me every second is independent from the next, that a bad feeling toward someone can be isolated, compartmentalized, only exist in a moment in the front of our minds. That if we're aware of that independence, we can turn off an emotion so quickly we hardly notice the effort. And today, I could be thoroughly enraged by someone's comment online, turn off my screen and be in a great mood before I even realize the transition occurred.
A few years back, he started watching the VICE documentaries at work during his free time. And then he started watching the clips and cuts made by Buzzfeed and channels like NowThis. Then he started sharing them on social media. And the clips got more and more incendiary. It's like VICE news could do a 30-minute special on LGBT in Brazil, but he'd watch and re-watch the few seconds of Bolsonaro saying gays are bad and that's just his view. And then he'd repost the clips. And then he started posting them on people's timelines to make sure their friends saw the clips and his comments too. And it eventually spiraled out into him posting clips of Nazi propaganda and these detailed comparisons to the Trump administration. And then he got verbally abusive toward his family.
My last conversation with him was me asking why he posted what read like a manifesto that white people, Nazis/KKK, cisgender people should be put into training programs and if they refused or didn't show rapid progress then they deserved to be dropped off somewhere remote and left there. I thought he was joking, but he said he was serious. He ranted for almost an hour at me, even after I closed Facebook. I got 13 or so message notifications on my phone.
Just to clarify, his posts on Facebook and Twitter included his belief that 'cisnormativity' is a product of 'white mafias', that we're all accomplices and own a blood libel for the deaths of the poor around the world, that ISIS wasn't homophobic and only executed cishomos, that he'd force cishomos to have sexual intercourse with trans people even if it didn't fix them. Just insane, insane shit.
These sites are the gateway drugs to violence. For all the talk about violent video games and movies, these indie (corporate) 'news' channels are the real danger.
>There has to be way to make this more obvious to people.
I've always been of the opinion that the reader needs to be on guard towards content which teaches people to hate, much moreso than "hate speech" that's just someone screaming their head off like an angry paranoid fool.
It's easy for everyone to identify and contextualize someone talking trash; even if they happen to agree they can still see it for what it is. It's much harder when a reporter (someone branded as a smart person) uses high-status language, slick production value, and an almost disengaged tone of voice to seduce you into a comfortable but dishonest explanation that turns people into cartoonish monsters to lay blame at their feet.
I'm sorry that happened to your friend. Unless I've only seen the tip of the iceberg, I didn't think vice was that bad? Not always substantiative, and definitely a ways left of center, but I wouldn't stick it in the same vein as something like Infowars or breitbart.
But probably you don't have any actual metric or system for deciding "badness".
PC goodthink is that Breitbart is terrible in every way and the worst possible source of news. When I've compared its European edition to outlets like the Guardian, it's pretty similar in tone, style and content (obviously with political polarity reversed). If anything it's actually less extreme, for instance, it's very clear about the separation between illegal immigrants (i.e. a class defined by choice) from race (a class defined by immutable characteristic), whereas the Guardian does publish pieces talking about 'white people' or 'white men' quite frequently.
Also, Breitbart uses links to primary sources much more heavily than most news sources do. A lot of papers only link to other stories they published, to keep you in-site.
Part of the reason people do things like what the journalist did is because they can do so without facing any consequences. There should be disincentives for that kind of behavior. I'm not talking about them being threatened or put at risk. I'm talking about there being consequences for their reputation.
That would be counterproductive. The reporter would get abuse from random people, the article would definitely get published with the blogger's name, with the twist of "blogger tries to suppress publication of article by leveraging an online mob."
There is no need to do that. As long as the reporter remains unnamed, for now, they can decide to either not publish the article, or not publish the name, and they will be able to go along with there life, without getting the negative backlash.
If they do dox the person, though, their name will be on the article, and you'll be able to find it.
I would like to know who the journalist is. Not so they can be threatened or put in danger. But so their reputation can take a hit. Part of the reason people do these things is because they can get away with it without any consequences.
The lead editors are responsible for maintaining ethical standards, and they represent the NYT. Adjust your impression of the NYT reputation based on this story. Also see the other comment on this article about Naomi Wu being doxxed, where the risk is deadly living under a tyrannical regime: the NYT hired the journalist responsible, who doesn't believe any mistake was made there.
It's just assumed in your comment that this should only be about the media outlet, and that we should ignore the journalist involved.
The problem with people trying to shut down others primarily comes from individuals. Often that's individuals on social media. In this case it's a journalist. These individuals can destroy other people's lives, yet they essentially face zero consequences for doing so.
And each time they succeed, like in this case, they embolden others to do it.
For twitter, you have a point. For something being paid for and published by an organization, this is driven by the organizational culture which pays them to do so.
So Scott the psychiatrist's reputation can take a hit? If Scott Alexander writes shitty stuff, Scott Alexander's name will take a hit. And there's nothing wrong with that, because his future work will also be published under that name. But what's the rationale for nuking Scott the psychiatrist? (who will also be nuked even if his patients see nothing wrong with his blog. Patient-psychiatrist interactions are supposed to be tightly controlled)
Colleagues, sure. Patients, NO. Especially since this will harm even potential patients who would have had no problem with Scott. The problem isn't that patients will read SSC, decide that Scott isn't cool, and Scott loses business. It's that patients will read SSC, learn too much about how and what Scott thinks, and this will hinder Scott's ability to help these patients regardless of what said thoughts are. For instance, if Scott talks about hating PE class in high school (he very well might have, I don't know), that could stop patients from opening up to him about their passion which happens to be sports or something.
But, you say, surely that's not a problem for well-adjusted people! Guess what the hell a psychiatrist does.
Since it seems that the reporter might have been named after all, did anyone take a quick look at their previous work to check whether they have a history of publishing problematic or misleading 'hit pieces'? It might be useful to figure out if concern really is warranted here.
Correct, in fact Wu had posted the article in order to somehow protest NYT's hiring of Jeong. I personally think that Jeong was simply misguided in this particular incident and doesn't deserve that much criticism especially compared to the Vice reporter in question, though.
Wow, i’ve read all her 3 long blog posts about what happened and it angers me so much. I knew Vice was shit, but I had higher expectations from NY Times, Google or Twitter.
Is there any conceivable good reason for the NYT to publish the name in an article on the claimed topic, despite the author's wishes to the contrary? Can't think of any, unless the reporter was also misrepresenting the subject of the story or the angle he is taking.
Maybe, revealing the true (or full) name is seen as a journalistic contribution? (As in "I'm not just reporting on what is there for everyone to see, I also did some actual research. See, here's the real name nobody was meant to know." – Obviously, this would be more proof of an issue with professional self-esteem, rather than of anything else.)
FWIW the CEO of Lambda School had the following to say on Reddit regarding whether the piece would really be positive ("you" in this quote is addressed to Scott):
> I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but they’re going to say you’re a far-right racist who supports eugenics, based on you not immediately supporting the firing of Hsu. I know this probably sounds improbable to you because the author was pleasant, but they’ll have a quote from you they’ll strip of nuance and context to make it clear that you’re evil. Probably something about why you want to remain anonymous and they’ll paint it as you wanting to be anonymous because your views are beyond the pale or a dog whistle or something.
> ... It was absolutely going to be a hit piece and they don’t tell you that upfront because they need your participation.
> Pui doesn’t care, she’s cracking open champagne right now. This is what she thinks their job is. Exposing everything because reasons and feeling good about it.
> It will absolutely be a hit piece, probably call SA a racist, and will be unapologetic. To expect anything different is impossible if you’ve spent a lot of time around this particular brand of new age journalist.
> ... The editor SA is referring to is a known quantity in many circles, including mine, as is the author of the piece (I know people who were asked for comment; all refused). This is a win in their book, and they couldn’t care less about whether SA’s life will be destroyed.
Somewhat related — does anyone know an easier way to cancel one's NYT subscription than going through the rigmarole
of waiting for/talking with multiple "customer service" reps?
After NYT's all-too-credulous parroting of Barr's mischaracherization of the Mueller report I tried to cancel mine, but spent over an hour on the phone with no progress, and gave it up. I should have persisted — I don't want to give them my money any more, and this is all the more reason to cancel. At the same time, I don't have the time or patience to subject myself to phoning them again in the near future. Surely there must be an easier way? Certainly there should be.
This is the more punitive action, and I will note that a credit card company will side with you as long as you made a decent effort at canceling. I considered it when I waited 3 hours for a chat without a response, but ended up doing the PayPal way because it required less dealing with a bank in this time of Covid-19 delays.
Most companies pay about $15 per chargeback (independent of if they win or not).
Especially for low value things, even a few percent chargebacks will be really costly.
Source:. Was selling $1 physical items online... The business was profitable until a few percent of packages started going missing in the mail, and rather than contacting us, customers would just chargeback, forcing me to double the price of the service.
Switch your payment method to PayPal and then cancel from the PayPal side. I got burnt by trying to cancel the NYT a few years ago so I made sure not to give them any of my financial details this time around.
I decided to cancel last month due to the Tom Cotton Op-Ed and couldn't figure out an easy way to do it on-site so I just cancelled from the PayPal end. On a lark, I decided to try and cancel from the NYT end as well just to see how difficult it would be. I connected to the live chat and finally got connected to a representative after TWENTY FIVE HOURS on hold and was given 20 minutes to respond before being cut off.
I just tried the runaround with the chat assistant, then got tired of waiting and did the PayPal trick. I am supposed to be charged on the 29th, I'll see if it goes through (though I suspect it won't).
I had to (or it seemed like I had to) go through a web chat queue and beg multiple times to cancel my crosswords subscription (which was the only NYT subscription I’ve ever had, and there’s nothing wrong with the crossroads product, I just wasn’t able to dedicate enough time to it).
Scummy business practices like that make it very difficult for me to recommend any of that company’s products to anyone, even though I’m sure the people actually making the products have little or no influence on the people who control the transaction mechanics.
I think I replied to one of their daily roundups and asked for them to cancel it. If they can't even filter out deranged calls for violence from their opinion pages, I'm not going to pay them to publish anything.
This is a tragedy, Scott Alexander is such a thoughtful writer.
I wish journalists would come up with some professional standards and make the title licensed, like doctor or lawyer. Right now we all recognize how important journalism is but journalists themselves run the gamut from ethical investigative journalists to clickbait manufacturers. Imagine if journalists also had to adhere to the equivalent of attorney client privilege for sources.
I 100% agree and talked about this a lot in j school. Would love to see some type of society body emerge with a coalition of Pulitzer Prize winners (the only real framework that possibly stands to live past the inevitable calls about its legitimacy from the News Corp -owned bodies of media, honestly) and ideally backed by the biggest news media companies in the world. I would love to see a further membership based element where members of the public and journalists could critique reportage and possible ethical lapses all publicly, adhering to principles set by the society itself.
Honestly I think it's time journalists take back some of the responsibility and importance of their roles that's been stripped by colleague and company malpractice (and the side effects of a business model twisted inside out in rapid succession), as many DO recognize their importance. But like politics any real "talk" of media quickly devolves into sports-like tribalism and never gets beyond hating the 'players' not the game itself.
It's fine to have a standards committee with the power of suggestion. However something like that could just as easily become something for countries with dictators to use to attempt to silence reporters who they don't like so I suspect that's why there's no "governing body" just some organizations who recommend best practices. One man's "standards" is another one's opportunity to cull rebellious journalists.
> society body emerge with a coalition of Pulitzer Prize winners ... backed by the biggest news media companies
If biggest media companies were interested in upholding any ethical standards - the would have been doing that already. Allowing them to create a coalition and giving that coalition any more power would make things only worse.
Scott Alexander may not have been the original source, but he is a definitely _a_ source as it seems he was in touch with the reporter. The reporter has an undeniable ethical duty to decide whether to publish his full name after he raises concerns about his safety.
I see limited to no news value in publishing his name and substantial risk of harm, but I'm a frequent reader and admirer of the blog.
I don't think the 'substantial risk of harm' is established, at least, not by Scott Alexander's own behaviour - he says himself his pseudonymity was quite thin. Journalists tend to see their responsibility as being primarily to their readers, not the subjects of their stories. Subjects generally don't get to edit stories about themselves - that's considered non-journalism.
> I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an antipsychiatry Reddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for). I’ve had dissatisfied blog readers call my work pretending to be dissatisfied patients in order to get me fired.
I think anyone who is not a sociopath would consider this proof of a “substantial risk of harm”.
Lots of people receive death threats and even more claim they receive threats or perceive types of loud criticism as threats. Being on the wrong end of these is no picnic but it is not, in itself, a substantial risk of harm. And again, his own efforts to protect his identity seem to have been relatively superficial. He just didn't think he was going to end up in the NYT and he was mistaken. As I said elsewhere, it's a bummer this is a disruption for him but it's not obvious we (let alone the journalist who actually figured out his name, as anyone wishing him harm could have) should take the claims of risk of harm at face value.
I don't disagree with your characterization that the obligation of the journalist is to inform, but what is the marginal utility of revealing his whole name? It's hard for me to come up with anything.
I wouldn't be opposed to the story running under a fictional name, even though that would probably not be to Scott's liking either.
He already has a sort-of fictional name. He's also a public figure with a substantial following. I think for the journalist reporting on him, this is a no brainer - identify the thing you're talking about. At the end of the day, I'm not some expert it journalistic ethics - maybe they don't have to publish his name. But the notion that they're committing some grave moral offense or journalistic malpractice by publishing it over his objections seems completely misplaced. It's journalists' job to publish things over subject's objections.
Suppose the National Review were doing a piece on a labor campaign and decided to publish the name of a major employee leader who had maintained his anonymity to protect his job. Would you be so blase about their journalistic ethics? After all, publishing true information about someone even if they don't want it published is just journalism at its finest.
It's not the sort of work the National Review does so I'm not sure I really understand the hypothetical. Do journalists sometimes omit details to protect subjects or sources from harm? Sure. But the bar for harm is usually higher than 'the subject wouldn't like it'.
I think this is the critical point. The marginal utility is quite clear though: Readers can check all sorts of claims for themselves by looking up public details about the person. E.g. are they really a psychiatrist working at X as the reporter claims.
In the specific case though, given a really well established pseudonymous online identity, that is the central subject of the article, the marginal utility of the additional information you can check seems uniquely low. At least if the subject is just the pseudonymous activity of the author.
Maybe there's some case to publish his name if he's misrepresenting himself. It doesn't seem like that's the case. If the journalist finds discrepancies he can report on them too.
Surely you'd agree that "trying to be pseudonymous but not taking it very seriously" and "being published in the new york times" are substantially different things, no? One can do the former and reasonably not expect it to lead to the latter.
You mean he didn't expect to get so popular? Sure, I can believe that but he's been popular for a while. My argument isn't really that he should have foreseen this, it's his own damn fault and that he deserves no sympathy. He has my sympathy, I just find his response unpersuasive and (perhaps understandably in his moment of distress) overwrought.
Those expectations are reasonable when you are a blogger with little to no following. But at some point on the fame/popularity spectrum, those expectations become rather foolish.
At the point where the NY Times is reaching out to write an article about you, I think you have likely crossed that threshold. Scott's best move would have been to refuse an interview in the hopes that it would kill the story. But even that might not have mattered. If your goal is to be both famous/influential and pseudonymous, you probably need to work a little harder to protect your anonymity.
I'm not really putting much on the table but journalist are in my low tier of respect, if there's any.
There's so many instances of abuse, lying and laziness that seems low standards are common through the profession and countries.
In general I tend to see them as activist, with very few exceptions of people that tries to approach truth.
Nowadays it really doesn't matter if they write for a local newspaper or WAPO, it's just so common that your default approach should be looking at every piece as propaganda.
A standards body maybe. But do you not see some ethical concerns of licensing that tells people how to conduct journalism? Freedom of the Press, but only for those who the governing body deems fit?
The whole point of a license is to reduce the gamut of people who can practice a profession to just those people who do it the way the license specifies. In a world such as ours, and a country such as the US, it will inevitably become the target of corruption and a position of immense power over the media. Even if it could be a good idea, I don't believe we live in a world where it would be executed in a way that maintains freedom of the press.
I don’t see it as much different than the general societal norms that we tend to teach children, like “try to be nice” and “it’s okay to avoid people who aren’t nice.” Is that a violation of freedom of speech, or some top-down regulation? I don’t think so.
It probably shouldn’t be “licensing” in the sense of using state or otherwise organized violence to seek out people who violate the norms. We generally don’t teach people to punch anyone in the face who is rude. But having general standards of conduct don’t seem to bad to me.
Licensing or regulation is a very particular construct in relation to employment, and nothing like education of ethics.
I am on board with ethics education as a way to impart societal values. I'm pretty sure it's a component in most journalism degrees, but perhaps it should be part of early education more distinctly as well.
There is no accountability, no repercussions [1] for causing any amount of personal and economic damage. No real need to offer retraction and corrections even when reporting isn't just unethical, but also blatantly wrong.
If you want an easy example look at this Super Micro spy chip story [2] by Bloomberg Businessweek. It's absolutely unsubstantiated [3], caused 40% drop for SM share price, but two years later it's still up.
I'm not saying there aren't consequences to the freedom, and the effects of social media make me wish we could ban entire publications at will, but it's the wrong direction to be thinking.
I must admit, the ability to sway stock prices is pretty far from what I worry about when I think of bad ethics in press, but it does happen to be the kind of thing that would make licensing prone to corruption. The money influencing that kind of corruption would be right at the door of the licensing body, just waiting for the first person to crack the door open.
For me this particular story was notable because it was the first time I had (barely) enough expertise to realise that story is really implausible and enough interest to follow it up.
It's not that rogue journalist influencing stock market is bad, it's bad, but that's not the point. What really bothers me is that that there are no mechanisms on media company level to punish or at least disincentivize faulty reporting.
We encounter misinformation on a daily basis, but can't do anything about it. We can't even notice it, unless topic in question happens to fall in our area of expertise.
I agree, it's going to be tough problem to navigate. I can't even come up with a vague ideological solution for it, let alone a good mechanism that is fair and robust against corruption. It's like being stuck inbetween one ideal and another. Freedom of information vs stopping the bad being caused by misinformation.
My optimistic side would hope that putting education in schools about misinformation and how to critically think about and analyze journalism could at least help the issue.
It seems to me that protecting sources and mandating some degree of truthfulness (like don't outright lie about verifiable facts, as some statements are not disprovable) are orthogonal to dictating the subject of the stories?
The AMA and bar associations are not without their issues either (they end up driving prices up since they have a monopoly on their service), but it seems to me that people don't have to worry about doctors doxxing their patients on social media or lawyers making deals behind a client's back as much. When it does happen, these professionals are usually ejected from their profession, which is a pretty big disincentive.
Maybe there could be an independent body like the EFF but capable of issuing penalties to the egregious companies, but not the individuals. Perhaps even cap the type of company that can receive penalties, in order to preserve the ability for small upstarts to succeed without giving a potentially corruptable governing body the tools to squash them under a veil of legitimacy.
If you license individuals, how do you categorize what is and is not journalism, and where do you stop? Photojournalists, blogs, for fun school magazines, local newspapers? Are radio shows journalism? Youtube channels? Do I become an unlicensed journalist if they hold misinformation? Thinking of the worst case, a corrupted governing body could quietly pick and choose who they want to take penalize for not practicing with a license, or penalize them out of existence even if they have one.
That benefits big news corps while stifling open/free journalism with risk. For one example of what I mean by that but in a different industry, I will never run a website that could have users upload media in my country, because we have no safe-harbour laws. If you are at risk of penalties, many people just won't start.
Not in some countries but it's the 1st amendment of the US Constitution that protects freedom of speech and the press. So it's considered pretty important here.
Licensing seems like a solution to problems like this but the cure would be worse than the disease. Control over the licensing body would guarantee control over information, so it would become a prize to be fought for and the whole thing would be politicized. The best case scenario is we end up with the same mess we have now. Worst case is one side captures control and now their side gets to be the only "legitimate" one.
Same problem with so-called fact-checking. It's politicized, which means it adds nothing over the chaotic political debate we already have, except a false veneer of objectivity.
This is possibly one of the easiest ways to create a police state if you make journalism "regulated" (i.e. government approved) ((or if you're a nutter, corporation approved))
There is already a sort-of licence. Being employed by a company as a journalist, especially if the company is a recognised media "name".
But the people this is deliberately not recognising is bloggers. And to be honest, I'm seeing better journalism being done by (some) bloggers than (some) paid journalists now (not their fault - the business model for journalism is a mess, while the model for blogging is working).
> There is already a sort-of licence. Being employed by a company as a journalist, especially if the company is a recognised media "name".
But this obviously fails as seen in this instance (and many others). Companies have interests that do not align with the public's interest of ethical standards. Much like we've generally understood (but unfortunately not really everywhere) that letting other industries regulate themselves isn't a good idea, I don't think it's any different in the media.
Personally, I'd rather journalism wasn't licensed in this way. I get the intention behind it, but it'd basically outlaw freelance journalists, independent journalism sites, blogging, etc, and make it easier to justify arresting people at protests because you don't like what they're recording.
Also an easy target to politicise, and dangerous to society if the far left/right end up running such a board and dictating that their opponents are wrong.
Licensing only works if you have to be in a certain jurisdiction to operate in it. Given that more "journalism" is online, if Murdoch or the Barclay Brothers or whoever don't like the restrictions of your licence, they can just employ journalists somewhere else. If they need boots on the ground, they can employ independent contractors.
How do you prevent independent journalists selling pieces to certain outlets without unfairly placing the burden on the journalist? Is it a list of proscribed publications? How does a publication get on the list? What happens to all the "good" journalists who work for an organisation when it gets put on the list?
What, exactly, is a journalist? Does it include columnists who write opinion pieces? If not, how do you prevent an outlet from running more and more "opinion pieces" masquerading as news? If you get defrocked for doing something your employer considers highly profitable, they can just rebrand you as a columnist.
What does it mean to be licensed? What does having a licence allow you to do that you can't do without one? Is this your "press pass" allowing you to ask questions at briefings? There have been cases recently when this has been revoked on a whim. Is it just to get a byline in a printed newspaper? Again, they can rebrand unlicensed journalists as runners, and print the piece under the name of a real journalist.
Journalism is not a terminal career like medicine or law. If you get thrown out of one of those professions, you lose your livelihood. There is nothing else that you are as well trained for that pays as well. You have to start at the bottom of something else. Most journalists are not particularly well paid. Former journalists can earn as much, if not more, writing press releases and advertising copy.
Doctors were once upon a time not very highly trained, medicine was a crapshoot, now things have changed. I'm sure it was a tremendous upheaval at the time. That it's a lot of work doesn't mean it can't be done.
A more interesting argument against doing this is considering the tradeoffs if implemented:
* e.g. the AMA has pretty successfully restricted the supply of doctors and driven the prices of medicine up,
* people are so paranoid about giving medical or legal advice they have to say things like "I'm not a doctor but... I'm not a lawyer but..."
Whenever people mention licensing practitioners of some trade, the interesting question is always "licence to do what?". All too often, the answer tends to be a boring and poorly thought out "licence to call yourself an X". It fails to answer "what can an X legally do that a non-X cannot?"
In the case of doctors, pharmacists and lawyers,things like surgery, controlled drugs, rights of audience are easy to restrict. If you are not one and try to do the job anyway, you won't get very far.
As a client, I cannot use a partitioner who is not licensed in my jurisdiction. If I have a video consultation with a real foreign doctor, they still can't write me a prescription I can take to my local pharmacist. No matter how good the doctor is, they are made deficient by not being registered with the GMC.
A journalist writes and publishes articles about current affairs. You can't legally prevent people doing that without a catastrophic infringement of free speech.
Every day, I read articles from publications from many countries. Those articles are not made deficient by the fact that they are not written by NUJ members.
Plenty of people read and believe bunkum written by people who don't even pretend to be journalists. Sticking little "licenced by..." Logo on the real stuff won't make a difference there.
People just don't buy newspapers anymore since the net is full of news articles. Your business model is basically attracting as many people as possible to your site. Advertisers were always the largest customers but today the reader is completely exempt from business relations.
I'd take what Scott Alexander has to say about this with a grain of salt. He is a bit obsessed with people who criticize him on the internet, going as far as to write about his borderline paranoid suspicions behind people making fun of him online in several of his blog posts.
Some people can't handle the judgment that comes with being a somewhat public figure, and Scott is one of them.
Exactly this. And the community plays into it. They imagine themselves to be Galileo —- persecuted by the state and society just for telling the truth.
He's most likely aware that he can't handle that level of judgment. Lots of people can't! That's why he's elected not to become a public figure, and why it's so toxic for the NYT to try and make him one against his will.
I clicked on this expecting it to be Scott Alexander blogging about somebody else getting doxxed. I flipped like a boat when I realized what I was reading. Holy shit!
I was just in SSC's Open Thread a few hours ago opening comment permalinks in tabs to respond to them.
That NYT writer should be fired. I hope Scott recovers soon. SSC is my favorite place on the Web.
I don't think, given Scott's recent defense of Steve Hsu, that he'd really want people fired for doing ill-advised things, even if they could be reasonably construed as dangerous, unless harm was demonstrated. It's still disappointing that the journalist is making this choice.
I think it's just in general dangerous and disruptive for the entire world to know who you are online. They will find you and threaten you and everyone you love. Sure only 1% of them are actually dangerous but it only takes one bullet or knife in the back from a psychotic person to end everything. Or just someone doing some crazy made up nonsense like pizzagate. The loonies are out there.
Point taken regarding the Hsu case. Maybe I jumped the gun there.
I don't want it to be the norm for any journalistic organ/employee to function/perform the way this one did. There are many ways to accomplish adoption of that norm, including (but certainly not limited to) firing people who do that.
There is a clear division to be made between firing someone for what they do on their own time vs. actions they take in the course of their employment for you.
When being a responsible journalist is your job, it's not unreasonable to expect to get fired for not being a responsible journalist.
I think it’s completely unreasonable to fire someone for one instance of wrong behavior (with very narrow exceptions for something like stealing or sexual abuse).
I’m very happy to live in a country where you cannot fire people just like that, even if they do something wrong. You have to give people second chances. I don’t get this “fire them” approach to anything wrong something does.
People make mistakes. That just happens. To always fire people because of that makes no sense to me.
Of course people make mistakes, but it's a mistake to confuse a deliberate and fully informed action with a mistake. The journalist knows Scott's concerns and has plenty of time to think through things and come to a decision, and came to the wrong one.
If I was a janitor and spilled a bucket of water on the floor it would be wrong and cruel to fire me for that mistake. On the other hand, if I saw a customer come in to our store and said "Yo customer, we hate you, get out and never come back!" And then grabbed a bucket of water and dumped it on the customer... Well then I think firing me would make sense. The former was a mistake. The latter is an intentional and deliberate bad action.
I read him as saying the NYT is being "dumb and evil". I think it's an open question if they are dumb or cunning. I think they may intend or prefer a result like this.
If people don’t accept that they made I mistake then yeah, that’s an issue – and one where firing should again become an option, sure (basically that unwillingness to accept that is then the second offense).
I do agree that the situation here is bit more complex since the public is involved.
This seems serious enough that, I think, the challenge is more about the NYT making transparent their process, their decisions and what they did.
I think that’s even more valuable than just firing someone. They should investigate which processes, guidelines, rules, etc. contributed to that behavior and how and wether they plan to change that. They should outline what they communicated to that reporter. They should apologize.
I want an explanation and improvements, not someone to be fired. Also because I think more often than not people who actually did make a mistake are unlikely to do that again.
They could be the problem and actually toxic, sure, that’s always a risk. But I think that’s ok.
I don't think this is a "that one writer" issue; I don't think Scott is saying this is a "that one writer" issue. Any such choice is down to newspaper-wide policy.
Proposition: The NYTimes editorial board has long addressed the matter of revealing identity of anonymous bloggers on interent.
From a political point of view, anonymous (and more critcally, independent) bloggers are a threat to the (local/global) establishment's propaganda organs. This may in fact be editorial policy, as you suggest. It doesn't matter of the blogger is 'friendly' in terms of political views.
> I don't think this is a "that one writer" issue.
I think the problems with journalism are bigger than this one writer. Simultaneously, I would like to see NYT take a stance against its writers doing what this one did to Scott.
> I don't think Scott is saying this is a "that one writer" issue.
Point taken, but I didn't claim to speak for him.
> Any such choice is down to newspaper-wide policy.
Agreed. I wrote another comment in response to 'rachelshu, adjusting my original comment to something more reflecting my actual views.
That said: I don't understand how I'm repeating a mistake here. "Cancel culture" has become a problem because people get fired from their day jobs (or suffer other consequences) for opinions not pertaining to their day jobs, which are expressed outside their work hours.
In contrast, the NYT writer engaged in crappy professional conduct.
I agree that the writer is not the root problem. I've changed my mind about whether firing should happen; other solutions addressing journalistic incentives, or this journalist's team, or whatever, would probably go further.
Response to my own comment because I can't edit it:
Scott Alexander has been giving more information in the SSC subreddit, including the comment I've quoted below. Having read what he has to say, I've changed my mind, and don't think the journalist should be fired.
> I honestly got the impression that the reporter liked my blog and wanted to write a nice story about it.
> When I told him I didn't want my real name in the article, he talked to his editor and said the editor said it was NYT policy all articles must include real names.
> I got the impression he felt bad about it but had spent weeks writing the article and wasn't going to throw out all that work just for my sake.
> When I threatened to take down the blog, I think he did the decision-theoretically correct move of not giving in to threats.
> Overall I think this is a story about the NYT having overly strict real-name policies that unfortunately put a guy in a bad situation.
Meh they also lost my respect with how they treated Snowden. Killed my account for digital subscription after this editorial. He revealed a far bigger evil than anything he ever did to get the info or what was revealed. They know if he comes back to the USA he will go to prison for life without parole. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/edward-snowden-doesn...
This is incredibly disheartening, I will miss the weekly reads - journalists position themselves as fighting the good fight for the truth. But increasingly just seems that in a world where there relevance is dropping fast they are willing to do anything for clicks. If you want to be the arbiters of truth perhaps start with a solid base of ethics.
Remember when Newsweek found this random guy named Dorian Nakamoto and told the world that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin? They were almost certainly wrong and the guy got harassed for years.
If you're pissed off by this, as I am, here's how the author politely suggests that you direct your support:
> There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS
> (please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks.)
It's not a "custom". The reason keypads have letters is precisely because the letters are mnemonics for the real number. This usage predates mobile phones, and is not US-specific.
They were originally used for area codes (Wikipedia lists a UK example of 0AY6, ie 0296, for Aylesbury), then later for mnemonic numbers like the one from the article. Mobile phones inherited the lettered keypad from landlines and also started using it for typing text messages.
It is definitely a custom limited to some particular countries.
Wikipedia: The use of alphanumeric codes for exchanges was abandoned in Europe when international direct dialing was introduced in the 1960s, because, for example, dialing VIC 8900 on a Danish telephone would result in a different number to dialling it on a British telephone. At the same time letters were no longer placed on the dials of new telephones.
(The very next paragraph after the one you quoted talks about how letters for European mobile phones were reintroduced some time later, now standardized so as to not have that problem.)
At any rate, the presence of lettered keypads doesn't mean people * had * to make mnemonic phone numbers with them, and it does look like (in Europe) only the UK had such numbers.
Apart from the US and UK, they might be popular in some Commonwealth countries too. I grew up in one and remember having them.
Yes, but only for SMS messages. They are not commonly used to write phone numbers (very occasionally you can see them now, but the numbers are also written below or next to them).
In the early automatic telephone years, letters were also used in the Netherlands, France, Denmark and other countries, but they fell out of use way before most people here were born, and also they were mostly (only?) used for area codes and exchange names/numbers, not subscriber numbers.
Well, the OC was confused as to how letters can be translated into an actual phone number. This should be obvious to anyone that has ever dialed a number on their mobile phone, i.e. OC.
They were specifically asking about landlines. And referring to the method of pressing a number several times to get the correct letter on a mobile phone (i.e., when texting). So they explicitly mentioned that they have seen the letters. However, when dialling a number, they used the numbers, not the letters.
Right. The point is... landlines have nothing to do with it.
Letters are associated with numbers on a phone keypad. This is not a US-only thing. It is not a mobile only thing. It is not a land-line only thing. Keypads, all over the world, have letters on them. Letters (in the same way they are on phone keypads) can be seen on other numerical entry devices, like a keypad for a secure door.
As to pressing a number multiple times when texting, a half-second of thought would make it clear that this wasn't the case. Are you telling me it would be reasonable for OC (or anyone) to think that the NYT's phone number translated from
It was obviously a weird idea, so they were posing it as a question, which is not a strange thing to do if you've never encountered it. Meanwhile, you keep making assumptions based on your own experience which is different from that of others, and stating obvious things from which you then manage to draw wrong conclusions by interpreting them in an obviously incorrect time or context. (I didn't downvote you btw.)
Indeed -- it dates back to the 1920s. At that time, phone numbers in the US started to be formed from a 2-letter exchange code followed by 5 (or sometimes 4) digits. For instance, "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (dialled 736-5000) was the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, and also the title of a 1940 hit song.
Mobile phones took this cue from telephones, which have had this kind of notion of an associated set of alphabetic characters since at least the eighties or nineties.
>In the most areas of North America, telephone numbers in metropolitan communities consisted of a combination of digits and letters, starting in the 1920s until the 1960s. Letters were translated to dialed digits, a mapping that was displayed directly on the telephone dial.
Much earlier. Except that in most of the world they fell out of use before telephones became a common household item, so for people who grew up between, very roughly, the 60s and early 90s, mobile phones were the first phones with letters on them. We had heard about those strange phone "numbers" with letters in them via American television shows, of course.
Yep, apologies if I wasn't clear. I said "at least" since the late eighties and nineties since that's around when I first became coherent enough of a human to notice. I didn't intend it to be interpreted as "around" the eighties and nineties.
You're thinking of T9, which is for typing text. When you dial 800-AAAAAAA, you're not typing, you're dialing. The "A" character is just on the same button as the "2". So when you press "A" seven times you're really pressing "2" seven times. You end up dialing 800-2222222. There's nothing funny happening, "A" is just another symbol printed on the "2" button.
You're correct, which appropriately enough is why you're downvoted. The letters were placed on telephone dials when telephone ‘numbers’ used a mnemonic exchange+digits format¹, so there was no requirement to include the entire alphabet. Advertising mnemonics like the one in the grandparent comment came later, and entering arbitrary text such as names, which actually requires the whole alphabet, much later.
They were generally present beginning in the 1980s. The phone you linked is from the 1960s. The layout with Q and Z was standardized by ITU-T in 1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.161
Earlier in time the letter "O" was also not generally on phone keypads.
According to your link, Q and Z were officially added sometime in the 1990’s, in a later revision. That puts the official change well into my childhood, which explains my out-of-date information; I didn’t put much effort into researching my comment.
Yes. Doxxing people whose only crime is producing good but complex content for the world to enjoy is cyberbullying. If bullies are on the right side of history I have no interest in the metric.
Doxxing, what? What do you think journalism is? It's very common for controversial authors with a very wide reach to be "revealed" and investigated? How do you know that this is "cyber bullying" after just reading one side of the story?
People seem have lost all sense of objectivity due to some sort of idolatry.
Scott is widely known for his impeccable mental honesty, even-handedness, and general niceness. There's a strong prior that what he says is, to the best of his knowledge, both true and presented in such a way as to reflect reality.
Well, now this 'controversial' author has been silenced; given that it reduced the number of places with better writing than the NYT, I would bet it will be permanent. Is that what you wanted?
He has certainly not been silenced in any way shape or form. Him closing his blog is just a way to create outrage, it has no effect in whether the NYT article will be published with his name or not.
The doubt you are trying to introduce is exactly the doubt that Scott Alexander has about his well being once exposed to the readership of the NYT (or anyone else in the world who catches a whiff of it).
If you think the journalist should enjoy being able to do what they want without an Internet mob, then why wouldn't you think the same way about Scott?
Harassing journalists for doing their job (we don't even know what kind of article this is yet) and revealing the real name of some blogger that has barely hidden their full name either way is worlds apart. The outrage, if there would even be one, that the latter would get would also be because of their own writings. If you write on controversial topics and have a large following you can't expect some sort of total anonymity. That's just naive to the point of stupidity.
Been there. To cancel the New York Times digital subscription, send an email to help@nytimes.com. You'll get a special offer, ignore that and you'll be unsubscribed.
Edit: Looks like they updated the link and title. Thanks!
@dang, you might consider somehow incorporating the name of the blog into the title. I almost didn't click on this because "his blog" is quite generic. Slate Star Codex is frequently posted on HN and is fairly notable.
It's displayed after the title though. There's even a site guideline about this: "If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link."
The link hasn't changed. The submitted title was "NYT threatens to dox blogger who often gets death threats. He deletes his blog", which broke the site guideline against editorializing, so we changed it.
This might be a controversial opinion, but I have just one word to describe most journalists nowadays: "scum".
They seek exciting and sensationalist stories without regard for any consequences in the real world. They twist their stories to manipulate the readers towards their viewpoint.
But worst of all, they have the gall to present themselves as the upholders of morality and the paragons of democracy. Any criticism you may have for these people is deemed "anti-democratic", which in most peoples heads already is a trigger word for "evil", no amount of arguments can sway them.
There's a novel by Balzac (forgot which one), which shows the behind-the-scenes of mid-XIX century Paris journalism. It's essentially the same as you described, but also, the journalists don't flaunt their views, but rather their masters' (the owners of the papers).
The nature of news, gossip, and propaganda predates 19th century France. The Roman god Fama, attendant to Jupiter, trumpeting his words, heedless of truth or falsity:
"At the world's centre lies a place between the lands and seas and regions of the sky, the limits of the threefold universe, whence all things everywhere, however far, are scanned and watched, and every voice and word reaches its listening ears. Here Fama (Rumour) dwells her chosen home set on the highest peak constructed with a thousand apertures and countless entrances and never a door. It's open night and day and built throughout of echoing bronze; it all reverberates, repeating voices, doubling what it hears. Inside, no peace, no silence anywhere, and yet no noise, but muted murmurings like waves one hears of some far-distant sea, or like a last late rumbling thunder-roll, when Juppiter [Zeus] has made the rain-clouds crash. Crowds throng its halls, a lightweight populace that comes and goes, and rumours everywhere, thousands, false mixed with true, roam to and fro, and words flit by phrases all confused. Some pour their tattle into idle ears, some pass on what they've gathered, and as each gossip adds something new the story grows. Here is Credulitas (Credulity), here reckless Error (Error), groundless Laetitia (Delight), Susurri (Whispers) of unknown source, sudden Seditio (Sedition), overwhelming Timores (Fears). All that goes on in heaven or sea or land Fama (Rumour) observes and scours the whole wide world. Now she had brought the news [to Troy] that ships from Greece were on their way with valiant warriors: not unforeseen the hostile force appears."
I think it's fair to say that there are plenty of journalists who don't engage in wantonly twisting stories, and honestly try to uphold morality and democracy. There are also others for whom your criticism is completely valid.
For example, I'd consider some of what Scott does (did?) on SSC as "journalism" in that he's writing about recent news in an informative way.
Anyone who publishes content not approved by the regime. These blogs recklessly publishing free thoughts are sowing discord and disharmony, and even when they publish reasonable ideas, they only create a precedent for dangerous people to publish dangerous ideas. Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, and they should be regulated in the same way we regulated access to dangerous weapons.
Trying to make sense of this reminds me of reading monad tutorials. To dense with references (self- and otherwise) and analogy for me to make sense of.
It's definitely possible I'm just not smart enough to understand this, but how does one go about learning to comprehend stuff like this?
If you want to read Russian literature, you don't have to be Russian ('but it wouldn't hurt!'), you have to want to read Russian literature, i.e. learn the language and have sufficient interest in the material to seek out enough context to understand it.
Unless of course you simply want to be seen as the type of person who reads Russian literature, in which case thelastpsychiatrist.com is probably better for reading...
The style is one of the appeal (without being the totality of it - I definitely would like the straigth version as well).
Personally for instance, I read "Shame & Society" once, found it fascinating, but couldn't really pinpoint what I had learned, so I re-read it and took notes, as well as try to summarize and articulate the big points and how they related.
That isn't TLP, it's one of TLP's millennial disciples. They mentioned working as a trainee doc in the ER but TLP was a psychiatrist at a large university hospital.
Also I don't think TLP quit because he was doxxed necessarily. If that were the case, he wouldn't have kept paying the site hosting fees all this time. I think he decided the blog had become too much about his identity as a sort of minor messiah figure in the eyes of his readers, which is sort of against the founding principles of the blog itself. The character or voice he created for the blog was gaining too much power. Having his real name revealed was only a secondary concern.
He probably still writes somewhere though... probably, he's a well-respected/beloved voice on some obscure phpBB board or similar (real TLP heads will know he used to read/post on Metafilter back in the day.)
This behaviour is very much not going to help. One of the many reasons doxxing is bad is because "speculation" is so often wrong. Anyway, it rather diminishes the force of an argument that the NYT is in the wrong if a mob publishes someone's name in a spasm of outrage over the fact that the NYT wanted to publish someone's name.
It’s not really the same. One person is a pseudonymous blogger who requested to keep their pseudonimity. The other is a reporter for the best known newspaper in the world. But I agree it’s a bad look, I have removed the comment.
I thought he was smarter than this. Of course talking to the press would put him in the spotlight and the press doesn't like pseudonyms (it might be accused of making it all up). Just suppress the narcissistic instincts and don't talk to the press if you like your privacy. As for the NYT's actions... It's as good as many other occasions to rethink one's attitude towards that paper.
Why is Scott's real name even relevant to the article? He has good reason not to want it published, and his real name is of no interest to most readers given that his entire public online presence is in the name "Scott Alexander". Knowing that Lewis Carroll was really called Charles Dodgson may be a piece of trivia that makes you win a pub quiz one day, and it may be of niche interest to someone who reads one of his mathematical papers and realises that the author is the same as the author of Alice, but Scott's real name won't even win you a pub quiz and has similarly niche publications that are not of remotely general interest.
If I was a writer I would not suddenly start using internet psuedonyms just because it sounds like a real person's name, much in the same manner putting down Groyper1488 in my article is ridiculous.
Really? "A popular blogger who writes under the name Scott Alexander…" isn't really any worse than "A popular streamer who uses the handle Day9" or something.
Scott Alexander is actually his real first and middle name. All he’s asking is for them to not use his real last name. Apparently, that’s beyond them, they simply must do it regardless of the cost to him and of how little relevance it has.
If your issue is that an online handle may sound strange or silly (e.g., ‘Count Dankula’), how would you handle someone whose legal name sounds strange or silly (e.g., ‘Moon Unit Zappa’ or ‘X AE A-XII’)?
If your issue is that an online handle is not someone's legal name, how would you handle someone who goes by a certain form of their legal name (e.g., using their middle name rather than their first name)? How would you handle someone whose name includes a title (e.g., ‘Cpl Bloggs’ or ‘Ambassador Taylor’)?
Everyone has a number of labels used to identify them, and the appropriateness of each is dependent on the situation being used. In the context of an article about the online community surrounding someone's online blog, which they publish under a certain name, it is entirely appropriate to use the relevant name. The only way that that person's legal name would be relevant to the article would be if it was reporting on their conduct outside of that community as well, which this article does not appear to have been doing.
The term "doxxing" is used in communities where it's normalized to harass people and try to ruin their lives because you think they're a jerk. In such a community, exposing someone's real identity against their will is a hostile act.
Unfortunately, all of American society is now such a community, so all investigative journalism about someone's identity is now also doxxing. I'm not any happier about that than you are, and hope we can return to better norms so that investigative journalism is less of a danger for its targets.
I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper.
It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse.
I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly stopped reading newspapers, and don't trust anything they write, without checking the facts.
The other requires more than half a decade of intense education, internships, tests and further verifications. (Not to mention thousands of Euros in education costs, if not state sponsored)
I cannot think of a larger difference in terms of barrier to entry.
You don't seem to understand, that under capitalism, mostly any work or study has to be backed up with money. Doctors don't become doctors a different way a reporter becomes one. What they teach you in universities it's not whay you end up doing. A reporter doesn't mean to do bad when they start studying, neither does a doctor. The results are totally different.
In France Medical Doctors require 6 years of externship, 4 years of internship + various amount of years depending on the specialization up to 5 (?) for example for neurology.
It's also the population that lead to the most suicides due to how intense the expectations are and failure will lead you to tenures you don't want (There is a spot for everyone but not where you want and on the speciality you want, even though we are lacking doctors ...)
This is interesting to me. In central Europe, or at least my country, the serious media keep very high standards.
Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals.
I find our independent media to be a key element of our democracy and I am worried when I hear the US media don't work quite the same.
Edit: I thought I might as well reply with our solutions to your bullet points
- Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist. The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians.
- The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society. (+ ads ofc)
- If one wants power to change things the far superior strategy in my country is to do the actual politics and not to report on it.
Independent objective media are the lifeblood of democracy. You literally cannot have a healthy democracy without a strong and independent fourth estate.
For a long time I underestimated how much of a bedrock requirement this is. It's easy to dismiss the media as entertainment at best or noise at worst.
But at best they model fairness, balance, and rationality, and if you have no one doing that in public the quality of discourse soon crashes.
I often wonder if the news/media has been purposefully weakened as an institution over time, so as to keep the populace more ignorant and controllable by people in power.
I guess it goes in cycles though. Apparently in the 1890s it was _actually worse_!?
I don't think the media has been weakened. I think that the media has always been this bad. Perhaps even worse. The public just didn't know about it, because it was a lot harder to verify the facts through other means.
A very eye-opening event for me was when I visited Berlin in 2003 (?). We watched ZDF (government-financed German TV) news and saw a huge crowd protesting against Bush’s war in Iraq. Wanting to join them, we found a mostly empty square with a much smaller group of protestors standing in a triangle-formation in front of the cameras, which were setup such that the crowd would appear massive on TV.
So if you think European media are free of political bias and distortions, think again.
I know nothing of ZDF, but right now our state public tv is also in a very bad shape.
It used to have high quality, but in the previous government period one of the ruling parties changed the management and now it's not objective at all. In fact, all the respected journalists left for other media and the reputation of the organisation is tarnished (polls show people don't trust it anymore).
Out of curiosity, for Central European media, how many of them reported on the damning half-dozen OPCW leaks[0] that create turbulence for Central European foreign policy in Syria?
It’s not a matter of verifying the accuracy, I’m curious if it was reported on at all. The OPCW was the driving force behind Central European foreign policy on Syria which has included everything from arming militias through to sanctions. This conflict has also exposed Central Europe to dozens of terrorist attacks and threatened the safety of everyone. This is arguably one of the biggest leaks about international corruption in the last decade.
So I’m curious if the media there has made much of a fuss with the exposé of OPCW producing falsified reports. American media hasn’t, neither has British or Australian media. But we already know those groups are corrupt.
With this I’m trying to find out (and so can you) if Central European media is as objective (and independent) as what it’s being made out to be.
The BBC didn't even mention it, at least not initially.
The Guardian article mentioned Russia 5 or 6 times (why?), the rest of the article didn't have any useful info.
The NYT article mentioned Russia 4 times IIRC, and had two half sentances of useful info.
Reuters only mentioned Russia once (hooray!), and actually had a reasonable amount good detail in there.
It pays well to do a 'deep dive' on something like the Syrian conflict, to better understand how the media /really/ works, then the lessons learned can be re-applied going forward. I spent some time studying the initial OPCW report, and independently came to the same conclusion that the OPCW leaks did. A few independent journalists, including Robert Fisk, shed light on some of the other aspects.
A more recent matter is the initial denials of the efficacy of face masks in helping reduce the spread of coronavirus. This was done largely for political reasons IMHO, and became part of advice that was muddled, illogical, and inconsistent.
The best source of advice was highly ranked medical experts in countries that had successfully dealt with SARS, their advice was clear, logical and consistent, right from the beginning back in late Jan. Of course for some reason they're almost never featured in western media, who prefer some celebrity GP or health adviser who's only real interest seems to be their appearence fee!
Would you mind sharing which country are you talking about? I'm from another country in central Europe and the situation is same as in the USA or western Europe.
Ok, I'm not expert on Slovak media, but quick search shows that SME is owned by Penta (Gorilla), HN by Andrej Babis (Berlusconi-like figure), Dennik N is listed on wikipedia as newspaper having liberal slant, Reflex liberal-conservative slant, Markiza is noted as historically being criticized for being against former owner enemies (owner changed, but did journalists?), DVTV as internet tv isn't great example of mainstream medium, also just cursory search revealed that one of their moderators, Emma Smetana, is well known for not being exactly professional.
The fact that you consider those media unbiased doesn't mean they are really unbiased. Plenty of people consider Fox News and Huffington Post as paragons of objectivity.
I'm not interested in defending all of this rapid fire as it would take too much effort on both of our sides.
I can tell you the story of the first one (SME) and you may take what you wish from it.
Penta is a shady investment group linked to heavy corruption scandals across the political spectrum. [0]
As a power move they decided to buy the medium they've seen as their main public opponent — SME. Half of the journalists from SME left, raised money and founded Denník N, which is pretty similar to SME. The other half stayed and convinced the previous shareholders to keep a majority.
45% of SME is owned by Penta but they have no effect on the content and SME critisizes Penta all the time. Penta knows that if they did anything about it, redactors would speak up and leave and they would be left with a worthless company.
I don't wish to be uncharitable, but this line indicates to me that there's likely bias involved in the media you described:
>Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals.
Something that seems to be quite common in modern media is to paint anybody who disagrees as a conspiracy theorist or fascist. Are there truly no other groups who have grievances with the news? Communists? The opposition party? Another news outlet that is partisan? It seems unlikely to me that only the groups that modern (left-leaning) media likes to blame everything on would have a problem with it.
On another point, I wish to address this:
>Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist.
You don't need to control what a journalist writes to create biased news. You simply need to control who you hire. Want a news organization that's biased towards right wingers? Hire a bunch of right wingers to be your staff. They will naturally gravitate towards stories that are biased.
>The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society.
The same is true for a lot of biased news outlets elsewhere. It still doesn't change that people like reading news that affirms their view of the world.
I don't wish to be uncharitable, but I believe based on this that perhaps you don't notice much of the bias. I could be wrong, but it just seems very difficult to believe that Europe has such a gem hidden in it. The news in my European country aren't quite as bad as in the US, but they're certainly not unbiased and politics certainly involves the media.
> The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians
The news (public service) I consume from time to time does this too. However while they try to not favor a particular political side they often instead fail towards trying to find dissent where there is none.
They invite some people with supposedly “opposing” views and then spend the time trying to provoke a fight. Usually it’s just people highlighting different perspectives with no interest in representing some kind of conflict over the matter.
> What if every hospital had an overt political stance and forced doctors to make diagnoses based on those politics?
At least in the US, this is standard. Try getting your local Catholic hospital to deal with complications with your IUD and this isn't a "what if." There are plenty of stories of people who discover that their primary care network has an avowed ideological stance on certain procedures and they need to switch doctors and perhaps go out of network for full care.
> What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health?
Don't they? There is no shortage of for-profit hospitals, and thanks to insurance, Medicaid, etc., they can often increase profit at no cost to the patient by just seeing the patient more and treating them kn more ways that might be strictly speaking unnecessary.
> What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics?
Isn't this approximately the backstory of Planned Parenthood?
Basically, everyone has an ideology, a reason to do what they do. Sometimes it's based on their view of the world and a desire to make it better in some way. Sometimes it's profit. Neither of these is necessary nefarious.
Doctors are heavily regulated. Journalists aren't.
I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous.
Professional journalism has a long, long track record of opposing any consequences to their actions whatsoever.
I love the idea of professional journalists. But the reality of them just does not work in practice in our current media industries.
>I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous.
Unfortunately expectations do not match reality. 10% of deaths are due to medical errors [0]. Then look at how the rest of the medical establishment are failing us. CDC is prohibited from naming the hospitals that have this error. The only thing they report on is trends [1]. If you have a hospital in your neighborhood, can you find out anything about it? From the medical error rate, to the spread of Candida Auris[2] is there any dangerous news about your local hospital/healthcare system that is public?
Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it.
I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course agree there are many kinds of people who call themselves journalists many of which don't improve our society. We must fight this battle, as we must fight every battle, because that's the only way things change for the better. Do not let cynicism win.
That's a problem specific to news reporting, not journalism as a whole. I consider news reporting seperate from investigative journalism. What happened is far easier to report and consume than a report on why it happened. So, a better filter against biased news reporting, better than averaging, is taking a longer view and reading more comprehensive analyses. You can spin everything, but I find the more the article tends towards a study (investigative journalism), the blatant spinners drop off exponentially. Any bias is usually clear in such texts and therefore easily accounted for.
Also stopped reading any news and reports from big media about 3 years ago.
Just curious are there any independent investigation journalists that work on the patreon/subscription model? Would consider donation them rather than NYT or WSJ.
Exactly. The main problem is MSM with corporate money behind it. Getting things wrong is normal, getting things wrong intentionally (or recklessly) is malicious.
Are they doing independent investigative journalism, though? I jumped around in the episode a bit and it just sounds like talk radio commentary/opinion that cites MSM sources.
It's more like media analysis I think. Both John and Adam take clips from main-stream/internet media and try to examine it. I think they do a very good job at that. There's a long donation segment because the show is produced by listeners. Sound effects and such started out as a joke but listeners like it, and almost everything around the show is done by the community, including the website, shownotes, and transcripts.
Adam was on Rogan in March. I recommend watching that episode.
I don't think so, but I've been listening to them for years. They criticize all sides, but one needs to listen to a few episodes to get into it, because they do have their own style of inside-jokes/jargon that might make first-time listener feel a bit lost, but that's the case with most indie/alternative media I think.
That is deed my criterion as well: I support independent investigative publications only (and I read few other sources, haven't had TV for nearly two decades for instance).
It's difficult (for values that soon reduce to impossible) to get press accreditation as an independent journalist.
There are plenty of scrappy little online micronewspapers now, usually with an evident political slant, and some of them do real investigative journalism.
But there's no chance they'll get the direct access to the political system their mainstream cousins do.
It's also incredibly easy to astroturf fake news at that level, so not all of those sites are reliable.
The point about the MSM is that they're mass media with a huge subscriber/reader base. That's what gives them their leverage.
I'm not sure about individual journalists, but The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project has a donate button. If there's a journalist whose work you admire, you could check if they have Patreon. https://www.occrp.org/en
Though they are sunsetting their platform, there were a bunch of high quality newsrooms on Civil which can be supported via donations. I recommend checking out https://readsludge.com/ & https://popula.com/, for local news Block Club Chicago, FAQ NYC, Gotham Gazette, The Colorado Sun.
There's plenty of independent journalists on YouTube/Patreon/Alt-Tech, some more reliable than others. Hopefully, in the future, more people will start getting their news from the independent YouTube/Alt-Tech journalists who wound up migrating to those platforms after they were laid off from their mainstream media publications during the past decade of layoffs for that industry. Anyone can find a list of such YouTube/Alt-Tech channels by searching Reddit. Of course, that also means having to go through the process of weeding out the biased low quality journalists. Hard hitting debates are rather rare on YouTube, but, as a general rule, I have found that the YouTubers who are willing to debate others (and who present facts during that debate) are better sources of information than those who are unwilling to ever debate anyone.
Vice (NYT reporter involved in the overall ordeal) got a person they doxxed to be kicked off Patreon aka their livelihood for some period of time before after she (the person) retaliated against Vice — SexyCyborg. Not sure if there’s a space or not.
And there's the rub. What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"?
In theory I would gladly support the theory of "quality investigative reporting", but the reality is a propagandist machine where opinion pieces replaces actual unbiased, adjective-free objective news.
As a former developer who worked closely on Thomson Reuters News feed (in the 00's), I've seen how there is almost zero fact checking for the information that appears on news feeds. Instead, news outlets trust the 'upstream' feeds and then quote the reports verbatim.
To be fair, there are those who are really awesome at doing research and releasing information that are part of the MSM. Unfortunately, there are plenty others who are not affiliated with MSM news outlets and hence aren't regarded as "reporters" per-se. These latter ones are regularly attacked via "fact checking" websites as a way to discredit them.
In short, there's a bunch of information out there and without each and every news report clearly citing original sources, then MSM or not, it must be regarded as suspect.
So for "quality investigative reporting", the actual reports must rigorously cite objective sources.
I find it mildly ironic that you link to a clip from the PBS NewsHour while, from my reading, you also imply that objective reporting or investigative reporting don't exist or are dwindling. There are clearly some sources left that are worth their salt.
In the US, I've found most PBS/NPR news broadcasts fairly objective, and the various NPR podcasts sometimes chart into investigative territory but there are other sources I rely on for this (e.g. ProPublica) which I don't expect to be just objective.
I'm not sure I understood exactly what you meant about quality investigative journalism, so forgive me if I misread. I generally agree with your comment.
Compare the language in the first paragraph, describing the severity of the pandemic.
In the context of left-wing political activity, just:
> In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic
In the context of right-wing political activity, a far more frightening description:
> despite the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which continues to wreak havoc on the lives and livelihoods of households across the country.
If NPR didn't lean left, the second article could have started with a tone similar to the first: in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump campaign will address another pressing issue, restarting the American economy. The rally has prompted fears that the close contact of thousands of attendees could lead to a spike in case counts.
A campaign rally is not the same thing as a grassroots political protest by far. It's an organised event that an organiser explicitly invites people to, which primarily serves party politics rather than any particular political issue.
That still doesn't change the very obviously biased framing of the information. You can objectively describe one as more important, or more justified if you will, but manipulating the reader by speaking to his subconciousness like they did is not what should be expected from serious journalism.
I disagree - stating the different situations in different ways is entirely reasonable and to be expected. Can you find me some "serious journalism", ever, which operated in the way you describe?
It's not the political orientation of the mass gathering - it's the purpose. One is the President organising a gathering in an attempt to boost his election campaign - the other is some random people who came together to protest a specific thing.
I am not about to jump into a debate about which of the two is "worse", because no matter the outcome it is absolutely disingenious to frame COVID-19 as "deadly coronavirus pandemic, which continues to wreak havoc on the lives and livelihoods of households across the country" in one context and plain "coronavirus pandemic" in the other. It is the same virus. If you don't see the bias in that then consider the possibility that you share it.
>> COVID-19 doesn't suddenly become a "different situation" depending on the political orientation of the mass gathering.
> It's not the political orientation of the mass gathering - it's the purpose. One is the President organising a gathering in an attempt to boost his election campaign - the other is some random people who came together to protest a specific thing.
How does the purpose of a public gathering alter a virus? Does it have political awareness and dynamically modify its transmissibility according to the righteousness of the cause?
Or perhaps the purpose of a public gathering justifies journalistic framing (altering the description of the severity of the virus, which in turn alters readers mental model of reality). If it's this, what is the logic behind the justification?
"Unbiased" or "factual" does not mean "we take both sides' opinions and put them next to each other without comment" - that's what the BBC does and it gives extremist, dangerous viewpoints far more legitimacy than they're worth. The fact that coronavirus got caught up in a bunch of political nonsense does not change that.
That's precisely what unbiased and factual means. You're actually arguing that the media should be opinionated, which is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint, but please don't try to destroy the meaning of words to make disputing your preference impossible.
Edit: I should clarify that I meant "unbiased and factual" together. Of course it's entirely possible to be both biased and factual, by choosing which facts to include.
You investigate specific claims. For example, take the claim that Covid-19 is "no worse than the flu". You could report on people making this claim, and state that others disagree. That can be considered an example of unbiased reporting, but it's nevertheless problematic as it may leave a reader with the impression that all reported-on claims are equally valid.
Choice and presentation of opinions you report on is not a neutral acitvity.
edit: I was distracted when I wrote my answer, so I missed some context. Was your question about differences in tone pointed out in a sibling comment[1]? Without having read the articles in question, at first glace, I'd considere this an example of journalistic bias.
> take the claim that Covid-19 is "no worse than the flu"
That's an interesting example of how difficult unbiased fact checking is.
To start with, there are many interpretations of the statement. Does worse mean death rate, severity of symptoms, infectiousness, or something else? What strain of the flu, and in which country? Which paper or anecdote does the fact checker cite? Because of differences like these, two fact checkers will give different ratings for the same statement.
Journalists aren't experts and shouldn't act like they are by presenting a single perspective as if it were unchallenged fact, or by injecting their own unqualified opinions. Any issue complex enough to be a matter for serious debate isn't going to be solved in an article.
They can be unbiased and report what the leading figures have said, like a camera at a televised debate, or they can be opinionated and add their voice to one of the camps, but they can't (honestly) do both.
Not everything can be fact checked in the first place and if it can, who fact checks the fact checkers? There are numerous examples of fact checking websites being factually wrong.
Making any kind of judgment about what’s “important” or “worthy” is exactly what OP was saying - that media suffer from bias and rarely confine themselves to neutral reporting of facts.
I don't know how this fiction has to be represented in every discussion. I don't want neutral unbiased reporting if it requires giving equal time to people who think that neutral unbiased reporting is real. The selection of what's important to report is literal biasing.
You're right, determining what's newsworthy is a biased process in and of itself. But that doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, neutrality is still something we should constantly aim for, even if it's a moving target.
For example, if a media outlet compare actual vs expected turnout for a Trump rally and report that turnout was "lower than expected", it would be plainly biased not to do the same comparison for Biden. The lines are obviously going to blur at some point (where 'balance' involves publishing something far less 'newsworthy'), but it's a lot like the definition of pornography - you know it when you see it.
Besides, most modern media outlets are blatantly pushing their own narratives anyway - I'd say it's far more important that we fix this before moving on to the smaller problem of selection bias.
Having a bias doesn't in itself imply lack of objectivity, in relation to what we call 'facts' and 'truth'. It would seem somewhat of a coincidence if 'center' (politically) is right where that lies.
Not that I'm saying that 'reality has a liberal bias', as some would. I personally think it has a left bias, but I'm not nearly certain enough of my opinions to make that claim!
> The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and Van Zandt as an "armchair media analyst."[3] The Poynter Institute notes, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[4]
I doubt that we can achieve absolute objectivity, that's why I wrote that I consider it fairly objective, not that it is. That said I don't see a reason why should Columbia Journalism Review or Poynter Institute be any better arbiters of what is correct way to measure bias. (Especially because both are competition.)
Also Poynter Institute has record of "weaknesses in the methodology".[1]
> What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"?
I don't think better ownership changes anything. The Guardian is owned by a trust, yet falsely reported Mark Duggan was unarmed in a front page headline (if you're unaware, this was false and the Gruan had to retract the claim after a PCC ruling).
Not sure why you're being downvoted. The biggest German left-wing newspaper (taz) is owned by a cooperative. If anything, I find it more annoyingly partisan than other newspapers. It's a hard problem.
The problem isn't bias/partisanship. You can't have any one source be truly unbiased and if you're aware of the politics behind any given source you can neutralise it and temper it with multiple sources from opposite camps.
The problem is that we're not being delivered news-as-information, we're sold news-as-entertainment.
In some parts of tech people treat politics as a team sport, so criticism of their 'team' (even pointing out mistakes acknowledged by the publications) is considered to be punishable.
Indeed. The Guardian Trust has also ruled in editorial complaints that factual inaccuracies in the opinion section are fine, which seems to be to be incredibly irresponsible.
IMO we need some kind of data driven media/data driven reporting/data driven newspaper type thing.
Then we can have reporting/debate/conversation on the meaning of the data but without the filters we use to have in place all reporting has essentially become meaningless, untrustworthy, opinion pieces.
How would you measure good journalism? In OP’s case they could only see a given journalist was bad by personally witnessing the falsity. You don’t get many opportunities like that unfortunately.
I do think some journalism is good. Many reporters at the Financial Times come to mind for example. But I found your reply did not really address the nature of OP’s complaint.
Financial Times is considered one of the least biased papers out there. I feel the quality dropped a bit recently but in general,they are ligh years ahead compared to the usual suspects of this world.
> Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society.
Statistical significance is not the only epistemological tool around. I would even argue that, outside of some scientific fields, it is really not that important (and might even lead to a lot of wrong conclusions in the context that is used nowadays, but that is a different discussion altogether).
We are not some dumb statistical machine. We have an entire model of the world in our heads, and one single observation can have profound implications on it. The journalist reports to an editor, who maintains a system of job promotions, and all of this is connected to an institution that holds very real power. The OP observed this journalist manipulating the story, not in a random direction, but in their view in a direction that would appeal to the status quo. It is normal to update one's map of reality when confronted with first-person experience of an event that goes against what you've been told, and when the simplest explanation for how the world works changes in light of this direct observation.
And this is also how your mind works, and this is also how you formed your views on reality, including repeating the "N=1" cliché. None of it has anything to do with p-values.
I was going to say that we could defer to whistleblowers instead but I realized that that term has also been loosely used. That said, it’s not journalists but news organizations that shouldn’t be trusted.
> I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting.
Where do I find quality investigative reporting?
I support the Guardian and two regional/local newspapers and I' also forced to pay for the state run broadcaster here but I have to say that I also find myself reading a number of other sources to figure out what is really going on (for the Scandinavians here I'm one of those who will happily look to both Klassekampen and Document, in addition to vg.no and nrk to figure out what is really going on in certain cases, and I understand I am not alone in this).
Once you know a bit of history and a number of different angles you realize some things are horribly complicated and big media is making things worse by pushing misinformation, and by conveniently omitting facts. My favourite example from my favourite (i.e. least despised) local mainstream media source: X fired at a number of positions in neighbouring country Y yesterday. <Long article about this>. <Towards the end:> This happened after a barrage of rockets was fired from these positions shortly before. And that is the most honest of them. The rest seemed to just omit the fact that part Y fired first.
PS: The reason I support some of them is 1) because I feel it is the right thing to do. 2) because I feel at least one of them have actually managed to do some great quality investigative reporting as well as some great feature stories in between. We talk about certain companies and public healthcare organizations getting some much needed sunlight.
Abrams Foundation, Altman Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Barr
Foundation, The William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, The Peter and Carmen
Lucia Buck Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Craigslist
Foundation, Davis Wright Tremaine, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation,
Democracy Fund, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Dyson Foundation,
Emerson Collective, The Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation,
Goldhirsh Foundation, The Jerome L. Greene Foundation, Heising-Simons
Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Joyce
Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, John S. and James
L. Knight Foundation, Leon Levy Foundation, The John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation, Metabolic Studio, Park Foundation, The Lisa
and John Pritzker Family Fund, Charles H. Revson Foundation, Sandler
Foundation, Select Equity Foundation, Skoll Global Threats Fund,
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Solidarity Giving
I've come to really enjoy long-form podcast investigative reporting, as there's enough content that it's pretty obvious whether proper journalistic work has been done or not.
My favorite in that vein is 'In The Dark' by APM Reports, which was a massive eye-opener for me in terms of flaws in the justice system (especially Season 2).
I'm all for quality investigative reporting, but that is not something that 99% of journalists do.
I've been interviewed by journalists a few times and I've seen at least a half-dozen other people be interviewed. The articles published are totally disconnected from what was actually said. Heck, I've had a journalist make up a quote and attribute it to me.
Don't talk to journalists. If you must, record everything.
Quality investigative reporting is even more tricky because it's even harder to double-check
In my country, there's a supposedly quality investigative reporting outlet. I did trust them for years. Then one time they did report on something I happened to know more details from other sources. Their reporting was complete BS bending facts to come to opposite conclusions.
Months later it turned out that political party loved favoured by those journalists had an internal struggle and the dude in article above happened to be on the "wrong" side. The report was about his overseas business, not political affairs. As a bonus point, "good" side was involved in bribery scandal.
Another investigative outlet recently published a series of reports on another politician that comes from unfavourable party in among mainstream media journalists. So far all of those reports seem to have little substance and they seem to be in she-said, he-said gray area at best. I'm pretty sure the dude do have skeletons under his bed. But investigative journalists seem to just post whatever rumors they got and see what sticks. Which is not exactly helping their quality investigative reporting image.
After getting in trouble with the law and getting the story in the paper as a kid, I realized people like a simple narrative which matches with their expectations. Reality is complicated and people just don't have time for it. Not the cops, not the media, and not the readers.
Reminds me of when I was in elementary and one day I was sick and all my classmates met the governor. The media was obviously there and one classmate was asked to write something to say to the governor. The media claimed he was 11 but his age was 12. The teacher taught us that the media isnt always necessarily telling you the truth. There is way more bias in the media these past few years than I have ever seen so confirming sources is more important than anything. I dont usually trust "anonymous sources" unless there is accompanying hard evidence.
I think unfortunately journalists are trained to take phrases out of context so that they sound "sensational" / trigger emotional responses in the readers. You quickly find that out if give out interviews - you need to be very mindful how things may sound if taken out of context.
E.g. a while ago a newspaper here took me an interview/ they were building a story about people that had somewhat remarkable results in school & ample opportunities to leave (e.g. I participated in IOI and had 2 medals), and still chose to stay in the country - what were their motives, how it turned out for them. During the interview, I mentioned something along the lines that "I earn well enough to afford everything that I want, and my friends/family is here, I'm used to the local culture, etc". As a result, "I can afford everything" became basically the headline.
Wealth is one of the classic ones that journalists like stretching. My mom, a classical musician, got asked about her wages, and after some back and forth (since they varied by the job, of course), she was given this more specific question: "what's the most you made from a gig?" The sum she replied with, of course, made it into the resulting magazine article as an hourly average. Cue the stinkeyes from colleagues.
This is so common in British press of lower quality: an engineer on £80K salary gets arrested for x,y,z. A man in his 30s left his £2M house before he decided to steal money from the donation box and etc.
In Britain: very unlikely. I think sometimes journalists know the exact salaries ( public servants) or simply guess based on job title. The same with house prices. Again, the chances of getting anything through courts are very slim.
I don't think that distinction is helpful. Journalism is too important to our society for us to give the profession a free pass by giving the shadier parts a different name.
I'm sure that wasn't your intention but a profession won't improve if there's a way for its practitioners to shrug off criticism by telling themselves some version of the no true Scotsman fallacy.
My friend's cousin got involved in some shady activities and some regional newspaper ran a full page article on this. That's where a 2 bedroom semi detached in a not so glamorous part of a small town became: a large villa in a leafy part of the town...
It baffles me when people trust the "news", _especially_ if they only consume news within their own little bubble. I was interviewed a couple of times on technological topics (once by a NYT journalist), and was once in the middle of events that were reported on, so I knew what actually happened. In all three cases what was printed was total clickbait horseshit that had nothing to do with reality. So if a journalist wants to talk to me now, I will only do it if it generates clickbait horseshit that's good for me somehow.
You can always agree for an interview on a condition of receiving final draft before it gets published and having a say on it. Whether they agree or not depends on how many other sources they have for that story.
The problem is that the press drives policy decisions, so you cannot disengage completely. You would need to find a direct line of communication towards representatives without the press. We have the means for that theoretically, but it needs a lot of engagement. I think most people would benefit when cutting out classical papers.
I had a similar experience with reporters. I worked on a commercial product, on release someone just opening store had a sale, some reporter interpreted that sale as dumping a failing product and wrote that story. No amount of proof to the contrary would get them to retract. Whether or not it effected sales I have no idea but I learned some reporters are scum
There is also the phenomenon of reading articles about topics I know well and haven them be completely wrong which leads to to at least entertain the idea that the same is true for topics i don't know about. No idea what the solution is.
Unfortunately every single media outlet has a narrative to propagate. Being that an imposed one or from their own convictions. Can't find a single source of information being totally objective.
> "I don't trust anything they write without checking the facts."
I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever.
How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?
What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector?
The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases.
The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - "I don't trust journalists" translates in most cases to "I don't trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint."
This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information.
Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn't mean you should distrust all apples.
"""
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
- Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002)
"""
This isn’t to say that all journalists are “bad apples”, but as the full aphorism says, “A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel”.
> How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?
"Professional journalist" shouldn't invoke any more trust than "professional fund manager".
Surely they're not all bad apples, but they're not inherently incentivized to have integrity, so you must assume that they do not have integrity, for your own safety.
I had a similar experience in Iraq. I had saw an attack happen and then heard the CNN report about it a few hours later and it wasn't even in the realm of what happened. It was surreal.
This may be slightly off topic here, but I attended a birthday party of a friend last year. Long story short, there was a guy at the same pub who OD'd and my wife and I helped him until the ambulance arrived. There was a 'reality' TV cameraman with them and we didn't want him filming us so I asked him to stop. His tactic was to shove the camera in my face and make snide remarks to provoke a reaction. When I put my hand up and stepped back, the guy tilted the camera back really quickly and took a knee panning it up at me, and started saying things like "you hit me! That's assault". To this day I have no idea what ended up being shown, if anything, but it was an eye opening experience about the abject dishonesty involved in reality TV. I can just as easily see that applied to TV journalism.
But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either. I prefer the Economist - they clearly have a very strong bias in some political & economical stories, but that bias is predictable and consistent. At least their factual reporting seems on the point.
> But living in a bubble doesn't sound that great either.
I'd call myself an "accidental moderate" in PG's terms, and there are lots of good accounts on Twitter that look at both sides of the issue.
You don't need to follow lots of accounts on a wide range of the political spectrum, but simply avoid the partisan/"belief bunching" preachers, and pick the smartest and most rational ones instead. This has been the biggest source of education for me recently.
Having seen the inside of a few events and the reporting produced in response, I'd say a healthy dose of scepticism is usually warranted when reading about something you have no personal involvement in.
In fact one of the worst experience for me in terms of trust for the media was working at a startup. The willingness of journalists to produce puff pieces, or print press releases virtually verbatim, on the basis of 5 minutes of SQL queries cobbled together and cherry picked to produce the desired result was frightening.
You know what's even more sad? Journalists on average, are more intelligent than an average human being.
An average journalist distorts the truth knowingly and is a scumbag. An average person parrots lies and is convinced of them, and if you point it out, he/she'll be upset with you.
This is how religions continue even in the face of the best thinkers for centuries, coming up with the most considerate, foolproof arguments for why it's bullshit. At some point we have to ask: do people even want to be able to tell truth apart from bullshit, or do they just want to be led and told what to do by someone they like?
Professionally relevant information - insider sources, other information that is important for you for whatever reason - from original sources. If there aren't any original sources (e.g. politics, history etc) - cross reference multiple interpretations that present story from different angles, e.g. Fox vs CNN, Guardian vs BBC, Washington Post vs Al Jazeera vs Russia Today. Of course for some stories there are sources that are better suited than others due to their focus (e.g. throw in Democracy Now for anything about grassroots movements, various scientific/medical news are discussed most in-depth by specialized podcasts, etc).
And then there is information that isn't important (it doesn't affect you and you can't act on it) and you're just seeking it out of habit (addiction really).
First and foremost, I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired. NYT is a reputable journal and shouldn't tolerate such unprofessional and potentially dangerous behavior. The person breached a few lines of ethical journalism, and for no justified reason:
First, purposefully using an incorrect name (and Scott Alexander's online identity is Scott Alexander). In many other cases, even if the name is known publicly, and it is (or was) a legal anme, a journalist does not need to write it.
Second, for everyone having vocal opinions, it puts them in real danger. If revealing someone's identity (or a threat of such) makes someone close their blog, the journalist have already made their damage.
Third, it erodes trust in journalists. Such journalists make any other journalism harder, as people have justified reasons not to talk. Not every person wants to increase their risk.
I hope that until the journalist gets fired, no activist, whistleblower, a person who wants to speak about professional malpractice, controversial artist etc. won't talk to NYT. For their own safety.
The NYT isn't reputable anymore. Haven't been for a while. Case in point, this article they might publish.
They fired most of their senior editors in 2017 because they were both too expensive and enforcing old school journalist standards and integrity which doesn't generate clicks like hot handed opinion pieces followed by reverse opinion pieces does.
Though mind you that senior group was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, so take their integrity with a grain of salt.
As an NYT subscriber, I'm very concerned by this, but I think it's ironic that people skeptical of the media because they don't wait to get facts right are so willing to jump to the conclusion that Scott's account is the full story. I'm inclined to believe Scott, but just as a remotely plausible hypothetical: there's also been rumors of a hit piece floating around for a few days[1]. Maybe they uncovered something Scott doesn't want out there besides just his identity and this is his way of seeding distrust before it gets out.
If the piece can run without the guy's name then it should.
If he's violating HIPAA or something, then sure, name names. But if it's simply about the content of the blog, then his nomme de guerre should suffice.
Isn't this just speculation? He gave out enough good reasons for his identity to not be known, the biggest is that he works as a professional psychiatrist with clients of wide ranging political stances.
He's also, I suspect (I don't follow his blog), given and written enough to at least earn enough good faith to be taken at his word.
Yes, I give him the benefit of the doubt, but at the time I wrote the comment NYC was barely awake yet and people were already cancelling their subscriptions and calling for the journalist to be fired.
To be honest, I was hoping NYT would have cleared things up by now, but I've been monitoring Twitter and haven't seen anything.
Or US-aligned coups. Passive voice and aggressively dodging the word "coup" can go a long way.
All awfully convenient for the State Department, and equally convenient for the paper's relationships with their contacts within it and other parts of the US government.
I guess part of the problem is that there are few reputable sources. Reuters still seems ok. So does Financial Times. WSJ dropped in quality, but still seems to cater well tonita audience.
> I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired.
Not going to happen. The reporter was doing his job. No one will lose their job just because your favorite blogger agreed to go on the record for an interview and is not upset that his identity will be revealed.
Breaking trust, going against wished how people prefer to be addressed and endangering people for now good reason - well, it's at most style of irresponsible, tabloid-level journalism.
If NYT aims for tabloid level standard, indeed, the journalist was doing his job.
> Breaking trust, going against wished how people prefer to be addressed and endangering people for now good reason - well, it's at most style of irresponsible, tabloid-level journalism.
Did you read SSC's post? SSC didn't mention anything of a "promise" or "agreement" for the reporter to not use his name. The reporter found it another way.
Now, if SSC explicitly said the reporter promised not to use his name, then that opens a new can of worms.
Doxxing is not something new. Scott Alexander is clear about his anonymity.
If a journalist interviewed a popular camgirl who introduced herself as (say) LustyClaraXXX, and then "did research" to compare pictures, and revealed her legal name an occupation (say, a schoolteacher), would you consider it ethical?
> If a journalist interviewed a popular camgirl who introduced herself as (say) LustyClaraXXX, and then "did research" to compare pictures, and revealed her legal name an occupation (say, a schoolteacher), would you consider it ethical?
It really depends on the context of the story, with additional nuances that a competent editor must consider:
Is this camgirl the central figure of this story?
What are her reasons for not revealing her real name?
You say she is a school teacher. What kind of teacher? Is she a well-known professor? Is she someone who teaches kindergarten?
Does she make more money from camming than being a teacher? That in itself could be another story about the system.
> Journalists shouldn't print anonymous articles. Journalists should use anonymous sources as little as possible.
Correct. But there are times when anonymous sources are necessary. Look at WaPo and NYT's political coverage. They use many political insiders who can't go on the record but reveal necessary information for the public.
One example: Trump's "shit hole countries" comment. That came from anonymous sources who were in the room, backed up with a few on-the-record commends from outsiders.
Just by luck I've been interviewed on camera a few times, and each time Im astounded, how im not really beeing interviewed, im rather beeing asked questions phrased a certain way, so they have a certain response that fits a narrative.
News organisations pander to their audience, so I think it's really important to understand what that audience is. If you happen to be in that target audience, then of course there's a real risk you'll end up in an echo chamber that becomes increasingly far away from anything resembling a consensus reality.
I've come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different target audiences. I occasionally read the Daily Mail (my mother gets it, don't judge) and the Guardian. My main source of general news is the BBC news site, but I also regularly read The Economist. From time to time I pop on to the Fox News site, partly to remind myself that the Daily Mail could actually be a lot worse. I listen to LBC in the car (A London based politics and current affairs talk radio show).
Genuine question - I'd be interested in how others approach this. Is my set of sources too skewed one way or another? Am I missing a decent balanced source, or should I add a credible source on any particular political leaning?
Most news is worthless. What's important will have more perspective available six months from now (or, better, six years from now); what's not important is just parlor room gossip.
Reading e.g. the politics section of the NYT religiously for the past couple years, your biggest takeaway would be that Trump is an idiot who doesn't belong in office. Which, as far as it goes, is true, but there's no need to pick up a bad habit like reading the NYT in order to know that.
It's probably necessary to know enough about this week's going-ons for social reasons, to the same extent that it's necessary to know who's playing in the Super Bowl, but there are more useful ways to spend your energies.
Getting the news from "both sides" is just getting two bullshit spins on the same topic, but the truth isn't in the middle.
You can get "just the facts" from outlets like Reuters. You may find that this isn't really entertaining and that really you do consume news for other reasons than getting informed. You may recognize that you actually want "the spin", you want the emotional turmoil, the sensation.
From that perspective, consuming news is more like a consuming a drug: A guilty pleasure that should not be overindulged in.
For example, you can come to a very different centre point for "both sides" by just choosing which representatives you have for both sides. The centre point of the NYT and the Guardian is very different from the centre point of the Washington Post and Breitbart.
For UK sources, I'd suggest adding The Spectator. They're not perfect (some of their columnists strike me as fairly obvious shills), but overall I've found them the most intelligent right-of-centre source.
For the Americans reading, they have a US site too, might be worth checking out?
This is not true, the spectator is a very right wing newspaper which our current pm used to edit (who was undeniably on the right wing of our the Tory party, which if you run the numbers on voting must put him in the rightmost 20% of the country).
It’s probably well written though, the irony is that the right wing press is often externally funded, not intrinsically profitable, and so has more cash in the bank to maintain high production quality, if completely destroying any pretense of neutrality.
I don't think The Spectator claims to be neutral? Everyone knows that it's a right-leaning magazine and it doesn't pretend otherwise. I'd describe myself as centre-left but I agree with GP that The Spectator is one of the better sources for a right-of-centre perspective. (I also agree with GP that there are exceptions... God I can't stand James Delingpole.)
Just because a source has an editorial slant doesn't mean it doesn't provide any insight. The problem is when journalists push their opinions on you while pretending to be impartial.
The Spectator is not only profitable (rare amongst newspapers) but has seen a surge in subscriptions. It's given back its COVID support money from the government.
It's actually the left wing papers that tend to lose money, as they're reluctant to go behind a paywall. They prioritise influence over profits. The Guardian is the clearest case of this.
The father of one of my neighbours recently died in a house fire. It was a tragic accident, nothing sinister. The whole family could be described as boringly average with nothing of note about them. The family refused all requests for interviews from the media.
That didn't stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family photos (both old and more recent ones) and published pictures of the whole family. The family could deal with the headlines, but that someone leaked family photos to the paper really hit them hard.
The story was so sensationalised and gory and completely off the scale. A few column inches would have sufficed, instead it was double page spread implying the family was in turmoil. The paper turned an already painful family situation in to an absolute nightmare.
My favourite example of all time of journalistic shamelessness is ABC reporting that Robin Williams's were "respectfully asking for privacy" following his death, while a banner at the top of the same page advertised live aerial footage of Robin Williams's home:
The Republic of Ireland is situated on the island of Ireland, which is itself one of the archipelago known as the British Isles (a term which is offensive to certain people from the Republic). Other entities which sit on the British Isles include the Isle of Man and the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", comprising four nations (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). Great Britain is one of the British Isles, and it contains most of Wales, Scotland, and England.
Two different countries. There was a big hoo-ha in 1916 about all that.
But this isn't slander. The Indo didn't lie they grossly exaggerated the truth in a gory manner.
Yes, the daughter was distraught - why wouldn't she be in the circumstances? But the Indos headline was along the lines of "AGONY AND PAIN FOR name AS FATHER PERISHES IN NORTH-SIDE INFERNO". This was accompanies by lots of quotes from anonymous "friends and family" about how she and her family were suffering. This article featured lots of personal photos. The really sore things about this is that these photos were only on display in her house, someone she trusted took copies with a smartphone and sent them to the paper.
As she is the copyright owner of some of the pictures I am going to suggest she invoice the paper for reproduction fees when she feels up to it.
For me, it’s difficult to “trust”. I assume I know next to nothing about India vs Pakistan or the Mexican drug war and that Journalism isn’t going to change that. At best it’s a source of stories like any novel, at worst it’s trying to mislead.
In the case of Mexico’s drug war, most Americans are probably very misguided as to how dangerous it is for tourists and also how much of it is seen by the average Mexican on a given day. I feel I’ve learned infinitely more in one conversation on Tandem with someone who lives in Mexico than I ever will from a newspaper.
If I read about riots in my city, I know there was something going on but I can’t really trust that the news correctly identified the place, people, or motive. I may have the desire to learn more and so I will reach out to someone who was there our lives in that neighborhood.
I had a waking up moment in 2003 during the Iraq war protests. I learned that the NYT, which was my favorite because each issue was a literary work that could be read from front to back, reported as though they’d never been to NYC. If they couldn’t get basic details right when the story was literally on the same street (Broadway) then I don’t know what they’re actually capable of reporting.
Even if the reporter was half decent (let's assume he/she was), it would most likely be the Editor that have twisted the story around, for whatever reason or excuse. It happens in all kinds of business. Go talk to an auditor (ANY) auditor and they will have plenty of horror stories where the reviewer rewrote a paragraph "to better reflect the message", in which rewrite the message was changed.
May as well ask here, I pretty much only read the weekly Economist to get my news at this point. I think I have their slight biases dialed in at this point. Anyone want to make a case for a different primary news source/argue that The Economist is bad?
For context, I like The Economist because it's mostly unemotional, information-dense, and the magazine comes in a single weekly thing to read.
The Economist is the rare case of a news source that's not too bad, at least at present. We can't let ourselves become complacent, however - just see what's happening to the NYT.
The Economist is actually pretty good. They have their own political bias (see at wikipedia entry) but both, their news and technology reporting is top notch.
I don’t know if I’ll really be able to add to this conversation, but two cents anyway:
I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better.
I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism.
1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles.
(This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.)
2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath.
3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful.
That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.
Many years ago, a close family friend, who was a police officer in a small town, committed suicide. The local television news kept trying to find the man's children and wife in the days immediately following his suicide to ask them questions. Because there's no informative news value to the general public in his family's reactions -- of course they're heartbroken and grieving, their beloved husband/father took his own life -- it was clear that the media just wanted to air emotional people to appeal to viewers.
I stopped watching television news -- because the vast majority of 'news' programs are just entertainment with a veneer of news.
Many, many years ago, I was the foreman on a murder trial in our little town. In the jury selection process, the public defender -- a good, respected, local attorney -- asked the first candidate pool if they had read about the murder in the local paper. Almost everyone had. Then he asked if any of them had ever had a story written about them, or, say, their business, in this local paper. Three or four people raised their hand. Then he simply asked, "Did they get it right?" Everyone shook their head. Everyone laughed, and he moved on. Point made. That was my eye-opener.
The Times wrote a story about a play written about my life (long story) and there was a mistake in every line - most trivial and inexplicable, like guessing an age for people and getting it wrong, and some mistakes actively annoying.
Also, I once appeared in the Post and the Times in the same day when my friend and I got blown up in a steam pipe explosion (we were covered in mud but undamaged). The Times made us seem suave and hip (they mentioned my natty tie covered by mud) and the Post made us seem like victims of a tragedy. Such different pictures!
Well, I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter WASN'T at the scene, and yet I later read what she had written about it in the newspaper as if she had been present.
It was a really nice review of a show that... was cancelled.
Some things to keep in mind when doing any interview.
First, know what message you want to get across, and focus on that.
Second, avoid almost all "what if" type hypothetical questions.
Third, make your own recording of any interview, and make sure the reporter is aware that you are doing so.
I was fortunate enough to be part of some media training early in my career, where the trainer (an ex-TV reporter) recorded an interview with one of the participants. The next day they played for us the video they had put together splicing different questions into the interview and editing down the responses. The resulting "interview" was a real hit piece, and the editing was done smoothly enough that it presented as a single continuous take (even with the switching camera angles). It would have been very damaging if it had been broadcast like that, and without proof that it was faked the PR effort to counteract it would have been challenging.
I'd say even more simply, don't talk to the press without the intermediation of a competent PR professional.
It's the same reason you don't talk to the police without a lawyer. Even if you're the cleverest person in the world, you're playing a game against an opponent who does this for a living and holds all the cards.
I learned this in college. I was head of an organization that supported a lot of activities around sports and I was interviewed by the school paper.
Had a nice conversation and then the story came out. He used 2 sentences from a 30 minute conversation to insert out of context in a piece totally unrelated to what we were talking about.
In 2005, The Australian newspaper published an article claiming that Macquarie University IT Services was going to make redundant 50-60 staff. (I can't find the text of the article online, but I can find a citation for it [1].)
I remember being amused by this article, because I actually worked there at the time, and we didn't actually have 50-60 staff to make redundant. If they'd let go of 50-60 staff from our department, we would have had a negative number of employees remaining (the actual number of employees was a bit over 40). It also reinforced my tendency to distrust journalists, who often fail to get even basic facts right.
(There was an element of truth behind the story – they did plan a significant round of job cuts, 15 years later I can't recall exactly how big, but it could have been a third of the department – it was just the numbers in the article had been impossibly inflated. And the plan was never to lay off the entire department, just a significant chunk of it.)
Same here to some degree. Those who wield actual power will never be criticized or exposed, which means that journalists are inherently useless or closer to being a corpse.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, Tim Pool, Andy Ngo are some who are constantly attacked both verbally and physically and thus I have bit more faith in them than I do for others "journalists".
My wife and I have a combined >20 years experience in microbiology and medical research, so we’re feeling the pain of “this journalist has no idea what they’re talking about” more than usual these days.
The coverage of COVID has been more distressing than the actual disease. (Hint: epidemiologists specialize in studying the spread of diseases after the fact; asking them about an ongoing epidemic is like asking an expert on Roman architecture to build an office building.)
Here’s some example nonsense in the news. I regularly see the same story argue both points in each bullet:
- Sweden has had too many cases (deaths), and too few cases (people with antibodies).
- Last week 5% of 1000 confirmed cases died; this week 0.5% of 10,000 estimated cases died. “Experts” “baffled” but we are winning and can reopen (the same publication will flip the numbers and conclusion tomorrow)
- Antibodies might not lead to immunity, but the vaccine (which does nothing but cause your body to create antibodies) will be a panacea.
Bonus gem from yesterday:
New study shows kids don’t spread COVID. The numbers are based on studies of areas where schools and daycares were closed, and the kids were quarantined. Adults were more likely to catch COVID at work than from their quarantined kids. There was one (just one) school where the kids spread COVID amongst themselves, but that was probably an outlier. No one really understands how it happened.
Note that the high-level conclusion of this last article was probably right: kids usually don’t get symptoms, and asymptomatic people are less likely to cough / spread it. A stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess.
This is a pretty easy conclusion to come to theoretically, too. Any position of power is going to tend towards abuse and incompetence if there's not some sort of filter in hiring for or sustaining the institution. Newspapers live or die by clicks and subscribers: There's no incentive towards any notion of "journalistic integrity", there's no filter ensuring that journalists are especially intelligent or honest, and there's no reason to believe that the typical journalist is any less likely to abuse their position than the typical police officer.
Just as there are individual dedicated, ethical police who believe deeply in fulfilling their mission the right way, there are good journalists out there who make the world better. But for every Ronan Farrow, there are a thousand Farhad Manjoos and Cade Metzes; for every Foreign Affairs, there are a hundred New York Times or Fox News. The net effect is the same as with police: understand that we've got a horridly imperfect system chock full of dishonest actors and engage with it on those terms. Don't talk to cops without a lawyer; don't talk to a journalist without a PR person and/or a specific plan for what you're getting out of the exchange and how to protect yourself from exploitation[1].
The Internet has greatly accelerated this trend. Pre-Internet, if by some miracle you managed to get enough honest, intelligent people together in a single paper, you could establish a culture of journalistic ethics under the aegis of the slack afforded by your local monopoly on distribution. But in the Internet era, you need to be fully competitive on the terms defined by the market, which, as described above, don't point towards honest, ethical reporting at all.
The tragedy with journalism is that government is usually a useful tool to address this problem: well-crafted regulation can shape incentives such that you don't need to rely on wishing for good cops, which is the direction that police reform discussions are taking. A heavy government hand, however, is anathema to the role that journalists are supposed to play in modern society, so this tool is off the table.
I've thought about this for a very long time, and I don't know how to solve this.
[1] This obviously doesn't apply in narrow cases like "observation from man on the street"
I would like to caution anyone reading the comments to be skeptical of posts that push to erode your faith in journalism. There has been an alarming trend of people pushing a narrative that news organizations cannot be trusted. It is a toxic attack on one of the most important components in a functional democratic republic.
A few relevant articles about how the New York Times claims to treat sources:
[0]: "The Times sometimes agrees not to identify people who provide information for our articles...Sources often fear for their jobs or business relationships — sometimes even for their safety."
[1] "If compassion or the unavoidable conditions of reporting require shielding an identity, the preferred solution is to omit the name and explain the omission. (That situation might arise, for example, in an interview conducted inside a hospital or a school governed by privacy rules.) "
He wasn't really a source or a person in a hospital or elsewhere governed by privacy rules. As he says himself, his online persona is very lightly pseudonymous. It sucks that he's inconvenienced in this way but it's hard to see how these articles are relevant to his situation. If anyone actually wished him harm, they could probably find his name just as the reporter did before ever talking to him.
I don't agree that he wasn't a source. He seems to be the subject of the article, but he made contact with the reporter and claimed to explain his concerns which were not heeded.
I've seen the New York Times omit the names of refugees who face persecution in their home countries. (I'm trying to find an example, but it's surprisingly hard to search for.) This is a different case, but I think it's broadly comparable.
But he is a medical professional that explains that releasing his identity is possibly detrimental for those he treats. Is "hospital" the important part of that policy we should be focusing on, instead of the implications of why they might not want to report that person's name?
He didn't say releasing his name would be detrimental to those he treats. If there was a serious medical ethical concern here about just his full name he would never have used his real first names to begin with - no medical professional would take such a risk. I'm sure he takes the utmost care with whatever obligations he has as a medical practitioner.
I think it’s plausible that if I became a national news figure under my real name, my patients – who run the gamut from far-left anarchists to far-right gun nuts – wouldn’t be able to engage with me in a normal therapeutic way. I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.
I'm pretty sure that is exactly the "possibly detrimental for those he treats" I was referring to. I'm not sure why you sat he didn't state that, unless you're referring to how you dropped the "possibly" from my statement, but that would make your reply a non-sequitur, so I don't think that makes sense either.
> If there was a serious medical ethical concern here about just his full name he would never have used his real first names to begin with - no medical professional would take such a risk.
Not everyone publishes their middle name. Without that middle name being fairly public and a little foreknowledge about that being likely what was done, there's little chance of finding the correct person.
Hell, my first name is a very rare spelling, and middle name is common, probably about as common as his. You won't find a single thing about me searching for that combo, because I've never included my middle name in anything that would be published online.
There's also the possibility he doesn't go by his first name. He could go my his middle name (Alex) and we that would also confound most searching. He didn't even specifically say whether the first and middle name were in the correct order, so you can't really assume anything from that, since they are both very common first names and he was trying to maintain some anonymity.
As a simple example, his full name could be Scott Alexander Papageorgio, and I doubt you would get very far finding what you thought were useful results from any variations of Scott and Alexander.
D'oh, you're right, I got sidetracked reading the Sci Am article he linked and then probably forgot to go back and read the rest of his thing after skimming. But to me, that makes his argument weaker. Either he was naive about this obvious and ostensibly grave risk to his patients, which seems at a minimum reckless. Or he assessed the risk and considered it acceptable, which seems both more charitable and plausible.
As to the name, I don't think we really need a convoluted hypothetical - it's not his first brush with exposure and people have found his full name before. He was lightly pseudonymous and aware of it.
Given the preferred solution was not to omit the name, and given that reporting the name was avoidable, modus tollens implies that the NYT did not feel that compassion was required.
1,612 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 494 ms ] threadIt's hard to describe how bad these things can get out of nowhere without having been through some of it or seeing it yourself. But, having your real name attached to posts that are against certain political topics or narrives, can be borderline-lethal in 2020, and I can't blame him for what he's chosen to do. There's been plenty of scary situations and chilling effects in the past, and they're obviously only getting worse recently.
He's scared, and rightfully so.
Confounding factors are the subject is self-insulating and it breaks traditional party lines. Also, people who experienced that Tuesday are exceptionally good at avoiding it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571449 ... I certinally was.
> The saner and wiser a person is, the less likely they are to contribute content. The design of the web selects for morons with neither any reputation to lose, nor foresight to worry.
Absolutely.
And btw — nothing scientific about race science.
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Murdered_American_wri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Assassinated_American...
E.g. I have written a bunch of outlandish stuff in my comment history, and some of it would cause people a lot of offense. Enough for them to want to call my employer out of some motivation and escalate to some sort of public/twitter witch hunt. But I promise you, I am not a bad person, and would not hurt a fly. That is the part that's missing here. Reasonable, innocent people are potentially being treated as if they're inciting violence.
There are many problems with the way the Internet works. Having anonymous people with nothing to lose broadcasting political opinions and threats is one of them. This creates anonymous angry mob which is very successful at silencing interesting authors and ruining lives of those who have even slightly controversial thoughts.
I don't know what the solution is. It's not clear to me more anonymity is going to solve anything. I believe the world would be a better place if you had to work to have your opinion heard. Do something interesting, work in certain industry for a few years, achieve something, live through something. Just because you are able to make an account on a website doesn't make what you have to say in any way interesting or worthwhile.
It's also unavoidable in 2020 to be doxxed eventually if you have a lot of enemies, unless you take care not to publish any personal details and hide your identity with the best methods available from the beginning. But when you make it easy to identify you with details such as those on the RationalWiki page, all bets are off and it's a bit late to mourn now.
I'm a moderator on Reddit for a gaming related television-show-turned-into-internet-streaming company with various shows and format.
The related circle jerk subreddit is very vocal and after some minor discussions about normal moderator actions of removing insulting posts, it kind of spiraled out of control and all of a sudden, lots of postings on the circle jerk appear, targeting me.
Somewhat amusing in the beginning but some of those posts were somewhat disturbing enough to let me actually consider for the first time how much information is out there for identifying me or persons in my personal circle.
My real name is easy enough to find out (I never tried to hide it) but it is kind of generic enough to have lots of hits so you can't go from there to where I live or work. But for other people which might even have different personas on the internet, this can be much more difficult.
Was certainly a chilling moment and this only on the topic of something completely apolitical.
I see a dead comment has cited "racial science" and "conservatives", seemingly out of nowhere. Has Scott written something "controversial" that I missed? Something that would offend the left wing?
If so, I can well believe that NYT would take it into their heads to write a semi-hit-piece on someone they perceive to be some sort of Jordan Peterson type.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200617034621/https://slatestar...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hsu
It's not like a large % of the NYT readers are going to know straight away that no one exists with the name used in the article deviate from it at all?
~~~
SlateStarCodex shutting down in direct response to the hubris/disregard of one NYT reporter hungry for a story. This parasitic appetite for airtime come-what-may approach to journalism needs to be checked. There's no reason the writer couldn't leave the real full name out of the article once requested and with legitimate concern aired by the person hes naming.
I'm glad "Scott" is taking this stance if only for the fact that it puts the onus of hard/difficult decisions back on the NYT - i.e. why despite legitimate concerns are your writers comfortable doxxing people?
The key highlight for me -
"When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he just said that me having enemies was going to be part of the story. He added that “I have enemies too”. Perhaps if he was less flippant about destroying people’s lives, he would have fewer.
(though out of respect for his concerns, I am avoiding giving his name here.)
After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks."
This is especially important to ask when a big complaint of the NYT staff about the Tom Cotton is editorial was that it was directly endangering their safety.
Apparently the NYT does not have the same concern about other’s safety.
[1] https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/
Wow. This is similar to Vice reporting on Naomi Wu and threatening to dox her while claiming to write a positive article about her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu#Vice_article
I've watched VICE and NowThis alone radicalize perfectly decent people. I knew someone for over 10 years who was always highly observant, emotional but self-aware, would drop what he was doing to sit in my car with me in a dark parking lot and let me go through the wild ride of emotions I have about my ex. He knew we wouldn't ever be a thing. I sat with him one evening in a dark parking lot and let him go through his emotions on us just not falling into place, the existential crisis of seeing something desired within reach and being able to touch but not keep it. He's the person who taught me every second is independent from the next, that a bad feeling toward someone can be isolated, compartmentalized, only exist in a moment in the front of our minds. That if we're aware of that independence, we can turn off an emotion so quickly we hardly notice the effort. And today, I could be thoroughly enraged by someone's comment online, turn off my screen and be in a great mood before I even realize the transition occurred.
A few years back, he started watching the VICE documentaries at work during his free time. And then he started watching the clips and cuts made by Buzzfeed and channels like NowThis. Then he started sharing them on social media. And the clips got more and more incendiary. It's like VICE news could do a 30-minute special on LGBT in Brazil, but he'd watch and re-watch the few seconds of Bolsonaro saying gays are bad and that's just his view. And then he'd repost the clips. And then he started posting them on people's timelines to make sure their friends saw the clips and his comments too. And it eventually spiraled out into him posting clips of Nazi propaganda and these detailed comparisons to the Trump administration. And then he got verbally abusive toward his family.
My last conversation with him was me asking why he posted what read like a manifesto that white people, Nazis/KKK, cisgender people should be put into training programs and if they refused or didn't show rapid progress then they deserved to be dropped off somewhere remote and left there. I thought he was joking, but he said he was serious. He ranted for almost an hour at me, even after I closed Facebook. I got 13 or so message notifications on my phone.
Just to clarify, his posts on Facebook and Twitter included his belief that 'cisnormativity' is a product of 'white mafias', that we're all accomplices and own a blood libel for the deaths of the poor around the world, that ISIS wasn't homophobic and only executed cishomos, that he'd force cishomos to have sexual intercourse with trans people even if it didn't fix them. Just insane, insane shit.
These sites are the gateway drugs to violence. For all the talk about violent video games and movies, these indie (corporate) 'news' channels are the real danger.
I've always been of the opinion that the reader needs to be on guard towards content which teaches people to hate, much moreso than "hate speech" that's just someone screaming their head off like an angry paranoid fool.
It's easy for everyone to identify and contextualize someone talking trash; even if they happen to agree they can still see it for what it is. It's much harder when a reporter (someone branded as a smart person) uses high-status language, slick production value, and an almost disengaged tone of voice to seduce you into a comfortable but dishonest explanation that turns people into cartoonish monsters to lay blame at their feet.
It's called "critical race theory".
PC goodthink is that Breitbart is terrible in every way and the worst possible source of news. When I've compared its European edition to outlets like the Guardian, it's pretty similar in tone, style and content (obviously with political polarity reversed). If anything it's actually less extreme, for instance, it's very clear about the separation between illegal immigrants (i.e. a class defined by choice) from race (a class defined by immutable characteristic), whereas the Guardian does publish pieces talking about 'white people' or 'white men' quite frequently.
Also, Breitbart uses links to primary sources much more heavily than most news sources do. A lot of papers only link to other stories they published, to keep you in-site.
If they do dox the person, though, their name will be on the article, and you'll be able to find it.
The point though, is that this hasn't actually happened yet. There is still a possibility that the reporter will back out, and not publish the name.
At which point, the author wins, and isn't doxed.
By not attacking the reporter, yet it still leaves open the possibility that everyone can back down.
The problem with people trying to shut down others primarily comes from individuals. Often that's individuals on social media. In this case it's a journalist. These individuals can destroy other people's lives, yet they essentially face zero consequences for doing so.
And each time they succeed, like in this case, they embolden others to do it.
Many of Scott's patients would find his writings to be very relevant information.
But, you say, surely that's not a problem for well-adjusted people! Guess what the hell a psychiatrist does.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/he95ak/blog...
https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...
Here are the other parts:
- part 2: https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...
- part 3: https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...
There was a positive outcome too, though, check out this video where she helps save someone’s life (SFW): https://youtu.be/4VKZTmTP7oY
That is exactly what was happening there. There is no other plausible explanation for the behavior.
> I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but they’re going to say you’re a far-right racist who supports eugenics, based on you not immediately supporting the firing of Hsu. I know this probably sounds improbable to you because the author was pleasant, but they’ll have a quote from you they’ll strip of nuance and context to make it clear that you’re evil. Probably something about why you want to remain anonymous and they’ll paint it as you wanting to be anonymous because your views are beyond the pale or a dog whistle or something.
> ... It was absolutely going to be a hit piece and they don’t tell you that upfront because they need your participation.
> Pui doesn’t care, she’s cracking open champagne right now. This is what she thinks their job is. Exposing everything because reasons and feeling good about it.
> It will absolutely be a hit piece, probably call SA a racist, and will be unapologetic. To expect anything different is impossible if you’ve spent a lot of time around this particular brand of new age journalist.
> ... The editor SA is referring to is a known quantity in many circles, including mine, as is the author of the piece (I know people who were asked for comment; all refused). This is a win in their book, and they couldn’t care less about whether SA’s life will be destroyed.
After NYT's all-too-credulous parroting of Barr's mischaracherization of the Mueller report I tried to cancel mine, but spent over an hour on the phone with no progress, and gave it up. I should have persisted — I don't want to give them my money any more, and this is all the more reason to cancel. At the same time, I don't have the time or patience to subject myself to phoning them again in the near future. Surely there must be an easier way? Certainly there should be.
Especially for low value things, even a few percent chargebacks will be really costly.
Source:. Was selling $1 physical items online... The business was profitable until a few percent of packages started going missing in the mail, and rather than contacting us, customers would just chargeback, forcing me to double the price of the service.
I decided to cancel last month due to the Tom Cotton Op-Ed and couldn't figure out an easy way to do it on-site so I just cancelled from the PayPal end. On a lark, I decided to try and cancel from the NYT end as well just to see how difficult it would be. I connected to the live chat and finally got connected to a representative after TWENTY FIVE HOURS on hold and was given 20 minutes to respond before being cut off.
I did that a week ago, worked great.
Scummy business practices like that make it very difficult for me to recommend any of that company’s products to anyone, even though I’m sure the people actually making the products have little or no influence on the people who control the transaction mechanics.
Still run by the BBC's Mark Thompson I see.
https://imgur.com/VUdcIou
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIMxvS-WEAER49I.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINJUoqUwAEkSip.jpg
I wish journalists would come up with some professional standards and make the title licensed, like doctor or lawyer. Right now we all recognize how important journalism is but journalists themselves run the gamut from ethical investigative journalists to clickbait manufacturers. Imagine if journalists also had to adhere to the equivalent of attorney client privilege for sources.
Honestly I think it's time journalists take back some of the responsibility and importance of their roles that's been stripped by colleague and company malpractice (and the side effects of a business model twisted inside out in rapid succession), as many DO recognize their importance. But like politics any real "talk" of media quickly devolves into sports-like tribalism and never gets beyond hating the 'players' not the game itself.
CAJ particularly has done some good explanations in the past (though I haven't read it since I was forced to, in university!) https://caj.ca/Ethics
If biggest media companies were interested in upholding any ethical standards - the would have been doing that already. Allowing them to create a coalition and giving that coalition any more power would make things only worse.
I see limited to no news value in publishing his name and substantial risk of harm, but I'm a frequent reader and admirer of the blog.
I think anyone who is not a sociopath would consider this proof of a “substantial risk of harm”.
I wouldn't be opposed to the story running under a fictional name, even though that would probably not be to Scott's liking either.
In the specific case though, given a really well established pseudonymous online identity, that is the central subject of the article, the marginal utility of the additional information you can check seems uniquely low. At least if the subject is just the pseudonymous activity of the author.
At the point where the NY Times is reaching out to write an article about you, I think you have likely crossed that threshold. Scott's best move would have been to refuse an interview in the hopes that it would kill the story. But even that might not have mattered. If your goal is to be both famous/influential and pseudonymous, you probably need to work a little harder to protect your anonymity.
There's so many instances of abuse, lying and laziness that seems low standards are common through the profession and countries.
In general I tend to see them as activist, with very few exceptions of people that tries to approach truth.
Nowadays it really doesn't matter if they write for a local newspaper or WAPO, it's just so common that your default approach should be looking at every piece as propaganda.
You can't expect the journalists to uphold ethical standards when the market rewards garbage rage-inducing clickbait.
The whole point of a license is to reduce the gamut of people who can practice a profession to just those people who do it the way the license specifies. In a world such as ours, and a country such as the US, it will inevitably become the target of corruption and a position of immense power over the media. Even if it could be a good idea, I don't believe we live in a world where it would be executed in a way that maintains freedom of the press.
It probably shouldn’t be “licensing” in the sense of using state or otherwise organized violence to seek out people who violate the norms. We generally don’t teach people to punch anyone in the face who is rude. But having general standards of conduct don’t seem to bad to me.
I am on board with ethics education as a way to impart societal values. I'm pretty sure it's a component in most journalism degrees, but perhaps it should be part of early education more distinctly as well.
If you want an easy example look at this Super Micro spy chip story [2] by Bloomberg Businessweek. It's absolutely unsubstantiated [3], caused 40% drop for SM share price, but two years later it's still up.
[1] except that one time Tiel funded a lawsuit
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/22/super_micro_chinese_s...
I must admit, the ability to sway stock prices is pretty far from what I worry about when I think of bad ethics in press, but it does happen to be the kind of thing that would make licensing prone to corruption. The money influencing that kind of corruption would be right at the door of the licensing body, just waiting for the first person to crack the door open.
It's not that rogue journalist influencing stock market is bad, it's bad, but that's not the point. What really bothers me is that that there are no mechanisms on media company level to punish or at least disincentivize faulty reporting.
We encounter misinformation on a daily basis, but can't do anything about it. We can't even notice it, unless topic in question happens to fall in our area of expertise.
My optimistic side would hope that putting education in schools about misinformation and how to critically think about and analyze journalism could at least help the issue.
The AMA and bar associations are not without their issues either (they end up driving prices up since they have a monopoly on their service), but it seems to me that people don't have to worry about doctors doxxing their patients on social media or lawyers making deals behind a client's back as much. When it does happen, these professionals are usually ejected from their profession, which is a pretty big disincentive.
If you license individuals, how do you categorize what is and is not journalism, and where do you stop? Photojournalists, blogs, for fun school magazines, local newspapers? Are radio shows journalism? Youtube channels? Do I become an unlicensed journalist if they hold misinformation? Thinking of the worst case, a corrupted governing body could quietly pick and choose who they want to take penalize for not practicing with a license, or penalize them out of existence even if they have one.
That benefits big news corps while stifling open/free journalism with risk. For one example of what I mean by that but in a different industry, I will never run a website that could have users upload media in my country, because we have no safe-harbour laws. If you are at risk of penalties, many people just won't start.
Same problem with so-called fact-checking. It's politicized, which means it adds nothing over the chaotic political debate we already have, except a false veneer of objectivity.
This is possibly one of the easiest ways to create a police state if you make journalism "regulated" (i.e. government approved) ((or if you're a nutter, corporation approved))
But the people this is deliberately not recognising is bloggers. And to be honest, I'm seeing better journalism being done by (some) bloggers than (some) paid journalists now (not their fault - the business model for journalism is a mess, while the model for blogging is working).
But this obviously fails as seen in this instance (and many others). Companies have interests that do not align with the public's interest of ethical standards. Much like we've generally understood (but unfortunately not really everywhere) that letting other industries regulate themselves isn't a good idea, I don't think it's any different in the media.
Also an easy target to politicise, and dangerous to society if the far left/right end up running such a board and dictating that their opponents are wrong.
How do you prevent independent journalists selling pieces to certain outlets without unfairly placing the burden on the journalist? Is it a list of proscribed publications? How does a publication get on the list? What happens to all the "good" journalists who work for an organisation when it gets put on the list?
What, exactly, is a journalist? Does it include columnists who write opinion pieces? If not, how do you prevent an outlet from running more and more "opinion pieces" masquerading as news? If you get defrocked for doing something your employer considers highly profitable, they can just rebrand you as a columnist.
What does it mean to be licensed? What does having a licence allow you to do that you can't do without one? Is this your "press pass" allowing you to ask questions at briefings? There have been cases recently when this has been revoked on a whim. Is it just to get a byline in a printed newspaper? Again, they can rebrand unlicensed journalists as runners, and print the piece under the name of a real journalist.
Journalism is not a terminal career like medicine or law. If you get thrown out of one of those professions, you lose your livelihood. There is nothing else that you are as well trained for that pays as well. You have to start at the bottom of something else. Most journalists are not particularly well paid. Former journalists can earn as much, if not more, writing press releases and advertising copy.
A more interesting argument against doing this is considering the tradeoffs if implemented:
* e.g. the AMA has pretty successfully restricted the supply of doctors and driven the prices of medicine up,
* people are so paranoid about giving medical or legal advice they have to say things like "I'm not a doctor but... I'm not a lawyer but..."
etc.
In the case of doctors, pharmacists and lawyers,things like surgery, controlled drugs, rights of audience are easy to restrict. If you are not one and try to do the job anyway, you won't get very far.
As a client, I cannot use a partitioner who is not licensed in my jurisdiction. If I have a video consultation with a real foreign doctor, they still can't write me a prescription I can take to my local pharmacist. No matter how good the doctor is, they are made deficient by not being registered with the GMC.
A journalist writes and publishes articles about current affairs. You can't legally prevent people doing that without a catastrophic infringement of free speech.
Every day, I read articles from publications from many countries. Those articles are not made deficient by the fact that they are not written by NUJ members.
Plenty of people read and believe bunkum written by people who don't even pretend to be journalists. Sticking little "licenced by..." Logo on the real stuff won't make a difference there.
Some people can't handle the judgment that comes with being a somewhat public figure, and Scott is one of them.
… is he? I think you've been reading a different blog to me; I have read all of SlateStarCodex. Can you give some examples?
I was just in SSC's Open Thread a few hours ago opening comment permalinks in tabs to respond to them.
That NYT writer should be fired. I hope Scott recovers soon. SSC is my favorite place on the Web.
I don't want it to be the norm for any journalistic organ/employee to function/perform the way this one did. There are many ways to accomplish adoption of that norm, including (but certainly not limited to) firing people who do that.
When being a responsible journalist is your job, it's not unreasonable to expect to get fired for not being a responsible journalist.
I’m very happy to live in a country where you cannot fire people just like that, even if they do something wrong. You have to give people second chances. I don’t get this “fire them” approach to anything wrong something does.
People make mistakes. That just happens. To always fire people because of that makes no sense to me.
If I was a janitor and spilled a bucket of water on the floor it would be wrong and cruel to fire me for that mistake. On the other hand, if I saw a customer come in to our store and said "Yo customer, we hate you, get out and never come back!" And then grabbed a bucket of water and dumped it on the customer... Well then I think firing me would make sense. The former was a mistake. The latter is an intentional and deliberate bad action.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/he95ak/blog...
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/he95ak/comm...
If people don’t accept that they made I mistake then yeah, that’s an issue – and one where firing should again become an option, sure (basically that unwillingness to accept that is then the second offense).
I do agree that the situation here is bit more complex since the public is involved.
This seems serious enough that, I think, the challenge is more about the NYT making transparent their process, their decisions and what they did.
I think that’s even more valuable than just firing someone. They should investigate which processes, guidelines, rules, etc. contributed to that behavior and how and wether they plan to change that. They should outline what they communicated to that reporter. They should apologize.
I want an explanation and improvements, not someone to be fired. Also because I think more often than not people who actually did make a mistake are unlikely to do that again.
They could be the problem and actually toxic, sure, that’s always a risk. But I think that’s ok.
I don't think this is a "that one writer" issue; I don't think Scott is saying this is a "that one writer" issue. Any such choice is down to newspaper-wide policy.
From a political point of view, anonymous (and more critcally, independent) bloggers are a threat to the (local/global) establishment's propaganda organs. This may in fact be editorial policy, as you suggest. It doesn't matter of the blogger is 'friendly' in terms of political views.
I think the problems with journalism are bigger than this one writer. Simultaneously, I would like to see NYT take a stance against its writers doing what this one did to Scott.
> I don't think Scott is saying this is a "that one writer" issue.
Point taken, but I didn't claim to speak for him.
> Any such choice is down to newspaper-wide policy.
Agreed. I wrote another comment in response to 'rachelshu, adjusting my original comment to something more reflecting my actual views.
It's not the writer anyhow. It's the editor and probably a policy, though I'm sure they'd have no trouble bending their policy if they wanted to.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/he95ak/blog...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611133
That said: I don't understand how I'm repeating a mistake here. "Cancel culture" has become a problem because people get fired from their day jobs (or suffer other consequences) for opinions not pertaining to their day jobs, which are expressed outside their work hours.
In contrast, the NYT writer engaged in crappy professional conduct.
I agree that the writer is not the root problem. I've changed my mind about whether firing should happen; other solutions addressing journalistic incentives, or this journalist's team, or whatever, would probably go further.
Scott Alexander has been giving more information in the SSC subreddit, including the comment I've quoted below. Having read what he has to say, I've changed my mind, and don't think the journalist should be fired.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/he95ak/blog...
> I honestly got the impression that the reporter liked my blog and wanted to write a nice story about it.
> When I told him I didn't want my real name in the article, he talked to his editor and said the editor said it was NYT policy all articles must include real names.
> I got the impression he felt bad about it but had spent weeks writing the article and wasn't going to throw out all that work just for my sake.
> When I threatened to take down the blog, I think he did the decision-theoretically correct move of not giving in to threats.
> Overall I think this is a story about the NYT having overly strict real-name policies that unfortunately put a guy in a bad situation.
> There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS
> (please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks.)
Update: Thanks OP for updating to include a note about this.
844-NYTNEWS
Do landlines phones have letters in the US? Is it pressing a number several times?
And also mentioning that I'm grateful for SSC to exist. I rarely comment but it's a refreshing community.
This is just a popular (in the US?) way to make numbers easier to remember.
They were originally used for area codes (Wikipedia lists a UK example of 0AY6, ie 0296, for Aylesbury), then later for mnemonic numbers like the one from the article. Mobile phones inherited the lettered keypad from landlines and also started using it for typing text messages.
Wikipedia: The use of alphanumeric codes for exchanges was abandoned in Europe when international direct dialing was introduced in the 1960s, because, for example, dialing VIC 8900 on a Danish telephone would result in a different number to dialling it on a British telephone. At the same time letters were no longer placed on the dials of new telephones.
At any rate, the presence of lettered keypads doesn't mean people * had * to make mnemonic phone numbers with them, and it does look like (in Europe) only the UK had such numbers.
Apart from the US and UK, they might be popular in some Commonwealth countries too. I grew up in one and remember having them.
In the early automatic telephone years, letters were also used in the Netherlands, France, Denmark and other countries, but they fell out of use way before most people here were born, and also they were mostly (only?) used for area codes and exchange names/numbers, not subscriber numbers.
Letters are associated with numbers on a phone keypad. This is not a US-only thing. It is not a mobile only thing. It is not a land-line only thing. Keypads, all over the world, have letters on them. Letters (in the same way they are on phone keypads) can be seen on other numerical entry devices, like a keypad for a secure door.
As to pressing a number multiple times when texting, a half-second of thought would make it clear that this wasn't the case. Are you telling me it would be reasonable for OC (or anyone) to think that the NYT's phone number translated from
> 844-NYTNEWS
to
> 844-669998663397777
??
Indeed -- it dates back to the 1920s. At that time, phone numbers in the US started to be formed from a 2-letter exchange code followed by 5 (or sometimes 4) digits. For instance, "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (dialled 736-5000) was the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, and also the title of a 1940 hit song.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number
Still is!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#United_States
>In the most areas of North America, telephone numbers in metropolitan communities consisted of a combination of digits and letters, starting in the 1920s until the 1960s. Letters were translated to dialed digits, a mapping that was displayed directly on the telephone dial.
Though the chart is still wrong according to that, however it (the chart) does match what my Android phone's dialer looks like.
¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names
Earlier in time the letter "O" was also not generally on phone keypads.
People seem have lost all sense of objectivity due to some sort of idolatry.
To expand: nobody here is harassing the journalist. The journalist harassed the blogger. The commenters are providing polite, critical feedback.
If you think the journalist should enjoy being able to do what they want without an Internet mob, then why wouldn't you think the same way about Scott?
Investigative?
What do you expect to happen when this kind of crowd ("rationalists") calls or mail-spam a journalist that's "attacking" their idol?
> Investigative?
Ok, just journalist then, does it matter?
@dang, you might consider somehow incorporating the name of the blog into the title. I almost didn't click on this because "his blog" is quite generic. Slate Star Codex is frequently posted on HN and is fairly notable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They seek exciting and sensationalist stories without regard for any consequences in the real world. They twist their stories to manipulate the readers towards their viewpoint.
But worst of all, they have the gall to present themselves as the upholders of morality and the paragons of democracy. Any criticism you may have for these people is deemed "anti-democratic", which in most peoples heads already is a trigger word for "evil", no amount of arguments can sway them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French_journalism#M...
"At the world's centre lies a place between the lands and seas and regions of the sky, the limits of the threefold universe, whence all things everywhere, however far, are scanned and watched, and every voice and word reaches its listening ears. Here Fama (Rumour) dwells her chosen home set on the highest peak constructed with a thousand apertures and countless entrances and never a door. It's open night and day and built throughout of echoing bronze; it all reverberates, repeating voices, doubling what it hears. Inside, no peace, no silence anywhere, and yet no noise, but muted murmurings like waves one hears of some far-distant sea, or like a last late rumbling thunder-roll, when Juppiter [Zeus] has made the rain-clouds crash. Crowds throng its halls, a lightweight populace that comes and goes, and rumours everywhere, thousands, false mixed with true, roam to and fro, and words flit by phrases all confused. Some pour their tattle into idle ears, some pass on what they've gathered, and as each gossip adds something new the story grows. Here is Credulitas (Credulity), here reckless Error (Error), groundless Laetitia (Delight), Susurri (Whispers) of unknown source, sudden Seditio (Sedition), overwhelming Timores (Fears). All that goes on in heaven or sea or land Fama (Rumour) observes and scours the whole wide world. Now she had brought the news [to Troy] that ships from Greece were on their way with valiant warriors: not unforeseen the hostile force appears."
-- Ovid, Metamorphoses 12. 39 ff
For example, I'd consider some of what Scott does (did?) on SSC as "journalism" in that he's writing about recent news in an informative way.
Might or might not be the same guy, but it's close enough to not matter.
It's definitely possible I'm just not smart enough to understand this, but how does one go about learning to comprehend stuff like this?
Unless of course you simply want to be seen as the type of person who reads Russian literature, in which case thelastpsychiatrist.com is probably better for reading...
Personally for instance, I read "Shame & Society" once, found it fascinating, but couldn't really pinpoint what I had learned, so I re-read it and took notes, as well as try to summarize and articulate the big points and how they related.
Also I don't think TLP quit because he was doxxed necessarily. If that were the case, he wouldn't have kept paying the site hosting fees all this time. I think he decided the blog had become too much about his identity as a sort of minor messiah figure in the eyes of his readers, which is sort of against the founding principles of the blog itself. The character or voice he created for the blog was gaining too much power. Having his real name revealed was only a secondary concern.
He probably still writes somewhere though... probably, he's a well-respected/beloved voice on some obscure phpBB board or similar (real TLP heads will know he used to read/post on Metafilter back in the day.)
If your issue is that an online handle is not someone's legal name, how would you handle someone who goes by a certain form of their legal name (e.g., using their middle name rather than their first name)? How would you handle someone whose name includes a title (e.g., ‘Cpl Bloggs’ or ‘Ambassador Taylor’)?
Everyone has a number of labels used to identify them, and the appropriateness of each is dependent on the situation being used. In the context of an article about the online community surrounding someone's online blog, which they publish under a certain name, it is entirely appropriate to use the relevant name. The only way that that person's legal name would be relevant to the article would be if it was reporting on their conduct outside of that community as well, which this article does not appear to have been doing.
Unfortunately, all of American society is now such a community, so all investigative journalism about someone's identity is now also doxxing. I'm not any happier about that than you are, and hope we can return to better norms so that investigative journalism is less of a danger for its targets.
It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse.
I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly stopped reading newspapers, and don't trust anything they write, without checking the facts.
The other requires more than half a decade of intense education, internships, tests and further verifications. (Not to mention thousands of Euros in education costs, if not state sponsored)
I cannot think of a larger difference in terms of barrier to entry.
In France Medical Doctors require 6 years of externship, 4 years of internship + various amount of years depending on the specialization up to 5 (?) for example for neurology.
It's also the population that lead to the most suicides due to how intense the expectations are and failure will lead you to tenures you don't want (There is a spot for everyone but not where you want and on the speciality you want, even though we are lacking doctors ...)
So, I said 'more than half-a-decade' because that is essentially the absolute minimum that nobody can be pedantic about.
* What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health?
* What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics?
Unfortunately all US media, and most international media, is equally bad and built on bad intentions for varying levels of nefarious purposes.
Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals.
I find our independent media to be a key element of our democracy and I am worried when I hear the US media don't work quite the same.
Edit: I thought I might as well reply with our solutions to your bullet points
- Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist. The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians.
- The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society. (+ ads ofc)
- If one wants power to change things the far superior strategy in my country is to do the actual politics and not to report on it.
For a long time I underestimated how much of a bedrock requirement this is. It's easy to dismiss the media as entertainment at best or noise at worst.
But at best they model fairness, balance, and rationality, and if you have no one doing that in public the quality of discourse soon crashes.
I guess it goes in cycles though. Apparently in the 1890s it was _actually worse_!?
So if you think European media are free of political bias and distortions, think again.
My grievance is more how the media, including the government financed ones swallowed said war.
It used to have high quality, but in the previous government period one of the ruling parties changed the management and now it's not objective at all. In fact, all the respected journalists left for other media and the reputation of the organisation is tarnished (polls show people don't trust it anymore).
Fortunately we have independent media as well.
[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/11/new-leaks-shatter-opcws-a...
A domain where they thrive is domestic politics and in such a small country it's not that difficult to verify whether they lie and manipulate or not.
So I’m curious if the media there has made much of a fuss with the exposé of OPCW producing falsified reports. American media hasn’t, neither has British or Australian media. But we already know those groups are corrupt.
With this I’m trying to find out (and so can you) if Central European media is as objective (and independent) as what it’s being made out to be.
The Guardian article mentioned Russia 5 or 6 times (why?), the rest of the article didn't have any useful info.
The NYT article mentioned Russia 4 times IIRC, and had two half sentances of useful info.
Reuters only mentioned Russia once (hooray!), and actually had a reasonable amount good detail in there.
It pays well to do a 'deep dive' on something like the Syrian conflict, to better understand how the media /really/ works, then the lessons learned can be re-applied going forward. I spent some time studying the initial OPCW report, and independently came to the same conclusion that the OPCW leaks did. A few independent journalists, including Robert Fisk, shed light on some of the other aspects.
A more recent matter is the initial denials of the efficacy of face masks in helping reduce the spread of coronavirus. This was done largely for political reasons IMHO, and became part of advice that was muddled, illogical, and inconsistent.
The best source of advice was highly ranked medical experts in countries that had successfully dealt with SARS, their advice was clear, logical and consistent, right from the beginning back in late Jan. Of course for some reason they're almost never featured in western media, who prefer some celebrity GP or health adviser who's only real interest seems to be their appearence fee!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/5188155...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcbJdRb6mds
The fact that you consider those media unbiased doesn't mean they are really unbiased. Plenty of people consider Fox News and Huffington Post as paragons of objectivity.
I can tell you the story of the first one (SME) and you may take what you wish from it.
Penta is a shady investment group linked to heavy corruption scandals across the political spectrum. [0]
As a power move they decided to buy the medium they've seen as their main public opponent — SME. Half of the journalists from SME left, raised money and founded Denník N, which is pretty similar to SME. The other half stayed and convinced the previous shareholders to keep a majority.
45% of SME is owned by Penta but they have no effect on the content and SME critisizes Penta all the time. Penta knows that if they did anything about it, redactors would speak up and leave and they would be left with a worthless company.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_scandal
>Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals.
Something that seems to be quite common in modern media is to paint anybody who disagrees as a conspiracy theorist or fascist. Are there truly no other groups who have grievances with the news? Communists? The opposition party? Another news outlet that is partisan? It seems unlikely to me that only the groups that modern (left-leaning) media likes to blame everything on would have a problem with it.
On another point, I wish to address this:
>Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist.
You don't need to control what a journalist writes to create biased news. You simply need to control who you hire. Want a news organization that's biased towards right wingers? Hire a bunch of right wingers to be your staff. They will naturally gravitate towards stories that are biased.
>The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society.
The same is true for a lot of biased news outlets elsewhere. It still doesn't change that people like reading news that affirms their view of the world.
I don't wish to be uncharitable, but I believe based on this that perhaps you don't notice much of the bias. I could be wrong, but it just seems very difficult to believe that Europe has such a gem hidden in it. The news in my European country aren't quite as bad as in the US, but they're certainly not unbiased and politics certainly involves the media.
The news (public service) I consume from time to time does this too. However while they try to not favor a particular political side they often instead fail towards trying to find dissent where there is none.
They invite some people with supposedly “opposing” views and then spend the time trying to provoke a fight. Usually it’s just people highlighting different perspectives with no interest in representing some kind of conflict over the matter.
At least in the US, this is standard. Try getting your local Catholic hospital to deal with complications with your IUD and this isn't a "what if." There are plenty of stories of people who discover that their primary care network has an avowed ideological stance on certain procedures and they need to switch doctors and perhaps go out of network for full care.
> What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health?
Don't they? There is no shortage of for-profit hospitals, and thanks to insurance, Medicaid, etc., they can often increase profit at no cost to the patient by just seeing the patient more and treating them kn more ways that might be strictly speaking unnecessary.
> What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics?
Isn't this approximately the backstory of Planned Parenthood?
Basically, everyone has an ideology, a reason to do what they do. Sometimes it's based on their view of the world and a desire to make it better in some way. Sometimes it's profit. Neither of these is necessary nefarious.
I'd expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I'd expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous.
Professional journalism has a long, long track record of opposing any consequences to their actions whatsoever.
I love the idea of professional journalists. But the reality of them just does not work in practice in our current media industries.
Unfortunately expectations do not match reality. 10% of deaths are due to medical errors [0]. Then look at how the rest of the medical establishment are failing us. CDC is prohibited from naming the hospitals that have this error. The only thing they report on is trends [1]. If you have a hospital in your neighborhood, can you find out anything about it? From the medical error rate, to the spread of Candida Auris[2] is there any dangerous news about your local hospital/healthcare system that is public?
[0]: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db118.htm [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-can...
If a single sample of corn in a shipment is contaminated with aflatoxin should you keep testing it and trying to find the good corn?
If a program corrupts your data on first use should you keep trying it on different data before rejecting it?
I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course agree there are many kinds of people who call themselves journalists many of which don't improve our society. We must fight this battle, as we must fight every battle, because that's the only way things change for the better. Do not let cynicism win.
Just curious are there any independent investigation journalists that work on the patreon/subscription model? Would consider donation them rather than NYT or WSJ.
There are many. But they're difficult to find and get into. My favorite is http://www.noagendashow.com/.
Plenty of non-profit MSM, including the BBC, The Guardian, AP, and so on.
Are they doing independent investigative journalism, though? I jumped around in the episode a bit and it just sounds like talk radio commentary/opinion that cites MSM sources.
Adam was on Rogan in March. I recommend watching that episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaPKrZTUoUs
There are plenty of scrappy little online micronewspapers now, usually with an evident political slant, and some of them do real investigative journalism.
But there's no chance they'll get the direct access to the political system their mainstream cousins do.
It's also incredibly easy to astroturf fake news at that level, so not all of those sites are reliable.
The point about the MSM is that they're mass media with a huge subscriber/reader base. That's what gives them their leverage.
Journalism is much less influential without that.
https://civil.co/registry/approved
https://taibbi.substack.com/
In theory I would gladly support the theory of "quality investigative reporting", but the reality is a propagandist machine where opinion pieces replaces actual unbiased, adjective-free objective news.
Some examples of "oligarch news": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
As a former developer who worked closely on Thomson Reuters News feed (in the 00's), I've seen how there is almost zero fact checking for the information that appears on news feeds. Instead, news outlets trust the 'upstream' feeds and then quote the reports verbatim.
To be fair, there are those who are really awesome at doing research and releasing information that are part of the MSM. Unfortunately, there are plenty others who are not affiliated with MSM news outlets and hence aren't regarded as "reporters" per-se. These latter ones are regularly attacked via "fact checking" websites as a way to discredit them.
An article on the latter is here: https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-381-who-will-fact-chec...
In short, there's a bunch of information out there and without each and every news report clearly citing original sources, then MSM or not, it must be regarded as suspect.
So for "quality investigative reporting", the actual reports must rigorously cite objective sources.
In the US, I've found most PBS/NPR news broadcasts fairly objective, and the various NPR podcasts sometimes chart into investigative territory but there are other sources I rely on for this (e.g. ProPublica) which I don't expect to be just objective.
I'm not sure I understood exactly what you meant about quality investigative journalism, so forgive me if I misread. I generally agree with your comment.
> Even In A Pandemic, WHO Believes That Public Protests Are Important
> June 8, 2020 5:40 PM ET
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/08/8724198...
14 minutes later
> Trump To Restart Political Rallies This Month Despite Coronavirus Pandemic
> June 8, 2020 5:54 PM ET
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
In the context of left-wing political activity, just:
> In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic
In the context of right-wing political activity, a far more frightening description:
> despite the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which continues to wreak havoc on the lives and livelihoods of households across the country.
If NPR didn't lean left, the second article could have started with a tone similar to the first: in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump campaign will address another pressing issue, restarting the American economy. The rally has prompted fears that the close contact of thousands of attendees could lead to a spike in case counts.
What is the political orientation of a "mass gathering" (rally/protest/etc) if not its purpose? Seriously.
(Plus, Trump's rally was indoors; protests are outdoors. We've got quite a bit of data now indicating outdoor transmission is less likely.)
> It's not the political orientation of the mass gathering - it's the purpose. One is the President organising a gathering in an attempt to boost his election campaign - the other is some random people who came together to protest a specific thing.
How does the purpose of a public gathering alter a virus? Does it have political awareness and dynamically modify its transmissibility according to the righteousness of the cause?
Or perhaps the purpose of a public gathering justifies journalistic framing (altering the description of the severity of the virus, which in turn alters readers mental model of reality). If it's this, what is the logic behind the justification?
Edit: I should clarify that I meant "unbiased and factual" together. Of course it's entirely possible to be both biased and factual, by choosing which facts to include.
Choice and presentation of opinions you report on is not a neutral acitvity.
edit: I was distracted when I wrote my answer, so I missed some context. Was your question about differences in tone pointed out in a sibling comment[1]? Without having read the articles in question, at first glace, I'd considere this an example of journalistic bias.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611963
That's an interesting example of how difficult unbiased fact checking is.
To start with, there are many interpretations of the statement. Does worse mean death rate, severity of symptoms, infectiousness, or something else? What strain of the flu, and in which country? Which paper or anecdote does the fact checker cite? Because of differences like these, two fact checkers will give different ratings for the same statement.
Journalists aren't experts and shouldn't act like they are by presenting a single perspective as if it were unchallenged fact, or by injecting their own unqualified opinions. Any issue complex enough to be a matter for serious debate isn't going to be solved in an article.
They can be unbiased and report what the leading figures have said, like a camera at a televised debate, or they can be opinionated and add their voice to one of the camps, but they can't (honestly) do both.
I don't know how this fiction has to be represented in every discussion. I don't want neutral unbiased reporting if it requires giving equal time to people who think that neutral unbiased reporting is real. The selection of what's important to report is literal biasing.
For example, if a media outlet compare actual vs expected turnout for a Trump rally and report that turnout was "lower than expected", it would be plainly biased not to do the same comparison for Biden. The lines are obviously going to blur at some point (where 'balance' involves publishing something far less 'newsworthy'), but it's a lot like the definition of pornography - you know it when you see it.
Besides, most modern media outlets are blatantly pushing their own narratives anyway - I'd say it's far more important that we fix this before moving on to the smaller problem of selection bias.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/npr/
Not that I'm saying that 'reality has a liberal bias', as some would. I personally think it has a left bias, but I'm not nearly certain enough of my opinions to make that claim!
> The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and Van Zandt as an "armchair media analyst."[3] The Poynter Institute notes, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[4]
Also Poynter Institute has record of "weaknesses in the methodology".[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynter_Institute
For example, listen for ", without providing evidence" in NPR broadcasts. Notice how selectively it is used.
I don't think better ownership changes anything. The Guardian is owned by a trust, yet falsely reported Mark Duggan was unarmed in a front page headline (if you're unaware, this was false and the Gruan had to retract the claim after a PCC ruling).
The problem is that we're not being delivered news-as-information, we're sold news-as-entertainment.
Then we can have reporting/debate/conversation on the meaning of the data but without the filters we use to have in place all reporting has essentially become meaningless, untrustworthy, opinion pieces.
I do think some journalism is good. Many reporters at the Financial Times come to mind for example. But I found your reply did not really address the nature of OP’s complaint.
A propos of nothing, here is the story of a photojournalist I just came across. Took many photos of the cultural revolution and hid them for decades: https://twitter.com/tony_zy/status/1275267759216222209
Statistical significance is not the only epistemological tool around. I would even argue that, outside of some scientific fields, it is really not that important (and might even lead to a lot of wrong conclusions in the context that is used nowadays, but that is a different discussion altogether).
We are not some dumb statistical machine. We have an entire model of the world in our heads, and one single observation can have profound implications on it. The journalist reports to an editor, who maintains a system of job promotions, and all of this is connected to an institution that holds very real power. The OP observed this journalist manipulating the story, not in a random direction, but in their view in a direction that would appeal to the status quo. It is normal to update one's map of reality when confronted with first-person experience of an event that goes against what you've been told, and when the simplest explanation for how the world works changes in light of this direct observation.
And this is also how your mind works, and this is also how you formed your views on reality, including repeating the "N=1" cliché. None of it has anything to do with p-values.
Where do I find quality investigative reporting?
I support the Guardian and two regional/local newspapers and I' also forced to pay for the state run broadcaster here but I have to say that I also find myself reading a number of other sources to figure out what is really going on (for the Scandinavians here I'm one of those who will happily look to both Klassekampen and Document, in addition to vg.no and nrk to figure out what is really going on in certain cases, and I understand I am not alone in this).
Once you know a bit of history and a number of different angles you realize some things are horribly complicated and big media is making things worse by pushing misinformation, and by conveniently omitting facts. My favourite example from my favourite (i.e. least despised) local mainstream media source: X fired at a number of positions in neighbouring country Y yesterday. <Long article about this>. <Towards the end:> This happened after a barrage of rockets was fired from these positions shortly before. And that is the most honest of them. The rest seemed to just omit the fact that part Y fired first.
PS: The reason I support some of them is 1) because I feel it is the right thing to do. 2) because I feel at least one of them have actually managed to do some great quality investigative reporting as well as some great feature stories in between. We talk about certain companies and public healthcare organizations getting some much needed sunlight.
One that is limited, but wonderful is: ProPublica
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/propublica
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/propublica-is-the-lefts-b...
Abrams Foundation, Altman Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Barr Foundation, The William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, The Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Craigslist Foundation, Davis Wright Tremaine, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Dyson Foundation, Emerson Collective, The Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Goldhirsh Foundation, The Jerome L. Greene Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Leon Levy Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Metabolic Studio, Park Foundation, The Lisa and John Pritzker Family Fund, Charles H. Revson Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Select Equity Foundation, Skoll Global Threats Fund, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Solidarity Giving
My favorite in that vein is 'In The Dark' by APM Reports, which was a massive eye-opener for me in terms of flaws in the justice system (especially Season 2).
I've been interviewed by journalists a few times and I've seen at least a half-dozen other people be interviewed. The articles published are totally disconnected from what was actually said. Heck, I've had a journalist make up a quote and attribute it to me.
Don't talk to journalists. If you must, record everything.
In my country, there's a supposedly quality investigative reporting outlet. I did trust them for years. Then one time they did report on something I happened to know more details from other sources. Their reporting was complete BS bending facts to come to opposite conclusions.
Months later it turned out that political party loved favoured by those journalists had an internal struggle and the dude in article above happened to be on the "wrong" side. The report was about his overseas business, not political affairs. As a bonus point, "good" side was involved in bribery scandal.
Another investigative outlet recently published a series of reports on another politician that comes from unfavourable party in among mainstream media journalists. So far all of those reports seem to have little substance and they seem to be in she-said, he-said gray area at best. I'm pretty sure the dude do have skeletons under his bed. But investigative journalists seem to just post whatever rumors they got and see what sticks. Which is not exactly helping their quality investigative reporting image.
E.g. a while ago a newspaper here took me an interview/ they were building a story about people that had somewhat remarkable results in school & ample opportunities to leave (e.g. I participated in IOI and had 2 medals), and still chose to stay in the country - what were their motives, how it turned out for them. During the interview, I mentioned something along the lines that "I earn well enough to afford everything that I want, and my friends/family is here, I'm used to the local culture, etc". As a result, "I can afford everything" became basically the headline.
I'm sure that wasn't your intention but a profession won't improve if there's a way for its practitioners to shrug off criticism by telling themselves some version of the no true Scotsman fallacy.
This. Sometimes we joke that "all news is fake news"; but it is actually true!
There is also the phenomenon of reading articles about topics I know well and haven them be completely wrong which leads to to at least entertain the idea that the same is true for topics i don't know about. No idea what the solution is.
I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever.
How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?
What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector?
The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases.
The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - "I don't trust journalists" translates in most cases to "I don't trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint."
This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information.
Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn't mean you should distrust all apples.
""" Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
- Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002) """
This isn’t to say that all journalists are “bad apples”, but as the full aphorism says, “A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel”.
"Professional journalist" shouldn't invoke any more trust than "professional fund manager".
Surely they're not all bad apples, but they're not inherently incentivized to have integrity, so you must assume that they do not have integrity, for your own safety.
Today only one has remained, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a german-language publication from Switzerland. Lets see how long it holds up.
I'd call myself an "accidental moderate" in PG's terms, and there are lots of good accounts on Twitter that look at both sides of the issue.
You don't need to follow lots of accounts on a wide range of the political spectrum, but simply avoid the partisan/"belief bunching" preachers, and pick the smartest and most rational ones instead. This has been the biggest source of education for me recently.
In fact one of the worst experience for me in terms of trust for the media was working at a startup. The willingness of journalists to produce puff pieces, or print press releases virtually verbatim, on the basis of 5 minutes of SQL queries cobbled together and cherry picked to produce the desired result was frightening.
An average journalist distorts the truth knowingly and is a scumbag. An average person parrots lies and is convinced of them, and if you point it out, he/she'll be upset with you.
This is how religions continue even in the face of the best thinkers for centuries, coming up with the most considerate, foolproof arguments for why it's bullshit. At some point we have to ask: do people even want to be able to tell truth apart from bullshit, or do they just want to be led and told what to do by someone they like?
And then there is information that isn't important (it doesn't affect you and you can't act on it) and you're just seeking it out of habit (addiction really).
First, purposefully using an incorrect name (and Scott Alexander's online identity is Scott Alexander). In many other cases, even if the name is known publicly, and it is (or was) a legal anme, a journalist does not need to write it.
Second, for everyone having vocal opinions, it puts them in real danger. If revealing someone's identity (or a threat of such) makes someone close their blog, the journalist have already made their damage.
Third, it erodes trust in journalists. Such journalists make any other journalism harder, as people have justified reasons not to talk. Not every person wants to increase their risk.
I hope that until the journalist gets fired, no activist, whistleblower, a person who wants to speak about professional malpractice, controversial artist etc. won't talk to NYT. For their own safety.
They fired most of their senior editors in 2017 because they were both too expensive and enforcing old school journalist standards and integrity which doesn't generate clicks like hot handed opinion pieces followed by reverse opinion pieces does.
Though mind you that senior group was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, so take their integrity with a grain of salt.
As an NYT subscriber, I'm very concerned by this, but I think it's ironic that people skeptical of the media because they don't wait to get facts right are so willing to jump to the conclusion that Scott's account is the full story. I'm inclined to believe Scott, but just as a remotely plausible hypothetical: there's also been rumors of a hit piece floating around for a few days[1]. Maybe they uncovered something Scott doesn't want out there besides just his identity and this is his way of seeding distrust before it gets out.
[1] https://twitter.com/TauTeFox/status/1273775737527394306
If he's violating HIPAA or something, then sure, name names. But if it's simply about the content of the blog, then his nomme de guerre should suffice.
He's also, I suspect (I don't follow his blog), given and written enough to at least earn enough good faith to be taken at his word.
To be honest, I was hoping NYT would have cleared things up by now, but I've been monitoring Twitter and haven't seen anything.
Where were those when they wrote about Iraq?
All awfully convenient for the State Department, and equally convenient for the paper's relationships with their contacts within it and other parts of the US government.
The people who lied us into Iraq?
The name of the journalist in question is no secret; spend 5 minutes browsing Twitter or the SSC subreddit and you'll figure it out.
Not going to happen. The reporter was doing his job. No one will lose their job just because your favorite blogger agreed to go on the record for an interview and is not upset that his identity will be revealed.
Breaking trust, going against wished how people prefer to be addressed and endangering people for now good reason - well, it's at most style of irresponsible, tabloid-level journalism.
If NYT aims for tabloid level standard, indeed, the journalist was doing his job.
Did you read SSC's post? SSC didn't mention anything of a "promise" or "agreement" for the reporter to not use his name. The reporter found it another way.
Now, if SSC explicitly said the reporter promised not to use his name, then that opens a new can of worms.
If a journalist interviewed a popular camgirl who introduced herself as (say) LustyClaraXXX, and then "did research" to compare pictures, and revealed her legal name an occupation (say, a schoolteacher), would you consider it ethical?
If yes, why so? If no, why so?
It really depends on the context of the story, with additional nuances that a competent editor must consider:
Is this camgirl the central figure of this story?
What are her reasons for not revealing her real name?
You say she is a school teacher. What kind of teacher? Is she a well-known professor? Is she someone who teaches kindergarten?
Does she make more money from camming than being a teacher? That in itself could be another story about the system.
And on and on and on.
"Tabloid level" journalism is how I would describe stories full of anonymous sources.
Correct. But there are times when anonymous sources are necessary. Look at WaPo and NYT's political coverage. They use many political insiders who can't go on the record but reveal necessary information for the public.
One example: Trump's "shit hole countries" comment. That came from anonymous sources who were in the room, backed up with a few on-the-record commends from outsiders.
I've come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different target audiences. I occasionally read the Daily Mail (my mother gets it, don't judge) and the Guardian. My main source of general news is the BBC news site, but I also regularly read The Economist. From time to time I pop on to the Fox News site, partly to remind myself that the Daily Mail could actually be a lot worse. I listen to LBC in the car (A London based politics and current affairs talk radio show).
Genuine question - I'd be interested in how others approach this. Is my set of sources too skewed one way or another? Am I missing a decent balanced source, or should I add a credible source on any particular political leaning?
Reading e.g. the politics section of the NYT religiously for the past couple years, your biggest takeaway would be that Trump is an idiot who doesn't belong in office. Which, as far as it goes, is true, but there's no need to pick up a bad habit like reading the NYT in order to know that.
It's probably necessary to know enough about this week's going-ons for social reasons, to the same extent that it's necessary to know who's playing in the Super Bowl, but there are more useful ways to spend your energies.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
Getting the news from "both sides" is just getting two bullshit spins on the same topic, but the truth isn't in the middle.
You can get "just the facts" from outlets like Reuters. You may find that this isn't really entertaining and that really you do consume news for other reasons than getting informed. You may recognize that you actually want "the spin", you want the emotional turmoil, the sensation.
From that perspective, consuming news is more like a consuming a drug: A guilty pleasure that should not be overindulged in.
(See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window )
For the Americans reading, they have a US site too, might be worth checking out?
It’s probably well written though, the irony is that the right wing press is often externally funded, not intrinsically profitable, and so has more cash in the bank to maintain high production quality, if completely destroying any pretense of neutrality.
Just because a source has an editorial slant doesn't mean it doesn't provide any insight. The problem is when journalists push their opinions on you while pretending to be impartial.
It's actually the left wing papers that tend to lose money, as they're reluctant to go behind a paywall. They prioritise influence over profits. The Guardian is the clearest case of this.
That didn't stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family photos (both old and more recent ones) and published pictures of the whole family. The family could deal with the headlines, but that someone leaked family photos to the paper really hit them hard.
The story was so sensationalised and gory and completely off the scale. A few column inches would have sufficed, instead it was double page spread implying the family was in turmoil. The paper turned an already painful family situation in to an absolute nightmare.
http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=abc_classy
But this isn't slander. The Indo didn't lie they grossly exaggerated the truth in a gory manner.
Yes, the daughter was distraught - why wouldn't she be in the circumstances? But the Indos headline was along the lines of "AGONY AND PAIN FOR name AS FATHER PERISHES IN NORTH-SIDE INFERNO". This was accompanies by lots of quotes from anonymous "friends and family" about how she and her family were suffering. This article featured lots of personal photos. The really sore things about this is that these photos were only on display in her house, someone she trusted took copies with a smartphone and sent them to the paper.
As she is the copyright owner of some of the pictures I am going to suggest she invoice the paper for reproduction fees when she feels up to it.
In the case of Mexico’s drug war, most Americans are probably very misguided as to how dangerous it is for tourists and also how much of it is seen by the average Mexican on a given day. I feel I’ve learned infinitely more in one conversation on Tandem with someone who lives in Mexico than I ever will from a newspaper.
If I read about riots in my city, I know there was something going on but I can’t really trust that the news correctly identified the place, people, or motive. I may have the desire to learn more and so I will reach out to someone who was there our lives in that neighborhood.
I had a waking up moment in 2003 during the Iraq war protests. I learned that the NYT, which was my favorite because each issue was a literary work that could be read from front to back, reported as though they’d never been to NYC. If they couldn’t get basic details right when the story was literally on the same street (Broadway) then I don’t know what they’re actually capable of reporting.
For context, I like The Economist because it's mostly unemotional, information-dense, and the magazine comes in a single weekly thing to read.
I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better.
I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism.
1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles.
(This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.)
2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath.
3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful.
That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.
I stopped watching television news -- because the vast majority of 'news' programs are just entertainment with a veneer of news.
A good follow up would be "How?"
The coverage might have been factually correct, but just because they didn't like it doesn't mean the information was wrong.
Also, I once appeared in the Post and the Times in the same day when my friend and I got blown up in a steam pipe explosion (we were covered in mud but undamaged). The Times made us seem suave and hip (they mentioned my natty tie covered by mud) and the Post made us seem like victims of a tragedy. Such different pictures!
All very educational.
It was a really nice review of a show that... was cancelled.
First, know what message you want to get across, and focus on that.
Second, avoid almost all "what if" type hypothetical questions.
Third, make your own recording of any interview, and make sure the reporter is aware that you are doing so.
I was fortunate enough to be part of some media training early in my career, where the trainer (an ex-TV reporter) recorded an interview with one of the participants. The next day they played for us the video they had put together splicing different questions into the interview and editing down the responses. The resulting "interview" was a real hit piece, and the editing was done smoothly enough that it presented as a single continuous take (even with the switching camera angles). It would have been very damaging if it had been broadcast like that, and without proof that it was faked the PR effort to counteract it would have been challenging.
It's the same reason you don't talk to the police without a lawyer. Even if you're the cleverest person in the world, you're playing a game against an opponent who does this for a living and holds all the cards.
Had a nice conversation and then the story came out. He used 2 sentences from a 30 minute conversation to insert out of context in a piece totally unrelated to what we were talking about.
I’ve been on guard ever since.
I remember being amused by this article, because I actually worked there at the time, and we didn't actually have 50-60 staff to make redundant. If they'd let go of 50-60 staff from our department, we would have had a negative number of employees remaining (the actual number of employees was a bit over 40). It also reinforced my tendency to distrust journalists, who often fail to get even basic facts right.
(There was an element of truth behind the story – they did plan a significant round of job cuts, 15 years later I can't recall exactly how big, but it could have been a third of the department – it was just the numbers in the article had been impossibly inflated. And the plan was never to lay off the entire department, just a significant chunk of it.)
[1] https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/121830411
Daphne Caruana Galizia, Tim Pool, Andy Ngo are some who are constantly attacked both verbally and physically and thus I have bit more faith in them than I do for others "journalists".
Always keep Reverse Gell-Man Amnesia in mind.
The coverage of COVID has been more distressing than the actual disease. (Hint: epidemiologists specialize in studying the spread of diseases after the fact; asking them about an ongoing epidemic is like asking an expert on Roman architecture to build an office building.)
Here’s some example nonsense in the news. I regularly see the same story argue both points in each bullet:
- Sweden has had too many cases (deaths), and too few cases (people with antibodies).
- Last week 5% of 1000 confirmed cases died; this week 0.5% of 10,000 estimated cases died. “Experts” “baffled” but we are winning and can reopen (the same publication will flip the numbers and conclusion tomorrow)
- Antibodies might not lead to immunity, but the vaccine (which does nothing but cause your body to create antibodies) will be a panacea.
Bonus gem from yesterday:
New study shows kids don’t spread COVID. The numbers are based on studies of areas where schools and daycares were closed, and the kids were quarantined. Adults were more likely to catch COVID at work than from their quarantined kids. There was one (just one) school where the kids spread COVID amongst themselves, but that was probably an outlier. No one really understands how it happened.
Note that the high-level conclusion of this last article was probably right: kids usually don’t get symptoms, and asymptomatic people are less likely to cough / spread it. A stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess.
Just as there are individual dedicated, ethical police who believe deeply in fulfilling their mission the right way, there are good journalists out there who make the world better. But for every Ronan Farrow, there are a thousand Farhad Manjoos and Cade Metzes; for every Foreign Affairs, there are a hundred New York Times or Fox News. The net effect is the same as with police: understand that we've got a horridly imperfect system chock full of dishonest actors and engage with it on those terms. Don't talk to cops without a lawyer; don't talk to a journalist without a PR person and/or a specific plan for what you're getting out of the exchange and how to protect yourself from exploitation[1].
The Internet has greatly accelerated this trend. Pre-Internet, if by some miracle you managed to get enough honest, intelligent people together in a single paper, you could establish a culture of journalistic ethics under the aegis of the slack afforded by your local monopoly on distribution. But in the Internet era, you need to be fully competitive on the terms defined by the market, which, as described above, don't point towards honest, ethical reporting at all.
The tragedy with journalism is that government is usually a useful tool to address this problem: well-crafted regulation can shape incentives such that you don't need to rely on wishing for good cops, which is the direction that police reform discussions are taking. A heavy government hand, however, is anathema to the role that journalists are supposed to play in modern society, so this tool is off the table.
I've thought about this for a very long time, and I don't know how to solve this.
[1] This obviously doesn't apply in narrow cases like "observation from man on the street"
Advertising means the consumers aren't customers to be served but eyeballs to be harvested and served up.
[0]: "The Times sometimes agrees not to identify people who provide information for our articles...Sources often fear for their jobs or business relationships — sometimes even for their safety."
[1] "If compassion or the unavoidable conditions of reporting require shielding an identity, the preferred solution is to omit the name and explain the omission. (That situation might arise, for example, in an interview conducted inside a hospital or a school governed by privacy rules.) "
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/reader-center/how-the-tim...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/guidelines-on-in...
I've seen the New York Times omit the names of refugees who face persecution in their home countries. (I'm trying to find an example, but it's surprisingly hard to search for.) This is a different case, but I think it's broadly comparable.
I'm pretty sure that is exactly the "possibly detrimental for those he treats" I was referring to. I'm not sure why you sat he didn't state that, unless you're referring to how you dropped the "possibly" from my statement, but that would make your reply a non-sequitur, so I don't think that makes sense either.
> If there was a serious medical ethical concern here about just his full name he would never have used his real first names to begin with - no medical professional would take such a risk.
Not everyone publishes their middle name. Without that middle name being fairly public and a little foreknowledge about that being likely what was done, there's little chance of finding the correct person.
Hell, my first name is a very rare spelling, and middle name is common, probably about as common as his. You won't find a single thing about me searching for that combo, because I've never included my middle name in anything that would be published online.
There's also the possibility he doesn't go by his first name. He could go my his middle name (Alex) and we that would also confound most searching. He didn't even specifically say whether the first and middle name were in the correct order, so you can't really assume anything from that, since they are both very common first names and he was trying to maintain some anonymity.
As a simple example, his full name could be Scott Alexander Papageorgio, and I doubt you would get very far finding what you thought were useful results from any variations of Scott and Alexander.
As to the name, I don't think we really need a convoluted hypothetical - it's not his first brush with exposure and people have found his full name before. He was lightly pseudonymous and aware of it.