Who cares about what any of these self-important pricks think of themselves? (I'm thinking about both parts of the elite that's a part of this story - both the VCs and the hacks.)
The rich and powerful attack those who attack their interests, but now they are more unified.
Notice that there is actually very little concrete criticism of the media, instead you get abstract assertions ("hit piece", "fake news"), ad hominems and so on. When pressed the elites say that the reporting isn't wrong but that they should still be portrayed in a positive light. Obviously journalism can't work if they got their way.
>When pressed the elites say that the reporting isn't wrong but that they should still be portrayed in a positive light.
God I would love to see what you'd come up with as an example of this.
Media does terrible things on a constant basis. They're smart about rarely writing since sentences that are out-and-out lies, but their portrayal of people, companies, and grand social narrative is highly motivated at every level.
The reason is because every major journalistic organization is completely dominated by activists, which means that all their reporting is motivated to specific ends. Their goals isn't to tell the truth, their goal is to remake the world according to their ideology. A perception of trustworthiness is just a resource to them - to be built up in service and spent in betrayal. It's not an end in itself.
This story is a great example, since it's so incredibly motivated to do damage to these people. Every quote is pulled out and placed in the most damaging light possible. It's entirely a hit piece with a single purpose and that purpose is not to give readers a rounded understanding of all sides of the situation, but to gain power.
It's not a story. There is no news here. Nothing happened. It's a private conversation between friends and the only content is thought. The story is an accusation of thoughtcrime. The fact that we're hearing about it at all is an indictment of the media.
> God I would love to see what you'd come up with as an example of this.
@jason on Twitter said so explicitly in the last 24 hours, pg said so on Twitter some time ago.
The rest of your comment just illustrates my initial point: abstract statements, ad-hominems and proof-by-assertions.
That isn't to say that the media doesn't have biases or get stories wrong. The problem is that the elites try to use those facts to discredit all accurate reporting that is harmful to their interests. The honest and convincing way to discredit an inaccurate story is to point out concretely how it is wrong, doing anything else suggests that the story is accurate.
>That isn't to say that the media doesn't have biases or get stories wrong.
This understates the reality, dramatically. The biases are extreme, and the bar for accuracy is generally extraordinarily low, especially in new media, but increasingly in old media trying to adapt. Oftentimes there are a number of lies of ommission/misleading statements/snippets taken out of extremely important context in order to make the reality fit into the desired narrative. Frequently they're actively trying to drum up outrage against someone or something. It's becoming a more and more destructive force.
Just go look for the full quotes any time there's a blog shitstorm about something someone famous says. Sometimes, the outrage is justified, but frequently, the context completely changes the meaning of the snippet, sometimes 180 degrees from the way it's being presented in the media.
I'm not at all surprised that the people you mention who've been in the media a lot are annoyed by it, they're right to be.
Also, why are you on a throwaway account?
PS: This reminds me of the old GW Bush "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me... you can't get fooled again". I don't know if this is true, but I've heard it explained that he realized halfway through that he couldn't say "shame on me", or it would be excerpted and used relentlessly against him.
To demonstrate an obvious pattern you need to give a set of important examples. Of course you can find selective misquoting and distortions, but that doesn't establish a pattern, much less a pattern for important cases. (But even if that pattern was established each individual story would be true or false on its own merits).
That said even the example you linked isn't that strong. The omission of the word "these" in "these women" doesn't change the meaning of the paragraph because it's qualified by "they haven't been hacking for 10 years". Obviously the modified paragraph doesn't apply to women who have been hacking for 10 years. The alteration only matters if many women have been hacking for 10 years relative to men. Therefore, the altered paragraph accurately conveys the author's meaning.
The same for the ambiguity as to whether "we" refers to society or YC. Either interpretation has very similar meaning ("Women aren't starting Facebook because they don't have 10 years programming experience and neither YC nor society can undo that without a time machine).
Then the author talks about how they misspoke. You can't blame that on a journalist when they quote you.
Even if you don't agree the excerpts are clearly not obvious examples of journalistic malpractice. And most claims of misquoting and distortion are much weaker than even this, often completely baseless.
That's an obvious example of journalistic malpractice. I wouldn't edit a quote like that in a legal brief--and that is something that is supposed to be slanted rather than objective.
Legal documents have different standards, I explained why I thought the meaning was the same. When there are concrete refutations we can actually discuss them and each come to our own conclusion.
But even if we take this case as journalistic bad behavior (obviously there is going to be some), I wouldn't conclude, based on this evidence, that there is systemic journalistic malpractice against tech or elites, nor would I default to taking a critical story on tech as false.
There are other areas like foreign policy where you can default to extreme skepticism because people have done concrete analysis and demonstrated a pattern. In tech on the other hand, cases seem to be hard to come by (everyone just "knows" it's true) and people instead resort to name calling and vague accusations. But even in foreign policy where I know the reporting to be untrustworthy I don't discard an article out of hand, I'm just extremely skeptical and search out disconfirming evidence and articles. I can't do that with tech stories because nobody concretely describes why a story is false. The "What I Didn't Say" article is an exception rather than the rule.
The most likely reason why nobody explains why something is false is because it isn't. When the facts are on your side people pound the facts otherwise they pound the table.
The standard for journalism should be stricter than for legal documents. In legal documents, it’s okay to edit the quotes to emphasize the point you want, or edit out throat clearing. But you must accurately represent the context. That’s not what happened with the Paul Graham quote. The author edited a reference to specific people (applicants to YC) and made it into a general reference to women. You would not edit out an antecedent reference like that in a legal document, because it changes the literal meaning. (It doesn’t matter if you think the substance of the meaning remains the same. You don’t get to make that call. If you want to argue that the more specific point is logically equivalent to the more general point, you’re welcome to make that argument.)
Just thinking off the top of my head, the media ran with a quote from Steve Mnuchin that made it seem like he was saying that the $1,200 stimulus checks should last people 10 weeks: https://www.businessinsider.com/mnuchin-criticized-seemingly.... If you actually play the whole video, the parts everyone quoted were actually tens of seconds apart. Mnuchin describes the $2 trillion package of reforms, including many months of adding $600 per week to unemployment benefits. A reporter asked “how long is $1,200 supposed to last people?” This was a deceptive question to begin with: The $1,200 was a stimulus, not a replacement for lost income. It’s not supposed to “last” any amount of time. That’s what the massively increased unemployment benefits were for. So Mnuchin refocused the question on the whole $2 trillion package. He spent several seconds doing that, which almost all the mainstream media sources edited out. Then he finally said that the whole package was supposed to last 10 weeks. Then the story blew up that he said the $1,200 was supposed to last 10 weeks: https://www.themarysue.com/steve-mnuchin-wants-us-to-survive.... AOC tweeted “how much is your rent, $10?” Again—the $2,600 per month in extra unemployment benefits was supposed to pay the rent. The $1,200 was stimulus.
Then there is a bigger issue of how journalists frame facts and what context they leave out. When New York City was seeing 750 deaths per day, the media was showing beach goers celebrating spring break in Florida. Now, they’re showing “spikes in cases” in Florida and Texas, even though death rates in Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, etc., remain higher than in Florida and Texas (which are bigger states). Quick: without looking it up, what’s the ratio of COVID-19 deaths in New York to Texas? Florida?
To pick another example: news stories about healthcare routinely mention that Western European countries have universal healthcare. Then they talk about wealth taxes and taxes on the rich. Have you ever read a story in the NYT talking about how European countries pay for universal healthcare? (Regressive taxes like payroll taxes and VAT.) Isn’t it weird to talk about healthcare systems and taxes, and reference Europe to talk about the benefits they offer, but ignore Europe when talking about the taxes they levy to pay for those benefits?
Along those same lines, journalists always reference Europe when it’s favorable to a liberal narrative, but ignore comparisons to Europe when its favorable to a conservative narrative. So Europe always comes up in the context of healthcare and gun control. But it never comes up when talking about say corporate tax cuts (countries like Sweden, Canada, France, the UK, etc. have massively cut corporate taxes in the last 30 years). Reporters will write an article where they talk about how Warren or Sanders want universal healthcare, like Sweden...
> Invariably, media coverage of the issue starts talking about universal healthcare.
So you're saying I won't find a single media article about the black/white mortality gap that doesn't mention universal healthcare?
I'm nitpicking here, but you're complaining about journalists bringing their own agenda to the table while yourself giving in to the temptation to hyperbole. Surprise: It's really hard (and often dull as dishwater) to write the kind of utterly deracinated just-the-facts prose you wish the media would produce.
Quick: without looking it up, what’s the ratio of COVID-19 deaths in New York to Texas? Florida?
It's about 2:1 Florida to New York. 2:1 Florida to Illinois, too.
What strikes me about your comment --- besides the fact that it looks like you somehow have the rates flipped between the lockdown states and the southern states --- is that almost nothing you're commenting here is really the subject of much reporting at all. It reads as if you're summarizing the bad takes of opinion writers, not of reporters. If you want to build a case against the Take Factory, I'm right there with you. But, in reality, very little of newsroom journalism involves evaluating how progressive Angela Merkel is.
<Replying to rayiner's comment as sibling because of comment depth limit.>
I don't know anything about what legal writing requires. Journalism requires editing and making calls about how to fairly and coherently convey quotes because of space and attention constraints because every story can't be a deposition.
We can debate the WIDS article but the most important things to me are 1. that there is actually a concrete objection that can discussed 2. how this case contributes, along with other cases, to produce the alleged pattern of behavior, namely the systematic (and willful?) negative erroneous reporting on tech leaders.
The cases you gave are not tech-elite related and the domains they cover are subject to different influences (e.g. liberal bias), though they may deserve their own scrutiny. I am also not familiar with the reporting on many of these issues and most of your examples don't cite actual articles. But I already agree that video news media (which seems to be mostly neutral or positive on tech anyway) is a joke and I exercise more skepticism when I read about polarized left/right issues, especially coming from a lower status or more uneven publications like Business Insider.
But with respect to tech I have not seen much evidence of these supposed routine fabrications from marquee print media.
Either PG was spouting an empty tautology, "these women [who aren't hackers] aren't hackers", or he was using "these" as a demonstrative article when speaking about the women YC sees to make a more general point about women and technology.
You can agree or disagree with whether his roasting was justified, but he wasn't roasted for something he "didn't say" imho.
Certainly there can be problems with media, as well as with venture capital and their paid defenders (like the one hired by the suitcase lady mentioned in the story). But can you provide concrete problems? You talk about nothing concrete in your complaints about journalists being unfair.
It’s kind of incredible to think of these people, with all the power, fortune and access they have, spending their time attacking journalists. It feels like there’s a limitless number of more productive things to do. But the reality is that their press coverage is one of very few things they don’t have total control over and it drives them nuts.
Paul Graham, Ben Horowitz, Balaji Srinivasan, and Jason Calacanis have proven to the world how sexist and misogynistic they all are and many others(Naval, Marc Andressen) like them with in Silicon Valley. We will never refer to them any of our portfolio companies.
So these VCs are sexist because they blocked someone I’ve never heard of for an unknown reason? Maybe they are just fragile snowflakes like he implies, but that’s orthogonal to your accusation.
Also, blocking anonymous trolls online is wonderful for your sanity. I wish HN had the ability.
Anand did a great thing with tech journalism, but the notion that he, or any journalist, is in any position to gatekeep on who qualifies as a "thinker" is laughably vain.
I do not deny that VCs have a bias (an agenda, even) that leads them to predict a future which furthers their own wealth. But corporate media holds considerable cultural power, and to assume members of the corporate media only tell the truth and never act to protect or extend that cultural power is naive (or mendacious).
Whatever we may say about capitalists insulating themselves from failure, at some point they still have to put some skin in the game. Your average corporate journalist is arguably more insulated from the consequences of their failure than a typical VC.
Edit: I seem to have mistaken this person for Anand formerly of Anandtech. An unforced error on my part. My point about vanity still
Yes. Some of the most "real deal" successful people I've been lucky enough to meet, themselves are totally upfront about how absurdly lucky they were to be at the right place and right time in the past to now be considered "successful" or prominent.
I'd like to see the evidence of him as well, I was very suspicious of him during 21 as he was simply acting as middleman for traditional VC money (Horowitz?) to buy up Bitcoin via a very lofty mining operation. With a raised eyebrow I continued to remain cautiously optimistic, but then when they exited 21inc with a pointless thing like VC email after being a significant miner in the Bitmain days and then eventually got bought out by COiNbase I felt this was the same SV guys having its way again burning money to hide their gains.
To this day I still cannot understand why they didn't just buy bitcoin over the counter over time, would it have shifted the price so much that it would spook the Market and spike? I mean Draper has been pumping millions into it since at least 2013 and his DCA holding's ROI up until 2017 would have probably beat anything on Horowitz's portfolio. But the truth is Horowitz has been in the Bitcoin space for sometime as well, I want to say 2014.
Hell, when Jack Dorsey went all into Bitcoin and essentially pivoted Square towards that end, not long after selling Caviar and going to Africa and stating that he would move there to build Bitcoin usecases, it didn't do anything noticeable and he is still CEO of both Twitter and Square/CASH.
I guess I just don't get the machinations of these tech billionaires who think they can fool people into thinking they're not into a certain tech, and use absurd ways to prove otherwise.
Bitcoin isn't a currency according FinCen [1], and back then not according the IRS [2], either. Maybe they were just trying to stay under the radar, but that's a lucky guess and again they've been active in the space regardless since '14. Who knows, but still I wanted to believe Blaji could actually live up to his 'Buidl' Speech, and I'm actually surprised he isn't around here on HN somewhere.
Plenty of things to talk about in that piece. For one the idea of this app seems entirely bizzare. A membership only app on which extremely wealthy people chat?
I had to seriously laugh seeing Horowitz invest millions after his "time to build" piece. We wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters, and now we wanted skyscrapers and spaceships and we get a digital nightclub for nerds.
Secondly I think it shows very clearly how much the superficially liberal, tolerant, woke entrepeneurs of this generation resemble old business tycoons. As soon as journalists shine a light on their behaviour, the masks come off.
I remember a piece I read last year on class dynamics[1]. The author characterises today's class war not as the working class vs the rich, but as the rich against the professional and managerial class. The 0.1% vs the top 10%. I think this was a pretty good observation and it's becoming more and more apparent. Journalists, public representatives, Engineers with a sense of ethics and so on are coming in increasing tension with the actual owners of the companies they work for. It is on display at Facebook but also in this article.
> The author characterises today's class war not as the working class vs the rich, but as the rich against the professional and managerial class.
That's an interesting perspective, but not the only lens I would view this issue through. John Mackey (founder of whole foods) makes a point about the intellectual vs. the commercial class that seems relevant:
> Intellectuals have always disdained commerce. That is something that tradesmen did—people that were in a lower class. Minorities oftentimes did it, like you had the Jews in the West. And when they became wealthy and successful and rose, then they were envied, they were persecuted and their wealth confiscated, and many times they were run out of country after country. Same thing happened with the Chinese in the East. They were great businesspeople as well.
> So the intellectuals have always sided with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kept down. You might say that capitalism was the first time that businesspeople caught a break. Because of Adam Smith and the philosophy that came along with that, the industrial revolution began this huge upward surge of prosperity.
Very insightful. I too see it as today's vcs/robber barons self-justifying blabbering about their greatness, and how no one should be allowed to question them.
It looks to me like we might be about to see a pretty big kerfuffle between "tech" and traditional elite journalism, with non-trivial political overtones as well. This is kinda impressive to me since everyone kinda expects them to be politically aligned, but these sorts of alliances can also shift quite suddenly and unexpectedly. Both sides might then try to appeal to their more "grassroots" audiences, claiming that the other party is insincere and lacking in ethics. It won't be an outright call for "canceling", but the subtext will be similar.
Paul Graham, Ben Horowitz, Balaji Srinivasan, and Jason Calacanis have proven to the world how sexist and misogynistic they all are and many others(Naval, Marc Andressen) like them with in Silicon Valley.
I think Taylor comes across extremely negatively here and the spin in this Vice article just makes it worse.
Basically Taylor puts up a mean tweet about the Away CEO’s comments on the media (without actually engaging in the content of those comments).
Balaji responds to the tweet with the same wording Taylor used, but directed at Taylor herself (to point out the meanness).
Taylor tweets a cropped response image of only Balaji’s response and plays victim, rallying media people behind her (things escalate) - eventually they surreptitiously record this clubhouse conversation and write a hit piece without taking any responsibility for anything.
It’s all very high school and the journalists come across extremely negatively to me. If anything this proves Balaji’s point.
This whole whole affair seems as exhausting as it is childish and typical.
Irrespective of these circumstances, journalists need to get off Twitter. Not even stop reading it, that's fine. They just need to stop tweeting if they're so constitutionally incapable of not getting into moralistic pissing matches and turning themselves into stories like they're trying to get on worldstar.
I don’t disagree, but I’m also glad I came across this and it was all out in the open.
I wouldn’t have believed it was this bad without seeing it myself.
This allows me to just dismiss most of it and distrust by default (I can also just ignore some writers entirely - Lorenz in this case, Kara Swisher earlier).
There are obviously still great reporters (Steven Levy, Li Yuan for some examples), but there are a lot of terrible ones that misuse their power.
In general I think people are better off not talking to the press and just writing for themselves on their own platform.
The VCs come across as extremely thin skinned people who think no one has a right to criticize them and any complaints about their companies are unfair slander. Those arguments are basically the clear justification why journalism is important and exists. There might be some 'unfair and mean' journalists, but writing about the problems of google or whatever is important. Those people complaining are the embodiment of rich people who can't take any criticism without going out and hiring lawyers to try to squelch it.
This is ironic, because it's exactly the journalists who are doing what you accuse the VCs of doing. The second they get any criticism whatsoever -- whether it's on Twitter or on Clubhouse -- they immediately play the victim and write pieces like this one that question the nerve of anyone who dares to criticize the media industry. As if they're above it all. Journalism is a for-profit industry just like any other, so why shouldn't they be open to criticism, too?
According to VICE, the "audio chat had spiraled wildly out of control" because what, it was critical of journalists?
Also, notice that none of the tech people in any of these conversations said that tech should be above criticism. They've literally simply said that the media should be accountable, too. Do you disagree?
For decades the media has NOT been accountable. They were the only organizations able to reach the masses directly. Now other people can to, and those people can criticize media coverage without having to go through the media itself, and so you get whiny pieces like this one that hypocritically try to argue that others should be open to criticism but they're assholes for criticizing the media.
The comments from the robber barons (I mean god's special children "the entrepreneurs") are just embarrassing for them. In their own words, they hang themselves. Then compound it by complaining on twitter about it. You can't make this stuff up. It's like Bonfire of the Vanities, 21 century edition.
Both groups were largely talking past each other, as is the norm for Twitter. To me:
- Lorenz's tweet about Korey were unprofessional and personal.
- Balaji's response (and overall campaign against Lorenz) was unprofessional and personal.
It was notable to me that literally every single verified journalist who responded were defending Lorenz, and nearly every tech person defended Balaji. The depth of group level allegiances is disheartening.
On the surface it looks like two tribes having a petty squabble. Beneath the surface, these are two industries competing.
Tech represents an existential threat to the media. The media has always controlled distribution channel, and enjoyed a monopoly on advertising and on getting messages across to the general public. In the last couple decades, however, that has changed, and tech companies are increasingly holding the keys. A few examples:
* People rarely buy their news from newspapers and magazines anymore, but instead find it via Google search, Twitter, Facebook, their mobile phones, and other tech channels.
* When the App Store first came out, Steve Jobs famously required a 30% cut of The NYT's mobile subscription revenue, while also retaining all of the subscriber data e.g. credit card numbers and email addresses. Very bad for the NYT and other media companies who always controlled this stuff. Amazon has done similar things to the book industry via the Kindle.
* Facebook has famously made a killing off of controlling distribution for media companies, e.g. which stories appear in users' feeds, and how much these companies need to pay for the algorithms show their posts to more people.
* Google News aggregates news stories and their algorithms control which sites get traffic.
* Twitter breaks news faster than any media-controlled platform, including TV and radio. This often forces media companies and journalists to tweet before publishing articles.
Consequently, the bulk of advertising revenue and readership now goes to tech companies and comes through tech channels, rather than going directly to media companies. The media has lost a lot of the power (and resulting income) that it once had. This is EXTREMELY scary for the media. Like I said, it's an existential threat. Think horse and buggy companies looking at the early adoption of cars.
So, what to do about it? Well, the media works like literally any other for-profit industry. They're going to fight back against competition. Why wouldn't they?
What that looks like from a strategy perspective is to use the strongest tools in your arsenal. For the media, that's the fact that they're still the ones doing all the writing. They can dramatically affect public opinion.
The playbook is simple: Hire a bunch of journalists who are anti tech. They'll naturally write a bunch of negative stories about big tech companies. They'll write about the dangers of an ad-funded business, not mentioning that this was a model literally invented by the media. They'll write about the dangers of monopoly, not mentioning that the media has always had a monopoly on distribution. They'll write about the dangers of censorship, not mentioning that media companies have editorial teams and hiring bias for their journalists, and that they allow their advertisers to censor them. They'll write about how rich and out of touch the tech elite are, not mentioning that the media elite are just as rich and out of touch. They'll write about the problems with diversity in tech, not mentioning the lack of diversity in the media. Etc.
That's not to say the criticism isn't warranted. Of course a lot of it is. And imo the journalists are sincere.
But the journalists don't control or necessarily even see the big picture, any more than the average software developer at Google controls Google. At risk of sounding overly dramatic, they're all just pawns on a chess board. If you control a media company, you don't even have to tell your journalists what to write. You simply hire editors and journalists who have already proven sympathetic to your viewpoints and let them go to work.
So beneath people calling each other names on Twitter, there's a lot more going on.
> He proposed that the approaches to truth and accountability offered by GitHub, venture capital funding, and cryptocurrency all offer better models for journalism than "the East Coast model of 'Respect my authori-tay.'"
When people talk about tech/engineer hubris, this is it.
The idea that a "Github" model for journalism could offer the same level of a. resistance to external pressure and b. in-depth investigation as more institutional models is entirely without basis.
It’s not hubris to think about better models. Questioning the status quo is how many revolutionary things got started.
The institutional model clearly has major issues and there are countless examples of journalists afflicted with bad incentives and a clear narrative. Also the rise of social media has eroded the whole point of institutional organization since they just spend all day dueling on Twitter and writing about whatever unsourced hot take is found there.
Journalists do in-depth investigative reporting, they submit FOIA requests, they cultivate connections with other institutions in order to get stories of public interest to the public. I have never seen a "Github" non-professional style of journalism approach doing the same thing.
> they just spend all day dueling on Twitter and writing about whatever unsourced hot take is found there.
This is the hubris. Thinking that everyone else's job is way easier than what an engineer does - and journalists just spend all day on twitter without doing anything else.
> Questioning the status quo is how many revolutionary things got started
You can question the status quo and it's not hubris. You can also have instances where you question the status quo and it is hubris. I would say this is an instance of the latter.
> Journalists do in-depth investigative reporting, they submit FOIA requests, they cultivate connections with other institutions in order to get stories of public interest to the public.
Some do. Others maliciously crop social media comments and provoke twitter flamewars to create content.
I think the biggest problem with the tech industry is that it's insufficiently self-critical. But I think journalism has the same problem; I rarely see journalists writing articles about other journalists behaving badly. They have a tendency to protect their own, which mirrors my observations of how people in the tech industry generally respond to criticism of the tech industry.
Do you think the fact that some journalists maliciously crop social media posts means that we should replace the institutional model with a "Github" model of professional journalists?
I'm sorry, but I fail to see this as a crisis of the profession in the same way that the GP does.
> Do you think the fact that some journalists maliciously crop social media posts means that we should replace the institutional model with a "Github" model of professional journalists?
No, I definitely don't.
I think techies who think they've got all the answers for how to fix journalism are hubristic, but I also think journalists who think all is well with their industry need to get off their high horse and do some introspection too. I think both industries are in a crisis, and it happens that the two crises have nontrivial overlap; the tools the tech industry has been creating over the past 15 or so years have been exacerbating the problems in journalism. So no, I definitely don't think the tech industry is situated to solve the problems with journalism; judging by past performance the tech industry has a deleterious effect on journalism and I don't foresee this changing soon.
I don't know how to fix journalism, nor do I know how to fix the tech industry.
I don't know either but I do know it starts with figuring out what journalism is or is suppose to be. You know it when you see it is not a good position to progress from. I'm not thinking of a single answer or a definition of what it is not.(or not suppose to be) I also have no idea who should make the decisions here :-) Perhaps we should all make up our mind indevidually.
The people in question literally do that. One of their assignments is to watch Snapchat and TikTok and write about the popular events.
And yes, most people today are in agreement that modern "internet journalist" is not a hard job when you don't actually investigate much, don't source anything, and write whatever narrative you want with no accountability.
> Some in the Silicon Valley set turned their sights on the Times after Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist who ran the philosophy blog SlateStarCodex, deleted the entire blog because he said the Times was going to "dox" him by publishing his real name in an upcoming story. (It is worth noting that Alexander has republished SlateStarCodex blogs in books using his full name.) This event resurfaced an ongoing and tedious discussion among venture capitalist types about journalism ethics, business models, and publishing incentives.
I didn't know that. Is it true? What's the name of Alexander's book?
65 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadNotice that there is actually very little concrete criticism of the media, instead you get abstract assertions ("hit piece", "fake news"), ad hominems and so on. When pressed the elites say that the reporting isn't wrong but that they should still be portrayed in a positive light. Obviously journalism can't work if they got their way.
God I would love to see what you'd come up with as an example of this.
Media does terrible things on a constant basis. They're smart about rarely writing since sentences that are out-and-out lies, but their portrayal of people, companies, and grand social narrative is highly motivated at every level.
The reason is because every major journalistic organization is completely dominated by activists, which means that all their reporting is motivated to specific ends. Their goals isn't to tell the truth, their goal is to remake the world according to their ideology. A perception of trustworthiness is just a resource to them - to be built up in service and spent in betrayal. It's not an end in itself.
This story is a great example, since it's so incredibly motivated to do damage to these people. Every quote is pulled out and placed in the most damaging light possible. It's entirely a hit piece with a single purpose and that purpose is not to give readers a rounded understanding of all sides of the situation, but to gain power.
It's not a story. There is no news here. Nothing happened. It's a private conversation between friends and the only content is thought. The story is an accusation of thoughtcrime. The fact that we're hearing about it at all is an indictment of the media.
@jason on Twitter said so explicitly in the last 24 hours, pg said so on Twitter some time ago.
The rest of your comment just illustrates my initial point: abstract statements, ad-hominems and proof-by-assertions.
That isn't to say that the media doesn't have biases or get stories wrong. The problem is that the elites try to use those facts to discredit all accurate reporting that is harmful to their interests. The honest and convincing way to discredit an inaccurate story is to point out concretely how it is wrong, doing anything else suggests that the story is accurate.
This understates the reality, dramatically. The biases are extreme, and the bar for accuracy is generally extraordinarily low, especially in new media, but increasingly in old media trying to adapt. Oftentimes there are a number of lies of ommission/misleading statements/snippets taken out of extremely important context in order to make the reality fit into the desired narrative. Frequently they're actively trying to drum up outrage against someone or something. It's becoming a more and more destructive force.
Just go look for the full quotes any time there's a blog shitstorm about something someone famous says. Sometimes, the outrage is justified, but frequently, the context completely changes the meaning of the snippet, sometimes 180 degrees from the way it's being presented in the media.
I'm not at all surprised that the people you mention who've been in the media a lot are annoyed by it, they're right to be.
Also, why are you on a throwaway account?
PS: This reminds me of the old GW Bush "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me... you can't get fooled again". I don't know if this is true, but I've heard it explained that he realized halfway through that he couldn't say "shame on me", or it would be excerpted and used relentlessly against him.
But there shouldn't be any effort involved if all of this is already as obvious as claimed.
An example, since PG was mentioned: http://www.paulgraham.com/wids.html
In this case, a word was edited out of even the context-free snippet.
Feel free to look up the articles surrounding it.
That said even the example you linked isn't that strong. The omission of the word "these" in "these women" doesn't change the meaning of the paragraph because it's qualified by "they haven't been hacking for 10 years". Obviously the modified paragraph doesn't apply to women who have been hacking for 10 years. The alteration only matters if many women have been hacking for 10 years relative to men. Therefore, the altered paragraph accurately conveys the author's meaning.
The same for the ambiguity as to whether "we" refers to society or YC. Either interpretation has very similar meaning ("Women aren't starting Facebook because they don't have 10 years programming experience and neither YC nor society can undo that without a time machine).
Then the author talks about how they misspoke. You can't blame that on a journalist when they quote you.
Even if you don't agree the excerpts are clearly not obvious examples of journalistic malpractice. And most claims of misquoting and distortion are much weaker than even this, often completely baseless.
But even if we take this case as journalistic bad behavior (obviously there is going to be some), I wouldn't conclude, based on this evidence, that there is systemic journalistic malpractice against tech or elites, nor would I default to taking a critical story on tech as false.
There are other areas like foreign policy where you can default to extreme skepticism because people have done concrete analysis and demonstrated a pattern. In tech on the other hand, cases seem to be hard to come by (everyone just "knows" it's true) and people instead resort to name calling and vague accusations. But even in foreign policy where I know the reporting to be untrustworthy I don't discard an article out of hand, I'm just extremely skeptical and search out disconfirming evidence and articles. I can't do that with tech stories because nobody concretely describes why a story is false. The "What I Didn't Say" article is an exception rather than the rule.
The most likely reason why nobody explains why something is false is because it isn't. When the facts are on your side people pound the facts otherwise they pound the table.
The standard for journalism should be stricter than for legal documents. In legal documents, it’s okay to edit the quotes to emphasize the point you want, or edit out throat clearing. But you must accurately represent the context. That’s not what happened with the Paul Graham quote. The author edited a reference to specific people (applicants to YC) and made it into a general reference to women. You would not edit out an antecedent reference like that in a legal document, because it changes the literal meaning. (It doesn’t matter if you think the substance of the meaning remains the same. You don’t get to make that call. If you want to argue that the more specific point is logically equivalent to the more general point, you’re welcome to make that argument.)
Just thinking off the top of my head, the media ran with a quote from Steve Mnuchin that made it seem like he was saying that the $1,200 stimulus checks should last people 10 weeks: https://www.businessinsider.com/mnuchin-criticized-seemingly.... If you actually play the whole video, the parts everyone quoted were actually tens of seconds apart. Mnuchin describes the $2 trillion package of reforms, including many months of adding $600 per week to unemployment benefits. A reporter asked “how long is $1,200 supposed to last people?” This was a deceptive question to begin with: The $1,200 was a stimulus, not a replacement for lost income. It’s not supposed to “last” any amount of time. That’s what the massively increased unemployment benefits were for. So Mnuchin refocused the question on the whole $2 trillion package. He spent several seconds doing that, which almost all the mainstream media sources edited out. Then he finally said that the whole package was supposed to last 10 weeks. Then the story blew up that he said the $1,200 was supposed to last 10 weeks: https://www.themarysue.com/steve-mnuchin-wants-us-to-survive.... AOC tweeted “how much is your rent, $10?” Again—the $2,600 per month in extra unemployment benefits was supposed to pay the rent. The $1,200 was stimulus.
Then there is a bigger issue of how journalists frame facts and what context they leave out. When New York City was seeing 750 deaths per day, the media was showing beach goers celebrating spring break in Florida. Now, they’re showing “spikes in cases” in Florida and Texas, even though death rates in Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, etc., remain higher than in Florida and Texas (which are bigger states). Quick: without looking it up, what’s the ratio of COVID-19 deaths in New York to Texas? Florida?
To pick another example: news stories about healthcare routinely mention that Western European countries have universal healthcare. Then they talk about wealth taxes and taxes on the rich. Have you ever read a story in the NYT talking about how European countries pay for universal healthcare? (Regressive taxes like payroll taxes and VAT.) Isn’t it weird to talk about healthcare systems and taxes, and reference Europe to talk about the benefits they offer, but ignore Europe when talking about the taxes they levy to pay for those benefits?
Along those same lines, journalists always reference Europe when it’s favorable to a liberal narrative, but ignore comparisons to Europe when its favorable to a conservative narrative. So Europe always comes up in the context of healthcare and gun control. But it never comes up when talking about say corporate tax cuts (countries like Sweden, Canada, France, the UK, etc. have massively cut corporate taxes in the last 30 years). Reporters will write an article where they talk about how Warren or Sanders want universal healthcare, like Sweden...
So you're saying I won't find a single media article about the black/white mortality gap that doesn't mention universal healthcare?
I'm nitpicking here, but you're complaining about journalists bringing their own agenda to the table while yourself giving in to the temptation to hyperbole. Surprise: It's really hard (and often dull as dishwater) to write the kind of utterly deracinated just-the-facts prose you wish the media would produce.
It's about 2:1 Florida to New York. 2:1 Florida to Illinois, too.
What strikes me about your comment --- besides the fact that it looks like you somehow have the rates flipped between the lockdown states and the southern states --- is that almost nothing you're commenting here is really the subject of much reporting at all. It reads as if you're summarizing the bad takes of opinion writers, not of reporters. If you want to build a case against the Take Factory, I'm right there with you. But, in reality, very little of newsroom journalism involves evaluating how progressive Angela Merkel is.
I don't know anything about what legal writing requires. Journalism requires editing and making calls about how to fairly and coherently convey quotes because of space and attention constraints because every story can't be a deposition.
We can debate the WIDS article but the most important things to me are 1. that there is actually a concrete objection that can discussed 2. how this case contributes, along with other cases, to produce the alleged pattern of behavior, namely the systematic (and willful?) negative erroneous reporting on tech leaders.
The cases you gave are not tech-elite related and the domains they cover are subject to different influences (e.g. liberal bias), though they may deserve their own scrutiny. I am also not familiar with the reporting on many of these issues and most of your examples don't cite actual articles. But I already agree that video news media (which seems to be mostly neutral or positive on tech anyway) is a joke and I exercise more skepticism when I read about polarized left/right issues, especially coming from a lower status or more uneven publications like Business Insider.
But with respect to tech I have not seen much evidence of these supposed routine fabrications from marquee print media.
Either PG was spouting an empty tautology, "these women [who aren't hackers] aren't hackers", or he was using "these" as a demonstrative article when speaking about the women YC sees to make a more general point about women and technology.
You can agree or disagree with whether his roasting was justified, but he wasn't roasted for something he "didn't say" imho.
We have vastly different views of the role of the media and I truly hope that your view never comes to pass.
It’s kind of incredible to think of these people, with all the power, fortune and access they have, spending their time attacking journalists. It feels like there’s a limitless number of more productive things to do. But the reality is that their press coverage is one of very few things they don’t have total control over and it drives them nuts.
Why Calacanis still has that embarrassing “reasons people are not rich” tweet pinned is beyond me.
Also, blocking anonymous trolls online is wonderful for your sanity. I wish HN had the ability.
I do not deny that VCs have a bias (an agenda, even) that leads them to predict a future which furthers their own wealth. But corporate media holds considerable cultural power, and to assume members of the corporate media only tell the truth and never act to protect or extend that cultural power is naive (or mendacious).
Whatever we may say about capitalists insulating themselves from failure, at some point they still have to put some skin in the game. Your average corporate journalist is arguably more insulated from the consequences of their failure than a typical VC.
Edit: I seem to have mistaken this person for Anand formerly of Anandtech. An unforced error on my part. My point about vanity still
These people all got status through one lucky project at the right time. After that, their popularity became self-reinforcing.
It's about as far from meritocracy as can be.
I'd like to see the evidence of him as well, I was very suspicious of him during 21 as he was simply acting as middleman for traditional VC money (Horowitz?) to buy up Bitcoin via a very lofty mining operation. With a raised eyebrow I continued to remain cautiously optimistic, but then when they exited 21inc with a pointless thing like VC email after being a significant miner in the Bitmain days and then eventually got bought out by COiNbase I felt this was the same SV guys having its way again burning money to hide their gains.
To this day I still cannot understand why they didn't just buy bitcoin over the counter over time, would it have shifted the price so much that it would spook the Market and spike? I mean Draper has been pumping millions into it since at least 2013 and his DCA holding's ROI up until 2017 would have probably beat anything on Horowitz's portfolio. But the truth is Horowitz has been in the Bitcoin space for sometime as well, I want to say 2014.
Hell, when Jack Dorsey went all into Bitcoin and essentially pivoted Square towards that end, not long after selling Caviar and going to Africa and stating that he would move there to build Bitcoin usecases, it didn't do anything noticeable and he is still CEO of both Twitter and Square/CASH.
I guess I just don't get the machinations of these tech billionaires who think they can fool people into thinking they're not into a certain tech, and use absurd ways to prove otherwise.
VCs aren't allowed to invest in currencies.
1: https://klasing-associates.com/fincen-update-bitcoin-cryptoc...
2: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/03/25/irs...
I had to seriously laugh seeing Horowitz invest millions after his "time to build" piece. We wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters, and now we wanted skyscrapers and spaceships and we get a digital nightclub for nerds.
Secondly I think it shows very clearly how much the superficially liberal, tolerant, woke entrepeneurs of this generation resemble old business tycoons. As soon as journalists shine a light on their behaviour, the masks come off.
I remember a piece I read last year on class dynamics[1]. The author characterises today's class war not as the working class vs the rich, but as the rich against the professional and managerial class. The 0.1% vs the top 10%. I think this was a pretty good observation and it's becoming more and more apparent. Journalists, public representatives, Engineers with a sense of ethics and so on are coming in increasing tension with the actual owners of the companies they work for. It is on display at Facebook but also in this article.
[1]https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...
That's an interesting perspective, but not the only lens I would view this issue through. John Mackey (founder of whole foods) makes a point about the intellectual vs. the commercial class that seems relevant:
> Intellectuals have always disdained commerce. That is something that tradesmen did—people that were in a lower class. Minorities oftentimes did it, like you had the Jews in the West. And when they became wealthy and successful and rose, then they were envied, they were persecuted and their wealth confiscated, and many times they were run out of country after country. Same thing happened with the Chinese in the East. They were great businesspeople as well.
> So the intellectuals have always sided with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kept down. You might say that capitalism was the first time that businesspeople caught a break. Because of Adam Smith and the philosophy that came along with that, the industrial revolution began this huge upward surge of prosperity.
It looks to me like we might be about to see a pretty big kerfuffle between "tech" and traditional elite journalism, with non-trivial political overtones as well. This is kinda impressive to me since everyone kinda expects them to be politically aligned, but these sorts of alliances can also shift quite suddenly and unexpectedly. Both sides might then try to appeal to their more "grassroots" audiences, claiming that the other party is insincere and lacking in ethics. It won't be an outright call for "canceling", but the subtext will be similar.
Summarized here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-bet...
I think Taylor comes across extremely negatively here and the spin in this Vice article just makes it worse.
Basically Taylor puts up a mean tweet about the Away CEO’s comments on the media (without actually engaging in the content of those comments).
Balaji responds to the tweet with the same wording Taylor used, but directed at Taylor herself (to point out the meanness).
Taylor tweets a cropped response image of only Balaji’s response and plays victim, rallying media people behind her (things escalate) - eventually they surreptitiously record this clubhouse conversation and write a hit piece without taking any responsibility for anything.
It’s all very high school and the journalists come across extremely negatively to me. If anything this proves Balaji’s point.
I should spend less time on Twitter.
Irrespective of these circumstances, journalists need to get off Twitter. Not even stop reading it, that's fine. They just need to stop tweeting if they're so constitutionally incapable of not getting into moralistic pissing matches and turning themselves into stories like they're trying to get on worldstar.
I wouldn’t have believed it was this bad without seeing it myself.
This allows me to just dismiss most of it and distrust by default (I can also just ignore some writers entirely - Lorenz in this case, Kara Swisher earlier).
There are obviously still great reporters (Steven Levy, Li Yuan for some examples), but there are a lot of terrible ones that misuse their power.
In general I think people are better off not talking to the press and just writing for themselves on their own platform.
According to VICE, the "audio chat had spiraled wildly out of control" because what, it was critical of journalists?
Also, notice that none of the tech people in any of these conversations said that tech should be above criticism. They've literally simply said that the media should be accountable, too. Do you disagree?
For decades the media has NOT been accountable. They were the only organizations able to reach the masses directly. Now other people can to, and those people can criticize media coverage without having to go through the media itself, and so you get whiny pieces like this one that hypocritically try to argue that others should be open to criticism but they're assholes for criticizing the media.
Replace institutional journalism with a "github" model? Please.
- Lorenz's tweet about Korey were unprofessional and personal.
- Balaji's response (and overall campaign against Lorenz) was unprofessional and personal.
It was notable to me that literally every single verified journalist who responded were defending Lorenz, and nearly every tech person defended Balaji. The depth of group level allegiances is disheartening.
Tech represents an existential threat to the media. The media has always controlled distribution channel, and enjoyed a monopoly on advertising and on getting messages across to the general public. In the last couple decades, however, that has changed, and tech companies are increasingly holding the keys. A few examples:
* People rarely buy their news from newspapers and magazines anymore, but instead find it via Google search, Twitter, Facebook, their mobile phones, and other tech channels.
* When the App Store first came out, Steve Jobs famously required a 30% cut of The NYT's mobile subscription revenue, while also retaining all of the subscriber data e.g. credit card numbers and email addresses. Very bad for the NYT and other media companies who always controlled this stuff. Amazon has done similar things to the book industry via the Kindle.
* Facebook has famously made a killing off of controlling distribution for media companies, e.g. which stories appear in users' feeds, and how much these companies need to pay for the algorithms show their posts to more people.
* Google News aggregates news stories and their algorithms control which sites get traffic.
* Twitter breaks news faster than any media-controlled platform, including TV and radio. This often forces media companies and journalists to tweet before publishing articles.
Consequently, the bulk of advertising revenue and readership now goes to tech companies and comes through tech channels, rather than going directly to media companies. The media has lost a lot of the power (and resulting income) that it once had. This is EXTREMELY scary for the media. Like I said, it's an existential threat. Think horse and buggy companies looking at the early adoption of cars.
So, what to do about it? Well, the media works like literally any other for-profit industry. They're going to fight back against competition. Why wouldn't they?
What that looks like from a strategy perspective is to use the strongest tools in your arsenal. For the media, that's the fact that they're still the ones doing all the writing. They can dramatically affect public opinion.
The playbook is simple: Hire a bunch of journalists who are anti tech. They'll naturally write a bunch of negative stories about big tech companies. They'll write about the dangers of an ad-funded business, not mentioning that this was a model literally invented by the media. They'll write about the dangers of monopoly, not mentioning that the media has always had a monopoly on distribution. They'll write about the dangers of censorship, not mentioning that media companies have editorial teams and hiring bias for their journalists, and that they allow their advertisers to censor them. They'll write about how rich and out of touch the tech elite are, not mentioning that the media elite are just as rich and out of touch. They'll write about the problems with diversity in tech, not mentioning the lack of diversity in the media. Etc.
That's not to say the criticism isn't warranted. Of course a lot of it is. And imo the journalists are sincere.
But the journalists don't control or necessarily even see the big picture, any more than the average software developer at Google controls Google. At risk of sounding overly dramatic, they're all just pawns on a chess board. If you control a media company, you don't even have to tell your journalists what to write. You simply hire editors and journalists who have already proven sympathetic to your viewpoints and let them go to work.
So beneath people calling each other names on Twitter, there's a lot more going on.
When people talk about tech/engineer hubris, this is it.
The idea that a "Github" model for journalism could offer the same level of a. resistance to external pressure and b. in-depth investigation as more institutional models is entirely without basis.
The institutional model clearly has major issues and there are countless examples of journalists afflicted with bad incentives and a clear narrative. Also the rise of social media has eroded the whole point of institutional organization since they just spend all day dueling on Twitter and writing about whatever unsourced hot take is found there.
> they just spend all day dueling on Twitter and writing about whatever unsourced hot take is found there.
This is the hubris. Thinking that everyone else's job is way easier than what an engineer does - and journalists just spend all day on twitter without doing anything else.
> Questioning the status quo is how many revolutionary things got started
You can question the status quo and it's not hubris. You can also have instances where you question the status quo and it is hubris. I would say this is an instance of the latter.
Some do. Others maliciously crop social media comments and provoke twitter flamewars to create content.
I think the biggest problem with the tech industry is that it's insufficiently self-critical. But I think journalism has the same problem; I rarely see journalists writing articles about other journalists behaving badly. They have a tendency to protect their own, which mirrors my observations of how people in the tech industry generally respond to criticism of the tech industry.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see this as a crisis of the profession in the same way that the GP does.
No, I definitely don't.
I think techies who think they've got all the answers for how to fix journalism are hubristic, but I also think journalists who think all is well with their industry need to get off their high horse and do some introspection too. I think both industries are in a crisis, and it happens that the two crises have nontrivial overlap; the tools the tech industry has been creating over the past 15 or so years have been exacerbating the problems in journalism. So no, I definitely don't think the tech industry is situated to solve the problems with journalism; judging by past performance the tech industry has a deleterious effect on journalism and I don't foresee this changing soon.
I don't know how to fix journalism, nor do I know how to fix the tech industry.
What we are saying is that journalism has major problems with accountability and criticism.
The most valuable news I currently get is from newsletters by individual writers and their podcasts.
Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara and Cafe Insider, Stratechery, Money Stuff, recently persuasion.
I also like Stripe’s increment magazine, but that’s more similar to the old model.
I’d love to support more individual writers I respect rather than the orgs they write for.
And yes, most people today are in agreement that modern "internet journalist" is not a hard job when you don't actually investigate much, don't source anything, and write whatever narrative you want with no accountability.
I didn't know that. Is it true? What's the name of Alexander's book?