[xster]

Corporate media like NYT and WashPo etc that writes things like you must be crazy to not believe there are WMDs in Iraq are not serious news sites. Rich != serious. And hegemonic news smearing all sources of independent journalism and grassroot progressive political movements is just about the opposite of the point of this article.

[jmcgough]

Like them or not, the NYT and WashPo do some of the best, factual investigative journalism in the world. Have they been wrong? Sure. But they have extremely high standards for publishing a story, so you can generally assume that they're accurate. They also are the ones who break a lot of the biggest, most impactful stories.

I think a better criticism of them would be wash po turning a blind eye to Bezos and others that have influence of it.

[rorykoehler]

They practice the worst type of disinformation. Correct most of the time but when it really counts they publish incorrect propaganda (eg wmds in Iraq).

[briga]

Care to name any large news publications that don't do this? I can't think of any.

[kaendfinger]

Breitbart has an interesting theory on this: Present your bias, and admit your publication has a world view, because even NPR has a world view.

Nobody is unbiased, so stop trying to be unbiased, and present how you see it. Then, a real reader will go to multiple "view points" and gather their own opinion.

[confounded]

But this isn’t novel; anyone who’s read a few different newspapers in the same week (a “real reader”, in your words) can easily get a feel for differences in editorial ‘bias’/agenda between news organizations.

The problem is that being a “real reader” has a time and attention cost, and it’s relatively boring compared to picking a circle of political reality stars, and gorging on “hot takes” and outrage.

[thanatropism]

Reddit is a halfway decent way of doing this though.

[xster]

+1. I do wish NPR is fully publicly funded and gets some degree of medium term immunity from the current legislative and executive branch (media as a fourth branch of government / res publica?).

Now it's just a mouth piece for rich donors but has 'public' in its name for marketing.

[Angostura]

In other words, they occasionally screw-up.

[timtas]

WaPo and NYT can be counted on to amplify every rush to war and every expansion of the suveylance state. This is where the assumption of accuracy turn insidious.

[SamPatt]

>they have extremely high standards for publishing a story, so you can generally assume that they're accurate

Dangerous assumption for any given story. Skepticism always warranted.

[specialist]

Maybe. I tried WashPost. Mostly to pay for my news. Hated it. Mostly because of the format. Wasted too much of my time. If they adopted a HN or RSS reader style, I’d try it again.

[drdrey]

And when they make factual errors, they publish errata

[xster]

Technically legal https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/930510825617543173 is the name of the game. Smear than obscurely retract is the news of 2016.

[croon]

Why are you linking twitter screenshots about something relating to buzzfeed?

[xster]

Maybe another way I'd frame the issue is that there are 2 orthogonal themes.

1, whether the structural incentives of the institution is altogether aligned with the interests of the common working people (http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...) or with the financial elites (https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/cia-funded-washington-pos...), and

2, whether the publication follows scientific rigor to produce in-depth factual investigations (https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-atlantic-commits-malp...)

It sounds like you're mainly addressing the second theme (i.e. they're less prone to just making things up). Though I'd argue they're not 'serious' institutions on both fronts.

On the one hand, they're less likely to even attempt to enter into discussion about whether to think about starting to investigate the types of stories that are detrimental to the elite consensus (When's the last time WaPo wrote about the 99% or DAPL or TiSa or had an opinion about this last $700 billion pentagon budget?). The same way how political bribes work. We think politicians get bribed to vote a certain way. It's way way too late by that point. Politicians get bribed to stop items from entering into the agenda for select committees so it'll never reach any assemblies for votes.

On the other hand, though large multi-month investigative journalism pieces correlate strongly with the wealth of the institutions that publish them, large scoped journalistic rigor isn't somehow exclusive to corporate media. Medium sized institutions like The Intercept (before they got influential and turned corporate) and fair.org produces many well researched articles corporate media will never get into.

No one is saying corporate media don't employ disciplined honest journalists who produces quality work. In fact, I strongly believe everyone who goes to work for NYT and WaPo do so because they want to productively contribute and be a force of good for society. What I'm saying is those journalists don't get promoted or get fired like Phil Donahue while journalists who understand the game and self censor and don't get carried away with independent thought get airtime.

[tallanvor]

>When's the last time WaPo wrote about the 99% or DAPL or TiSa or had an opinion about this last $700 billion pentagon budget?

They write about the 99% pretty much daily. You can start by looking at healthcare coverage.

They published articles concerning DAPL as recently as November 16 (plus more recent ones on Keystone XL and the ANWR drilling).

The Trade in Services Agreement process has been very secretive, and unless they get sources, there's not a lot they can actually report. The last I know of any leaks about the process was in 2016, so I'm not sure it's fair to criticize Washington Post for not having more information about it this year.

Pentagon Budget - again, an article specifically about it on November 16, others that included mention of it more recently.

Basically you're making claims that are pretty easy to debunk.

[Super_Jambo]

WaPo is very good at publishing about everything. To extract sentiment you have to actually read their articles & see what they bother to put above the fold.

They published plenty of "negative" stories about Clinton during the primaries. Except if you read the stories in detail at publication time you'll see they downplay the negative story. Getting out ahead of the story and presenting it in the best light.

Grandfather comment has really set you up an excellent strawman to knock down there.

[wfo]

They cover these issues, yes, but always with a specific purpose and intent. Let's consider a case study, this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/upshot/bernie-sanders-wen...

They covered a tour Sanders did about healthcare in Canada, and used it as an opportunity to spout ideological tripe slamming universal healthcare and Sanders himself.

Even the first line is a weaselly backhanded attack on Sanders. Then,

>Now he wants to make Americans fall in love with his proposal to make the United States system a lot more like Canada’s.

This is an absurd thing to say if you did your homework and know that a strong majority of Americans already support a single payer system like Canada's. However it is not an absurd thing to say if you want your reader to walk away believing Americans just aren't ready for it.

What follows is an entire section attacking Sanders for being popular because he advocates for popular political positions(how dare he?). Then their description of his bill is right out of a right-wing rag

>His Medicare-for-All bill includes free care as a central feature. If the legislation became law, no American would pay directly for a doctor, dentist or hospital visit, and co-payments for prescription drugs would be limited. (Taxpayers would, of course, finance the system.)

Indeed, you would get all of this stuff for free at taxpayer expense in a snarky parenthetical as if to suggest "you wouldn't really want to pay for others would you?" Ignoring that we already pay more for worse healthcare than any country, and that the bill would save trillions in taxpayer money.

An entire section on waiting times for non-critical procedures a common tactic for attacking universal healthcare -- ignore waiting times in the US, talk about how people have to wait in the other system and write "for non-critical procedures" in the smallest print possible so you're technically not lying. They never ask the actual explicit question: should you be able to jump the line and get your nosejob a week early, kicking a poor person with cancer out of line so they die because you have more money?

Then they cite a study that correctly assess the US healthcare system as the worst among developed countries, but it notes that Canada's is only 9th out of 11th -- doesn't look so bad now does it?! -- ignoring the fact that countries 1-10 (with universal healthcare) were ranked pretty close together, and the distance between the US and the 10th is double the distance between the 1st and 10th.

Then a series of more blatant incorrect claims without evidence about the medicare for all bill in particular.

Then the icing on the cake -- a section about how "Americans don't care about fairness or healthcare", with strong evidence this time! No, wait, their only evidence is that the Republicans control the government. Hmm. Let's look a little deeper:

>In the United States, though, Republicans control the presidency and the Congress, and many candidates last year ran on a promise to roll back government support for health care coverage.

Oh, I see. People only vote based on healthcare now. And not liking a failed overly complicated Obamacare system that forces people to buy bad private insurance is the same is disliking universal healthcare, but the article already stated universal healthcare has strong majority support...

It's almost as if someone has an agenda to portray America as a right-wing country whose people care mostly about the interests of the rich to their readers, who happen to be the rich...

This is just one article. NYT puts out hundreds of these ideological hit pieces with a shallow veneer of objective reporting every week. The amount of human labor put into this propaganda is staggering.

Wapo is even worse. Jeff Bezos did not buy it expecting to make a profit. They have rarely criticized Bezos or Amazon since the purchase. They 'fact-checked' a statement by Sanders where he describes the amount of wealth Bezos has and agree the statement is objectively correct. But it did not fit in with their ideology, so of course they rated it a 'lie'.

If this is what 'coverage' looks like, I'll pass. Reading wapo or nyt as a person on the left is what reading Breitbart feels like to a center-right Democrat or Republican nyt/wapo reading neoliberal.

[hyperdunc]

I see two major problems with sites like NYT and WaPo:

1. There is important news they choose not to cover, especially for political reasons. (The news they do cover is usually of better quality than most.)

2. Their opinion pieces are frequently poorly thought out.