[throwaway0255]

> At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.

I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism.

Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake.

The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did.

I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story.

If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.

[jackfoxy]

I think the polite term for this is advocacy journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism I too have descended to being pretty much only a headline reader, partly because of the prevalence of advocacy journalism and partly from the shear volume of content of all types which assaults me.

[throwaway0255]

So "advocacy journalism" is basically a form of journalism wherein all the statements are technically factual, but the journalists intentionally and transparently ignore all other ethics and standards of journalism.

I understand why this will outcompete real journalism, but I don't see how it serves anyone.

It also saddens me that this practice has attained a degree of general acceptance that it's referred to as a "genre of journalism." I would refer to it as a more insidious and enduring form of propaganda.

[eksemplar]

Have you considered paying for news? If they are free, then you’re the product being sold.

Aside from that, your approach makes little sense. You read headlines and comments, but headlines are notoriously bad, especially on free news, and comments are a jungle. I mean, anyone could tell you anything and not ever be held accountable, unlike actual media, but you’d rather spend time on anarchy, uninformed opinions and outright lies?

Furthermore looking at this particular article, even if we say the numbers are lower than they are in the private sector, does that mean there isn’t a problem? We’re talking about people in power who are bullying their juniors who are trying to do research that may alter human history. Even if the numbers are lower than somewhere else, that’s still not good.

[kiriakasis]

Consider a city where the murder rate is half of the country wide one, it would be a little unusual to claim it has a institutionalized murder problem based on those numbers.

Maybe it has one (e.g. particularly bad neighborhoods) but it would be a weird conclusion from just the number

(I didn't read the article, did not feel that was relevant to this specific response)

[throwaway0255]

I'm not aware of any paid news sources that fit my needs, maybe you can recommend some.

I agree that headlines are bad, which is why I discount them almost entirely, as I mentioned in my original comment.

I'm not sure why you don't think it makes sense for me to trust my own independent research over everyday news sources. I think it makes a lot of sense.

I never said anything about comments. HN is the only place I read them, and I'm not treating them like they're a news source. It's just an online conversation happening among people in tech.

I haven't expressed an opinion about this Guardian article, or the root commenter's assessment of it. But if the numbers are higher in the private sector, that would suggest top UK universities have a bullying rate below that of the general population and comparable populations, which would suggest that those institutions do not have a bullying problem.

It looks like the root commenter is saying that the Guardian article is suggesting the opposite, and based on those statistics, the Guardian article is wrong. The root commenter is additionally claiming that this is consistent with a pattern they've noticed of The Guardian writing skewed articles to fit a narrative of institutional injustices.

As an experiment, I read the body of this article and did a bit of research, and I would agree with the root commenter. Within the opening paragraph, I'm already losing confidence in the article:

> "Hundreds of academics have been accused of bullying students and colleagues in the past five years, prompting concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."

Citing population sentiment is a common form of misdirection in journalism. "People are concerned that ...", "we're receiving emails that say ...", "people on twitter are ...", these are all just misdirection. There are billions of people in the world, there are people concerned about everything. Twitter has over 300 million active users, every point of view on every topic is being tweeted by everyone all the time.

Citations of unquantified population sentiment are factual in all cases and for all arguments and all narratives. Journalists do this to give support and credibility to their narrative (which is often skewed), and to make it appear that they aren't the drivers of that narrative (when they often are).

As an example, Wolf Blitzer can point to a scrolling list of tweets that are all unified in any point of view on any subject at any time, based purely on Twitter's broad demographic and volume of tweets. It doesn't actually mean anything at all, other than that Twitter still exists and people still communicate.

Wolf Blitzer pointing at that list will increase the prevalence of tweets reflecting that unified point of view. This Guardian article stating that their FOIA findings are "prompting concerns" is in itself what will prompt those concerns. "People are concerned" actually means "we are telling you to be concerned." It's all just misdirection and deception, there's no honest reason for a journalist to cite sentiment in this way.

A more honest writing of that opening paragraph would be something like: "Academics in UK universities have been the subject of complaints at a very low rate. I am trying to prompt concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."

Reading through the rest of the article, the bias in this case is quite blatant:

* 135 UK universities became: "top UK universities"

* A filed complaint became: conclusive proof of bullying

* 294 complaints at 135 universities over 5 years became: hundreds of presumably recent complaints at "top universities"

* Less than 1 complaint against an academic every 2 years per university became: "a culture of harassment and intimidation in Britain’s leading universities"

To me it seems that The Guardian told their journalists to leverage FOIA requests for news stories. So their journalists try to think of a FOIA request that might get dirt for a good story, then send in that FOIA request, and then when the FOIA is fulfilled they just write whatever story they were hoping to write when they originally thought up the FOIA request.

After reading the article, the headline itself actually appears to be an outright lie. It says "hundreds of complaints at top universities", but they only found 294 complaints in total from all UK universities. Unless every university in the UK is a "top UK university", the headline is a lie.

The Guardian also leads the article with a stock photo of people wearing academic regalia with their heads down and backs to the camera, which paints an image of guilty and shamed academics.

Relating this all back to how people consume news:

* Reading only the headline, and believing it, would've made me very misinformed

* Reading both the headline and the article, and believing them both, would've made me the most misinformed

* Reading both the headline and the article, believing none of it, and doing independent research to disconfirm all of it made me slightly more informed on this subject (if you can even call it that) than the average person, and took 20 minutes of my time

* The approach I detailed in my original comment, which would've been to read only the headline, recognize that in this case it bears no consequence for The Guardian whether any aspect of the headline is true or not, and therefore ignoring it completely, would've had a neutral effect on how informed I am, but would've only taken 1 second of my time

In this case I regret reading the article at all, and I think I would've been better off just reading the headline, recognizing that it can't be trusted, and ignoring it like I normally would.

There is still utility in headlines though, which is why I still read them. If the story is, for example, that someone won an election, or that a proposition passed, or that someone died, or that a hurricane is coming, or that a company was acquired, etc., then that will be stated in headlines and you can confirm almost immediately that it's factual.

The large majority of important news events are in that category.

From there, if the subject is important enough to me, I'll do independent research. That research usually won't involve reading news articles, because I've found them to be extremely inaccurate in almost all cases.