[makomk]

About the only US publication that seems to be making decent money from subscriptions is the New York Times, and I suspect they're at least partly trading on their name. The quality of their reporting... well, let's just say that I didn't expect to see the day when Snopes ended up debunking a conspiracy theory about the US president started by the NYT: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-profit-hydroxychloro...

[slg]

That isn't a debunking of the NYT's story. It is a debunking of an interpretation of the story that many made due to either news illiteracy or malicious intent. That line got shared all over the place out of context. In context it was not the focus of the piece and was instead buried in the details as a disclaimer regarding the larger issue of who profits from this drug. Snopes isn't disputing anything actually reported by the NYT.

[dmix]

I've come across so many terrible and one sided Snopes articles. This is why all the talk of 'regulating' fake news scares me more than the fake news.

Does every slant need to make their own credibility machine now too to keep up?

(Not making a statement regarding this particular link, just personal experience in other areas I'm more invested in. NYTimes went off the partisan 24hrs news cliff long ago and are just burning old reputation at this point, it's becoming old hat.)

[makomk]

The focus of the piece was, to quote the headline, "Trump’s Aggressive Advocacy of Malaria Drug". The article leads into the claim by talking about how that advocacy "has raised questions about his motives". Literally the only reason to mention Trump's "small personal financial interest in Sanofi" in this context is to suggest that interest is, in fact, his motive. Everything leading up to that paragraph is background recapping of stuff people already know; the article is structured with this as the key point. Crucially, the New York Times piece also omitted to mention the one piece of information that made this conspiracy theory utterly ridiculous and that Snopes used to debunk it: just how tiny that financial interest really was.

Now, a few of the more cynical and distrusting people did realise that probably meant his interest was so small that the narrative the Times would pushing would fall apart if they mentioned actual numbers, and they were right - but all the people who trusted the most respected and prominent paper on the planet not to mislead them into a nonsensical conspiracy theory took that narrative as it was intended to be taken and spread it all over social media.