[offby37years]

Bombholing.

> The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed.

> As George Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history.

> The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers.

> Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombhole-era-0cb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAWggqZQmE

[mistermann]

Here's a video where an ex-lawyer goes through a NYT article on election fraud and absolutely tears apart the misleading language they use to build the case that there was "no" election fraud:

https://youtu.be/TmgMu5sefzA

The beauty of this style of reporting is that the writer's skill with words allows them to plant specific ideas into reader's minds, but if anyone was to call them out on the carpet, they can completely truthfully say that nothing in the article is untrue, or explicitly asserts conclusions that any typical reader would naturally draw.

The NYT is arguably one of the best news outlets going, so I'm not sure how one could hope that this situation will ever improve.

[pwinnski]

Oh, it's an ex-lawyer? Not just some random guy sitting in his car? Thanks for including that tidbit, so I know this arbitrary YouTube video is credible.

Or maybe, just maybe, you're doing the same thing you complain about, and cherry-picking your sources and relying on stories that support your existing biases.

The answer is not to reason every sentence from first principles, like the HHG2G character who is pleasantly surprised every morning to discover that a pencil makes marks on paper. At every point, new information builds on previous information, and that usually works out reasonably well. There are exceptions, perhaps most notably in the case of the NYT, the post-9/11 Iraq war, but most of the time it works better than any other solution, and more importantly, any alternative would work less well.