[tablespoon]

> A better alternative is not trusting any of them. Realize that they're all distorting the truth, and yet also sharing a part of the truth, and dig deeper.

I think that's kinda right, but I have some quibbles. Basically, I feel the attitude that they're not trustworthy and distorting the truth leads to a kind of paranoia, feelings of helplessness, or succumbing to the trap letting an uncritical indulgence of one's own biases dictate what's "factual." I think there's a better way to say a similar thing:

You can trust the members if the mainstream media to try their best, but realize they make mistakes for understandable reasons and have their own biases, so you need to read with those biases in mind and try to correct for them with a measure of skepticism (e.g. a grain of salt, not a boulder). Realize that they're all sharing a part of the truth, dig deeper, and withhold judgement. The news is a first draft of history, written before all the facts are in.

[leereeves]

I think this is giving them entirely too much credit. The NY Times own editor admitted their staff was partisan:

> “What I’m saying is that our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told his staff in a town hall on Monday.[1]

No doubt some members of the media are still trying their best, but look how many of the best have left the media for Substack or other independent pursuits, because the climate in the big media organizations no longer permits the pursuit of truth over politics.

1: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-m...

[tablespoon]

> I think this is giving them entirely too much credit. The NY Times own editor admitted their staff was partisan:

So what that they're partisan? It's a myth that a good journalist must be personally detached and disinterested, since that's frankly inhuman. They should strive to act that way in their work, but they're not going to be perfect at it, and they'll still have their personal opinions. It's one of those things to understand and correct for.

> No doubt some members of the media are still trying their best, but look how many of the best have left the media for Substack or other independent pursuits, because the climate in the big media organizations no longer permits the pursuit of truth over politics.

I haven't been following Substack, but the format only seems like a good fit for self-important pundit types and maybe few name-brand journalists that cover a few narrow but particularly popular topics. Honestly, IMHO, the op-ed section (where the former live) is the least valuable kind of journalism (but it's unfortunately the only kind of journalism a lot of people pay attention to).

[leereeves]

> So what that they're partisan?

So it's led them to uncritically publish lies time after time.

They claimed "Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage", but the medical examiner found no evidence of injuries, and a thorough review of the tapes found no event that would have caused his death.

They pushed the Steele dossier, whose claims, even they now admit, "have never materialized or have been proved false" and which was the work of a "renegade, billion-dollar [private spying] industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news."[1]

They said “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church” but a thorough investigation by the inspector general, published under the Biden administration, found that “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.”[2]

Something that claims to be the "newspaper of record" should have higher standards and not just run with any story that suits their partisan agenda.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...

2: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/yet-another-media-tale-trum...

[tablespoon]

It's a mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that was timely.

If you don't want that, wait a year or more for someone to publish a definitive history after all the investigations are done.

And you're seeing that process in action: the NY Times wrote about the Steele dossier in a timely fashion and later wrote about how it was false after new facts come to light.

[leereeves]

They uncritically accepted these claims, without sufficient investigation, because they wanted them to be true.

Worse, the attitude seems to be "so what if they're partisan", as you said. Neither they nor their audience have learned anything from their many mistakes.

And that's being generous by allowing that they were mistakes. One would expect mistakes to happen in both directions, but as Glenn Greenwald said of the media in general, "The most notable aspect is that they all go toward promoting the same narrative."[1]

I suspect what's really happening here is that the standards for publication are drastically, catastrophically lower when the story is both powerful and politically convenient. That is not a mistake; that is prioritizing politics over truth. That is a publication that's in the business of propaganda, not journalism.

1: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-w...

[tablespoon]

> They uncritically accepted these claims, without sufficient investigation, because they wanted them to be true.

That doesn't match my recollection. For instance, I recall the reporting I read about the Steele dossier reported that it existed and made claims X, Y, Z, but it did not endorse those claims. And that's not just me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier:

> The media, the intelligence community, and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations...

On the Lafayette square thing, I don't recall how tentative the exact language the stories used was (and I certainly didn't read every one), but the the timeline of the events makes it very clear that crowd clearance and the photo op were closely coordinated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._J.... Which does back to my last point: it looked like a duck, it quacked like a duck, they reported it was a duck, but after a year of investigation and a battery of DNA tests, it turned out it was a mutant goose.

I wouldn't draw too strong conclusions from Greenwald's list. And frankly if those things are embarrassing he should be embarrassed too, because the "Havana Syndrome" story (#6) isn't over, yet he jumped the shark to claim it's been debunked. He honestly seems to be cherrypicking to support his narrative, which is one of those things you have to correct for.

[whocares2345]

> It's a mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that was timely.

Wow, this quite possibly is the stupidest thing I ever read on NH. No, there is no trade off between accuracy and timelessness! If you can’t guarantee accuracy then you can report that “a questionable pice of information that can’t be easily verified says X’. So that people who are into gossip can get their fix, while people who are only interested in undisputed facts do not. And yes - undisputed facts are where 99% of all people agree that this is a fact, rather than 49% or 53%. I also understand that it would eliminate 90% of news and stories, which admittedly is the point.

[everdrive]

I think that in isolation this is a completely fair criticism of the NY Times. My point would be that not every topic covered by them suffers in the same way. Check out some of their topic feeds:

- https://www.nytimes.com/section/world/middleeast

- https://www.nytimes.com/section/business/economy

- https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/nuclear-energy

- etc.

I'm not suggesting that these stories are all perfect. But, my claim would be that they don't suffer from the same problems (or at least to the same degree) as the very loud Trump vs. Biden bias that may exist there. It ought to be possible to say something like the following: "The NY Times probably has a measurable slant when it comes to reporting on the major US political parties, however that particular bias does not directly bleed into all other areas of their reporting."

[leereeves]

That seems like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect ("you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page...and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate...You turn the page, and forget what you know.")

That's always seemed rather strange to me. When I see that a newspaper isn't trustworthy on one subject, I think it's reasonable to doubt them on all subjects.

I'm not saying they're always wrong; sometimes they're even right about Trump. But no one should trust something simply because they've written it.

[everdrive]

I don't think gell-mann amnesia applies here. At least, it doesn't apply to me in particular. I'm moderately well informed about the topics I've posted, and not particularly well informed about U.S. politics. If anything, you've got it backwards (at least in my specific case) -- I'm reading the topics I don't know very well with increased skepticism, and am more trusting when I see that topics I'm better versed in are presented well.

I don't think being wrong on one subject damns a whole paper.

[leereeves]

> I don't think being wrong on one subject damns a whole paper.

I would agree in general. A paper that was consistently wrong about sports might still be trustworthy about science.

But almost every story touches on US politics, so misleading the public about US politics casts doubt on all of the stories. They're probably still trustworthy on sports and celebrity gossip, but politics influences science, medicine, business, economics, international news, etc, so their bias in politics is likely to infect all those other topics.