[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.

[leereeves]

I think you should double check your recollection. For example, the editorial board wrote:

> The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.

That's an op-ed, but it's making a factual claim, so it's doubly dishonest: it's misinformation and it's pretending factual allegations are just "opinion".

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-2016...

[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.