[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.