Huge job cuts. Many journalists are now doing work of multiple positions in many places especially online media. New York Times has reduced the number of their total editors in the last 10 years for example. Every major online media had layoffs comparable to 10% of their total workforce in the last 5 years. It affects mid level journalists the most so there are more interns now.
Most of the jobs have been concentrated geographically. Whatever people say, environment changes how they act and what they believe in the most, likely to report.
There isn't enough exclusive content. Any big announcement or what rich people say can be read on social media by directly following their account. Why buy a NYT subscription for that?
There are thousands of big YouTubers reading the latest news from NYT to their subscribers and taking NYT's cut if they actually do something exclusive and costly.
News has become an entertainment commodity for people. The vast explosion of content means fewer people are willing to pay for less but greatly researched content compared to more content and noise.
While the newspaper does run ads, NYT's ad revenue is in large part driven by their 'native advertising' business (T Brand Studio).
It's a fundamentally different approach to advertising compared to what Google and FB are doing.
I think the problem is more that it's harder to quantify a carefully crafted brand campaign, and easier for middle-managers to look at a chart of click-through return rates and make decisions based on that.
I see this as the ability to test and measure beating out a better method that is less quantifiable. Basically the same thinking that leaves us with policies like No Child Left Behind where education has shifted from learning to test taking yet people are still under the impression they are the same thing.
While that seems intiutive that NYT is being sidestepped by free sources, they are in fact doing very well as a business and reporting record profits. They have no debt, in fact through cash on hand and lines of credit they have access to over a billion dollars. They bought out their headquarters in midtown manhattan. Their stock price is near all time highs.
People pay for quality. It's why people still pay for services like HBO instead of watching free content on youtube.
I agree with your analysis. Watching the last season of The Wire it really struck home the incentive structures, and how News organizations are ultimately businesses that are beholden to financial interests.
A business that unfortunately has lost its viability, which is how we've ended up in this current predicament.
A buddy was a photographer for a very well respected newspaper. In a grand cost-cutting measure the newspaper simply bought all the reporters iPhones and fired all the photographers.
The reporters are now expected to take photos for their own articles "Because iPhones make that really easy".
At Tronc, they had an all hands shortly after buying the NY Daily News. A staffer on the call said “we’re ‘New York’s picture paper’ but our equipment is all old. When can we get new cameras?” On the call, the execs said NYDN is losing money, so it will have to get profitable first. Then a few months later, they fired all photographers and social media people.
Yes I did. It didn't mention anything about more employees (mostly policies to encourage more POC). Although it does mention the expansion of their digital media. That seems fine to me but what about total employees from both digital and paper?
"It has hired hundreds of journalists to staff a newsroom that is now 1,700 people strong — bigger than ever. Its stock has risen fourfold since Trump took office, and the Times has consolidated its Trump bump into a business that includes Serial Productions, the podcast juggernaut; Audm, the audio-translation business; and a TV show based on the Times series “Modern Love” that was filming its second season this summer, until a COVID-19 false positive on-set forced it to halt shooting. More than a million people subscribe to its Crossword and Cooking apps alone, and the company has been able to weather the pandemic in part because it now has more cash on hand—$800 million—than at any point in its history."
It occurs to me that as we become more and more connected globally the less there will be a need for the media. Hear me out: let’s take this to the limit of our ability to communicate. Let’s say that we develop a direct interface between the brain and the Internet via some sort of implantable chip. Any information you want to know becomes instantly knowable in your brain. Moreover, you can request info about certain topics a la a curated Twitter feed. If an earthquake happens in Japan or new Oscar nominees are announced, you know about it soon as you think about it or think about “I wonder what has been happening today?” And of course all the information is gathered in aggregators that automatically verify that multiple people did witness the particular event to verify authenticity.
Under these conditions it becomes unnecessary for someone to do the basic legwork of seeking out stories and curating them, no? Interpreting the stories of course does require someone’s time and energy, but for example there would be no need to go and investigate what is happening with the earthquake rescue because the first responders could effortlessly share their thoughts/experiences, the person in charge could instantly add their voice to the info stream telling everyone what the clean up/rescue plans are, etc. What role would a newspaper play in a setup like this?
Now, we aren’t there yet. We are not a hive mind and sharing what we are witnessing takes time and effort. A first responder isn’t going to stop and tweet about what’s going on. And the even bigger hurdle is consuming this much information. That problem hasn’t been solved yet. But we are closer to that than not: Twitter and Reddit allow regular people to share what they are seeing: earthquakes, protests, awards ceremonies, graduations. Curation will only get better. Whereas before only the select few had a voice because it was expensive, now almost anyone can broadcast to a huge swath of humanity.
> And of course all the information is gathered in aggregators that automatically verify that multiple people did witness the particular event to verify authenticity.
In other words, "and then a miracle occurs". I don't see how this requirement could ever be met in general. For particular cases (like first responders at an emergency being able to directly feed what they are seeing and doing), perhaps.
I think it could be quite simple actually. If Paxos can do it, so can we :). I also definitely got a chuckle that you thought this part was impossible, not the brain interface.
People disagree very strongly about what they witness.
Take - for example - the question:
"Did Trump ask the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton in 2016".
The direct quote is this:
"Russia, if you are listening I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."[1].
That led to "Russian officials began to target email addresses associated with Hillary Clinton’s personal and campaign offices “on or around” the same day Donald Trump called on Russia to find emails that were missing from her personal server"[2]
Turns out that people disagree very strongly about what that means[3].
> I also definitely got a chuckle that you thought this part was impossible, not the brain interface.
That's because brain interfaces in the same general category already exist. Much less sophisticated, of course, but as the saying goes, that's just an implementation detail. :-)
Most of the big successes have been involved "reading" brain signals and using them to control things like the modular prosthetic limb or speech synthesis.
In contrast, it seems like most of the "write" stuff has been comparatively crude (e.g., phosphenes in visual areas), though the somatosensory stuff (also for the modular limb) is pretty neat. Have I missed something?
giving everyone a platform is a noble goal from some perspectives, but is it also what makes up the worse parts of platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube. suddenly every crackpot and grifter has been given room to spread their garbage opinions and views. just look at the massive disinformation and radicalization pipelines that have popped up. letting people beam info right into their heads would only make this issue worse.
I'm am not trying to say gatekeeping information platforms would solve this or is even morally correct - I am just trying to demonstrate the downsides of such a system that lets the floodgates open to content creation with lax moderation. if you want some semblance of truth and accuracy in the media people consume, it doesn't hurt to have some bounds on what is an acceptable source of news (again with caveats)
I don’t think there is anything noble about this setup. It would be incredibly messy and lead to more crap like what we just went through with having no leadership in the US whatsoever. It would likely be the beginning of the end of us, if climate change doesn’t get us first.
I imagine that having some sort of reputation system might eventually be the answer. After all “is john@example.com a liar?” would also be instantly accessible information. But again we know there are lots of powerfully people today who are dishonest and yet there is little consequence for them because enough people like the lies to prop them up. I don’t see that changing.
Seeing as the article is about the NYT newsroom, it's not limited to the readership. And the article directly says it's not just the readers: "a large portion of the paper’s audience, a number of its employees, and the president himself saw it as aligned with the #resistance."
If I said "all the audience of Fox is confused - Fox is actually left-wing, it's just a bunch of confused right-wingers who used it as their primary source of news", would you believe me?
The audience tells you the message. There's a reason no one calls Fox left-wing, or NYT right-wing.
I Was looking at a newspaper from the 1940s and the difference in content presented then, versus even now in large print newspapers, is astounding. There was so much more information conveyed back then, less opinions more information that people could use. It makes me think that our definition of news has gotten away from its original meaning
1940's? Try using the wayback machine to see CNN from 2000.
You will see instantly how opinion/intersectionalist/narrative it is now relative to then.
It used to be Cable News, now it's Cable Opinion.
The article points to this: there is an ideological war in the NYT that speaks to their bottom line:
"There’s still this huge gap between what the staff and audience and management want. The audience is Resistance Moms."
There's also a huge gap between editorial and news at the NYT, apparently, they don't like each other.
There are also different editors for each side - there is effectively 2 'Top Editors' so it's a weird dynamic.
To be fair though - historically, papers were always very biased, usually in the names of their owners. Rich dudes would buy papers to slander their political opponents. So a mix of crude facts and the polity stabbing each other in the back.
I would love to see an example, perhaps, if what you were looking at is digital. The way I see it, there is some inherent bias in even the newsroom, but I feel that the information I get from New York Times is accurate and substantial.
I tried that but it's no different. AP and Reuters articles are written in a style no different to what you'd find in a Guardian or NYT article. The problem is journalists as a class, not specific firms. They don't have any incentives to report dry, factual news without a slant.
Why doesn't NYT establish a separate "woke" section?
It's not like NYT can't publish bias; it has the Opinion section. NYT has grown into a media empire and is pumping out more content in more areas than ever before. Why not just create a new "woke" section, where progressives are given more reign over what to publish and in what tenor?
The erosion of journalistic standards in Newsroom and Opinion will ultimately bring about its downfall. Those standards are the reason why so many people subscribe. If the standards fall away, eventually some other outlet will come along upholding those standards and siphon away the subscriber base.
News has changed a lot since the internet broke newspapers revenue model. The trend began before the internet, with television.
Marshall McLuhan anticipated the change when he said the medium is the message. What he meant is that the UI and dynamics of each media format determines what kind of dialogs are possible.
Typographical media encouraged history, background, and timeless reflection. Television changed that by chopping news into 30 second pieces, with no background understanding required, infrequent depth, and a change of topic after every 3 stories for a message from our sponsor, after which you'd return to something completely different.
Neil Postman explains it in his classic 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. News has become entertainment. Entertainment has become trivia and indulgences.
I read a print version of the NYT recently and the feeling I got was quite different than the web version - mostly in that what was being pushed on you was "news", not opinion. Almost all of it could be described as "These People Did This Thing In This Place". It was great actually, dispassionate and informative. The editorials were packed away somewhere in the back, not worth looking for. A very different experience than the web version.
Consider the role of newspapers historically. It's not unreasonable to expect an institution of reporters of current events to have a section of opinion and analysis on the facts of the day.
That may seem antiquated now, with an unlimited amount of opinion readily available on social media or advocacy websites.
What newspapers did historically was mostly just possess the very expensive printers and delivery networks required to distribute media to large numbers of people, right? It would make sense for such organizations to distribute news, opinion, sports info, financial info, comics and other entertainment, etc.
It’s tempting to think that their real value was always the reporting itself, but then how do we explain why technologies like the internet (and even TV before that) have seemed to massively disrupt their business model?
"Person X did Y on Z date" is a perfectly fine information properly residing in the news section. Writing about what the consequences of Y are very easily leaves the purely factual space once Ys consequences reach a certain complexity.
I get the Sunday Washington Post. I get the same feeling there as well. The online version has more sensationalist headlines and articles, and also publishes opinion columns that never make it into print (like Hugh Hewitt and Marc Theisson) for the outrage clicks.
I still highly respect NYT but I agree that the tone of its headlines (if not the actual article text) in general has gotten more sensationalized over time. I now read both NYT and the news section of WSJ to get a more balanced perspective (I steer clear of the opinion section of WSJ because it's a total dumpster fire).
> In 2018, a group of data scientists at the Times unveiled Project Feels, a set of algorithms that could determine what emotions a given article might induce. ... “Hate drives readership more than any of us care to admit,” one employee on the business side told me.
Sounds like the exact same feedback-optimized gradient-descent optimization for engagement that is biting social media in the ass is affecting them, too.
If you're ever looking to absolutely lose all faith in humanity the journal's comment section is even better than facebook. Never thought I'd see the day where someone unironically says "LIBERAL NOONAN"
I would have expected the $40/month price tag for the WSJ to be a more effective filter. I guess there's plenty of racist-grandpa types happy to shell out the cash.
This is a good question: should news media like NYT report news without any political biases? Or is it OK for them to pick a side while reporting (progressive, liberal vs conservative etc).
If it is OK for media to report news with a bias, then will that accelerate the echo chambers across the political spectrum where news media only report on angles they favor?
We all have bias and there is no point in denying it. But that shouldn't stop people in professions like journalism aiming for independence and neutrality. People can be honest and intellectually honest, follow the evidence and logic impartially, in spite of their biases. The problem comes where they see their role as something different; then they become propagandists and political partisans who hide behind their supposed impartiality.
The problem is when one side lies a hell of a lot more than the other. Just look at the present situation where the US President is claiming to have won an election that he has very clearly lost.
If newspapers try to push back on those lies they get accused of being biased. At that point it is a very thin line between publishing the truth, and pushing one side of the story.
People in media will usually tell you that there's no such thing as unbiased reporting; even the act of choosing which stories are important enough to report is a biased act.
However, I must say that I'm not subscribed to any newspapers, and the main reason I've chosen to do so is that newspapers can:
- Work for political and business moguls by offering crowd manipulation as a service
- Work for ad buyers by trying to optimise engagement
- Work for subscribed readers by trying their best to provide quality information
Any of those is a valid business I guess, but I'm only interested in the latter. And newspapers try to sell me the third option without dropping the others. It's true that if something's free you are the product, but in this case they're trying to both make me the product and make me pay. Not cool.
You could consider donating to a nonprofit news org like ProPublica, then.
Also you are throwing out the baby with the bath water, just because news is funded by the rich doesn't mean every little mundane article they publish is biased. Oftentimes the facts are there, but the analysis or framing is biased. It's still probably more accurate than trying to get all your news via Twitter or something.
> Also you are throwing out the baby with the bath water, just because news is funded by the rich doesn't mean every little mundane article they publish is biased. Oftentimes the facts are there, but the analysis or framing is biased. It's still probably more accurate than trying to get all your news via Twitter or something.
What would the baby be in this case?
News are not fundamentally important to me, at least not to the point where I'd want to get them regardless of quality. The absolute crushing majority of news I read don't require or cause any action on my part.
Of course I'd like to be informed of current events, developments in politics or international news; but no information is better than wrong information - my alternative would never be social media, it's just the absence of general news.
My views might seem extremely pessimistic, but they're rooted in two facts:
1 - I am yet to see any piece of news related to my area of expertise where information is accurate. I should assume that it's the same for all areas, and mine isn't a weird exception.
2 - I am the son of a journalist, and happen to have close friends that work daily with press. Insider views on the journalism business can rapidly turn you into a cynic.
Other positions aside, I’ve found most rational people have a natural distaste for hypocrisy/double standards, especially when it’s institutionalized.
I read Tom Cotton’s op ed about civil unrest in the US and then Regina Ip’s op ed about similar issues in Hong Kong. I’m struggling to understand why anyone would think Cotton’s piece needs the post-publication disclaimer and the other does not. A clear double standard seems to be present.
Can you explain why you think that illustrates a double standard? What principle do you think the NYT is purporting to hold but is applying inconsistently in these two cases?
I haven't read either article (because I'm not a subscriber), but I gather that the former is advocating using the US military to put down civil unrest in the US, and the other is defending the actions of Hong Kong police to put down civil unrest in Hong Kong.
If you suppose the principle being applied is very broad, something like "no support of any state action against civil unrest should ever be published," then that principle does seem to be applied inconsistently. But that seems very unlikely to be the principle NYT is purporting to have.
Other comments are saying there is no such thing as news without bias, which is true. But I think your question is still meaningful, since news organizations can either try to recognize and correct for their biases or lean into them.
It seems like the NYT's decision to print Senator Cotton's conservative opinion piece was a poorly executed attempt to compensate for their prevailing liberal bias. It's a good idea, but I think they should solicit articles that might actually be convincing to the paper's reader base rather than easily-attacked incendiary pieces with glaring factual errors.
Opinion pieces are a special case, though. For non-opinion articles, I'd prefer that papers strive to lay out the facts as objectively as they can and leave the conclusions to the readers. Their bias will still show up in which stories they choose to promote, which is why I think it's important to get news from at least a few different sources with different biases. I use the opinion section as a rough guide to identifying a paper's editorial biases. Although it may contain articles that diverge from the paper's views, there is usually a clear trend.
It is impossible to report news without bias. Instead, publications and journalists should strive to be honest about what their biases are, and to do what they can to correct for them.
Opinion: i like it when journalists state their bias and their opinion, then give their report. If I know a classical Democrat is reporting on a trump rally I can expect some heavy bias. Etc. Maybe journalists and news anchors should have scorecards where they personally identify their opinions on issues from foreign affairs to drugs to crime and gender.
Ethically, is it okay to be biased towards one party (esp as a journalist) when that partys positions are objectively projective, dishonest, and baseless across senior party members, senior partisan journalists in the parties favor, and dutifully documented over the years?
No. They should disclose their biases though. It's a business. Why would you sell something that no one is buying?
If I started a news site, I would target the audience with bigger pockets and more comfortable with subscribing to online services (many people are resistant). That would be people living in expensive cities.
Even if you are a non-profit, you are still beholden to your donators. Mozilla can't go ape shit on Google.
I think that is totally fine. If you want an unbiased source you can read from a newswire service like AP or Reuters, which often feed directly into nyt and other paper's articles directly.
I think the times does ok at having some conservative pieces to balance out. They got a bit unlucky in all their republican columnists, Brooks and Douthat in particular, being never trumpers, but they try to throw in some pro trump op-eds.
I never understood this particular viewpoint. The Times is fairly centrist to begin with, and we have to balance that out by inviting the occasional fascist to write a column? What does anyone gain from that?
It is okay, and in fact preferable to pick a side, but they portray themselves as 'objective' and 'rational', when they're clearly biased. Just remember the Nick Sandmann story and the subsequent lack of introspection (as well as the continued insistence that the boy did anything wrong on the NYT's behalf).
I've observed the NYT's recent drift with dismay. Here's a recent example I noticed: https://imgur.com/a/uST4zE0
Somebody was murdered at a protest, and two bullet-points the NYT splashes with are "blame the victim" context hits because the deceased was on the "wrong" side.
It should not be necessary to visit a toxic site like Breitbart to get a balanced diet, but at the moment as an NYT reader I feel it is.
I agree that the bullet points are on the victim blaming end of things, but Far Right is a factual term and I'm not sure what the issue with it is - could you elaborate on your point please?
Sounds quite messy in the slack channels of the nytimes. A democratic (small D) atmosphere where the newspaper’s hierarchy does not seem to matter. Interesting that the tech and data workers of the times feel as justified in opining on the paper’s direction as the writers and editors. This article makes it sound as if the insurrection from within is driven partly by those who are not producing the main content of the paper.
I was surprised to read that the opinion section garners 20% of the reads despite being 10% of the content. I personally avoid the opinion section because it feels impotent; the republicans control the government and indignant opinions change nothing about that.
> Interesting that the tech and data workers of the times feel as justified in opining on the paper’s direction as the writers and editors.
A colleague at a hip American energy-tech startup tells me that this is the new normal for zoomers (<26 years old) in the workplace. "Speaking their mind" at all times on chat when it would be absolutely inappropriate for them to do so in person, no awareness of or care for the existing hierarchy. This meshes badly with boomers and gen-x'rs who implicitly expect a much higher degree of formality, and react in unpredictable ways to insubordination or feeling challenged. It's only going to get worse as the generational shift widens.
> As a “big S” Socialist [...] I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests. [1]
Like the great houses of Game of Thrones fighting a huge civil war, while an unstoppable army of wights readies invasion from the north.
Perhaps one can throw around accusations of bias in economics and politics easily, but our own world squabbles in internecine insular conflict while Global Warming, Species Depletion, and other major threats loom.
If your "side" denies the existence and threat of those and calls those "liberal" issues, then it taints the entire "side" it represents.
The denialism of global warming the fundamental argument to "reality has a liberal bias". Until the right accept the basics of rationalism and science, "centrist" media should appear liberally biased to the right wing zealots of our time.
I don't really consider them a force of nature as they are not a mindless mob, but a military with a general executing strategies. A mindless mob would be much less of a threat.
It started in 2017 and is one of the most wildly successful and popular podcasts over the past couple years. It has over 2 million downloads every weekday.
It's also the reason I subscribed to the NYT - just to support the podcast.
Tucker Carlson defended the NYT in 2009, saying the paper had a liberal slant but was careful about the facts. He urged conservative media to pay attention to accuracy. But sadly, after devastating revenue losses from 2010-2016, the NYT decided to become Fox News instead.
My comment was about the NYT, not Tucker Carlson. The point is that even in the recent past, the paper had credibility even among people like Tucker Carlson.
> Tucker Carlson is a despicable human being, utterly without guile or integrity or good faith.
Can you explain this? I don’t particularly like him and have only seen a few clips here and there, but I am surprised anyone might have such a strong reaction.
I teach a course titles "Free Speech, Fake News and Foreign Influence in American Democracy." As part of the course I assign my students to watch and discuss a lecture by Jack Balkin at Yale on the modalities of 20th/21st century media. In it Prof. Balkin really hits home the aspect of how we pay for the news in the 21st century under the model of surveillance capitalism. It is a fantastic lecture and well worth the hour or so.
>Gang, it would be great to shift the tone of this discussion,” Baquet jumped in to say during a fight about whether “Opinion”-section provocateur Bari Weiss’s description of a “civil war inside The New York Times
Right message, wrong person.
Journalism is in crisis but it's not money, there's more journalists today than there ever has been. More budget than ever before. More journalistic freedom than ever before. This freedom isn't the problem. The problem is that political activists are becoming journalists, this occurs at the same time where a political ideology is in their death throes.
USSR collapsing was a huge blow to the left-wing but worse China's free trade zones success is undeniable. Shenzen went from tiny town to over 10 million people because of capitalism. The free trade zones in China resulted in hyper globalization and all the 'problems' from China is because they adopted capitalism. In 2004, China made a huge change, they recognize private property.
Communism is dead, China has been shifting toward capitalism. Obviously you can't immediately switch to capitalism. Who are the remaining communists? Cuba? North Korea? Vietnam? Laos? Venezuela? Spain? Greece?
Not only is communism as dead as ever and it's leading to communist political activists taking over some journalistic positions and pushing communism. The problem is that they keep getting caught and rebranding. Marxists, collectivists, communists, socialists, postmodernists, etc. They go by many names and all propose the same thing.
The conflict in the NYTimes is that journalism tends to lean left and they certainly dont have any right-leaning viewpoints. So the conflict arises where moderate left-wing collides with the communist journalists.
Why is everyone a racist? Because communism requires a classless society and intersectionality demands this.
Why is Russia the big bad evil people trying to ruin everything? They are the ones who are anti-communist.
In my opinion the NYT has been the clearest and most unrelenting source of anti-Trumpism in the Trump era, and continues to push hard as Trump is not showing signs of letting go. Historically this may play out as NYT devolving into a hopelessly polarized sensationalist pseudo news source, but it could be cemented as a clear stand against despotic inclinations in the Presidency when few others were so determined.
You are confusing anti-Trump bias with telling the truth. Trump being a pathological liar means that any given story about him will sound bad. Example: “Trump said today he is still under audit and unable to release his tax returns. Of course there is zero reason why being under audit would prevent someone from releasing their tax returns and the most likely explanation is that there is evidence of tax fraud that can be uncovered if his tax returns became public.” This is what happens why you are a public figure who lies: it makes you look bad. The solution isn’t to blame the reporters but to stop lying.
Okay, sure, Trump misrepresented that maybe -- although his tax returns are typical of someone with lots of depreciable real estate, and don't have much evidence of fraud.
But let's talk about other so-called trump 'lies'. What about the continued doubts by the NYT that there would soon be news about a working coronavirus vaccine at the end of October, early November? What about the Steele Dossier that is now known to have been paid for by Russia (which Trump said at the beginning, but was claimed to be a lie)? What about the forced firing via threat of withholding aide of the Ukrainian prosecutor by Joe Biden, who denied being involved with his son's business dealings in the Ukraine? We were told that was lies, but there is indisputable DKIM evidence that an e-mail from Burisima to Hunter Biden thanked him for meeting his father while he was in office (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim). Are those lies too?
Sure Trump lies, like any other politician. But sometimes he tells the truth, and the truth is so ludicrous, that it seems like lies, but when it finally comes out that it was true, we all sit and say to ourselves... maybe we should believe the guy. But I mean... continue on with the denial, you'll just turn more formerly anti-Trump people into pro-Trumpers.
The implication of working coronavirus vaccine by end of October was that it would be available for use (you can find quotes from the Trump administration saying they were working on distribution of hundreds of millions of doses by the end of the month), not that there would be a preliminary report from a still ongoing trial indicating that the vaccine works.
The Steele dossier includes information from Russian sources. It was not "paid for" by Russia.
No one has argued that Hunter Biden was not being paid because he was a Biden. The question was whether it led to improper behavior on the part of Joe Biden. That email proves nothing. It's entirely plausible that Hunter Biden got this guy an invite to some social function where shook hands with the Vice President. This is also entirely ignoring the fact that the firing of the prosecutor wasn't some sort of one off idea that Biden came up with on his own. There are independent speeches by all sorts of people from 6 years ago that complain about the corruption of the prosecutor in question, which makes this whole point moot. The prosecutor was fired for not investigating the company that hired Hunter Biden.
Like most liars, Trump isn't inventing everything out of thin air, but he misrepresents so often and so much that you can't draw any useful conclusions from anything he says.
> The implication of working coronavirus vaccine by end of October was that it would be available for use (you can find quotes from the Trump administration saying they were working on distribution of hundreds of millions of doses by the end of the month), not that there would be a preliminary report from a still ongoing trial indicating that the vaccine works.
Trump said there would be news of a vaccine. Obviously, it won't be available by November. If you listened to Trump or Pence, you'd know that the US arranged for a working vaccine to be delivered by December or January, not November.
> The question was whether it led to improper behavior on the part of Joe Biden. That email proves nothing. It's entirely plausible that Hunter Biden got this guy an invite to some social function where shook hands with the Vice President.
And indeed, that would actually make Joe Biden's claim that he had no involvement with his son's business dealings a lie. Biden could have been honest and said, I met a few of my son's friends but we never discussed business. However, he didn't. He unequivocally stated that he had absolutely no knowledge of his son's business dealings and had no interaction with anyone from Burisima. That is a lie.
> The prosecutor was fired for not investigating the company that hired Hunter Biden.
Then why did the new prosecutor immediately drop charges and investigations against Burisima? if this was the reason he was fired and replaced, shouldn't the new prosecutor then take up the charges?
Sorry for the late reply. Hacker News has partially shadow banned me for not toeing the party line.
Quote: When the FBI obtained the dossier in September 2016, compiled by a former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, Comey told lawmakers he was unaware Steele's primary source was a suspected Russian agent.
A Russian agent is someone paid by Russia. Hence the dossier was sourced from misinformation spread by a paid Russian agent.
>the dossier was sourced from misinformation spread by a paid Russian agent.
You're moving the goalposts. You original said the report itself was "known to have been paid for by Russia".
It's plainly false that the report was paid for by Russia and your attempt to assert this as an indisputable fact by prefixing it with "known to" makes it doubly disingenuous.
Trump lies every day, and you have ... the ukraine thing.
Gotcha.
You don't convince people to stop telling the truth with your cute little nonsense about turning people pro-trump. On election day, this year, he claimed victory before all the votes were counted. If you support that, you don't support democracy. Nothing else compares.
Every time a right wing tries to say the "media" is unfair I ask for a single example and they always fail. 100% of the time. All just a bunch of whiners IMO.
But sure, please take pride in your support of Trump, who peddled the racist conspiracy theory that Obama isn't a citizen. Good for you champ.
Just look at the blatant lies he said about COVID19, it's laughable if the consequences wouldn't be so serious and tragic. Yes, politicians do lie (mostly in terms of vague while being up for election), but that doesn't mean Trump lying and other politicians lying are similar. I haven't seen other first world leaders state, without a doubt, that the COVID19 virus is a hoax, it's not real and all the other crap Trump espoused in regards to COVID.
I’m just curious, because this is something which happens with Trump constantly...
This particular claim isn’t as bad as the Charlottesville lie, but Trump didn’t say that COVID is a hoax — he said;
> ”Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.”
> ”One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”
The next day when asked about it;
> Trump: No, no, no. “Hoax” referring to the action that they take to try and pin this on somebody, because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them, not — I’m not talking about what’s happening here; I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the hoax. That’s just a continuation of the hoax, whether it’s the impeachment hoax or the “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax. This is what I’m talking about. Certainly not referring to this. How could anybody refer to this? This is very serious stuff.
But what the media reports is that Trump called nazis good people (he said exactly the opposite) and that Trump called COVID a hoax (he said exactly the opposite). I think these lies upsets a lot of people and drive a lot of support to Trump who otherwise wouldn’t support him.
Nice dodge of the question! I cited specific examples of ludicrous things he's said that have come true, and you cite small lies he's told. I can do the same for any politician you name, that doesn't mean they never say something worth listening to.
Like I said though... Keep going. People like you have converted me from a never Trumper to a Trump supporter. And people like you have converted my aunt, a former Obama-supporting liberal, into avid pro-Trumpers. Honestly, from my perspective, I say keep going on and do whatever it is you do. It'll just make more people like me.
> People like you have converted me from a never Trumper to a Trump supporter.
It’s not my job to think for you. And are you really trying to use reverse psychology to get me to argue with you? You are spewing conspiracy theories straight out of 4chan and Trump’s Twitter feed. You have lived under Trump for almost four years and you still support him? And I’m supposed to attempt to convert you back? No thanks, I have better things to do than to argue with people who refuse to look at look at reality unless it’s through the walls of their conspiracy theory bubble. Best of luck to you and your aunt. I hope you find some inner peace. I suspect that if Internet comments bother you enough to switch political affiliations that you need some of it.
I did not vote for Trump in 2016. Yes, for the past few months I have become a Trump supporter, ever since the fake impeachment attempt, I have supported the president. Supporting Trump for a few months after not supporting him for years is hardly some great evidence that I'm lying.
EDIT: Oh look downvotes at me explaining my very plausible change of heart on trump. Apparently HN knows my ballot better than me!
Saying the moment you became a trump supporter was when trump abused the resources of the United States to extort a foreign country for personal political gain is not a good look.
The way that the MSM has portrayed and reported on Trump I think is a huge source of his ongoing support.
For a more recent example, claiming Pfizer isn’t part of Operation Warp Speed, or that holding the samples on ice until the day after the election wasn’t partisan is bald faced denial.
Gore spends 30 days pursuing recounts in 2000 before conceding but Trump is supposedly a dangerous dictator for not conceding.
How about this one — Flynn allegedly violates the Logan act by talking about sanctions with the Russian ambassador, but Biden is talking policy with world leaders a day after the election is called and its AOK. Now, to be clear, it’s exactly what Biden should be doing and is clearly not illegal, but it’s the double standard which drives a lot of people to support Trump.
> Gore spends 30 days pursuing recounts in 2000 before conceding but Trump is supposedly a dangerous dictator for not conceding.
Are you comparing pursuing recounts in a single state when the vote difference there is around 500 votes out of nearly 6 million (an amount that is well within the range that recounts frequently reverse) to pursuing recounts in several states where the differences are far larger than any recount has ever overcome?
Yes? I doubt entirely Trump will prevail, but there's no question he's entitled to due process. Votes are still being counted. If the situation was reversed, I doubt Biden would concede until the last vote was counted either.
In any case, when he loses--and then looks like a sore loser--it can only possibly help democratic turnout in the GA runoff.
Anyway, that's arguing the finer points and missing the forest for the trees. The point is about the vitriol of the MSM toward Trump, and the role it plays in driving support towards Trump.
It's not hard to report that the election is over and Trump refuses to concede without calling him Hitler, but it sells more clicks when you do.
> If the situation was reversed, I doubt Biden would concede until the last vote was counted either.
The situation was essentially reversed when it was Clinton and Trump. Clinton was behind after the night of the election in 3 states that she needed to win, by amounts ranging from about 0.25% to 0.7%. That's comparable to where Trump is now in the 4 states he needs to win.
She conceded the morning after the election.
You really think Biden would be more like Trump than like Clinton in this kind of situation?
Yes, and she also said that was a mistake, spent the last 4 years saying the election was stolen from her by Russia, and said that "Biden should not concede under any circumstance."
MSM is not angry towards trump, they are angry towards a guy who sexual assaults women and who lies every single day. There is a difference. Too bad the snowflakes on the right don't get it.
You ever think there is a possibility trump just lies more? Every think about that crazy idea?
> I cited specific examples of ludicrous things he's said that have come true, and you cite small lies he's told.
So your defense of “Trump lies constantly” is “not absolutely every thing he says is a lie”, which is true, but man, that’s a really weak defense. Congrats, you set the bar low enough that he can get over it, but maybe having to set that bar so low is a problem.
My response to anybody that downvotes and disagrees with the parent comment is to just wait and see for yourself how long it'll take for the NYT or your news source of choice to ever report a negative story about Biden. Every day you read the news try to take a look through and find a negative story. I guarantee you the day will never come.
It absolutely blows my mind that people can say something like "CNN is relatively unbiased", and yet nearly 100% of every (political) story follows the same pattern: In the last four years I don't remember a single CNN headline that was positive of Trump. Of course you can say that he's a complete screw up that never once in four years did a single positive thing, but if you're honest with yourself, you know that's not true. The same way that in the next four years they won't publish a single negative article about Biden, but that doesn't mean he's a saint that never once did anything that could be reported on negatively. That people can't see how insanely biased these sources are really blows my mind. The proof is there for you to see - how many months or years will it take before you see a single negative story about Biden?
And yes exactly what you wrote in your second paragraph.
You can be pedantic all you want. But 90%+ of America’s won’t follow what you’re saying if you’re saying at best NYT is center right.
You also likely won’t be able to have the conversation without seeming smug (or insert other related adjectives) either. Likely hurting any discussion you have.
It is, however, a classic rhetorical technique. If you call a moderate liberal a conservative, then it “normalizes” more extreme left-wing views. The same works left to right. In the parlance of Classical Greek rhetoric, it is called a “douchebag maneuver”.
We can all agree that “Shining Path” Maoist rebels view the NYT as to the right of center...
Neoliberalism isn't a left view in America, either. While it's true that only since Trump it's been somewhat displaced by vague mix of kleptocracy and protectionism as the economic policy of the dominant faction of the Republican Party, it remains widely shared between both parties, there's nothing left, even in American terms, about neoliberalism.
> But 90% of people in America will have no clue what you mean when you say things like that.
If I rephrased neoliberalism as “corporate capitalism”, they'd understand it perfectly.
You must have missed the few instances when the NYT ran a rare Trump headline that could be regarded as positive, then promptly edited it to include leftward spin under the guise of 'adding context'. Here's the NYT's own reporting on one such instance:
"A print headline on Tuesday’s front page for an article about President Trump’s statement addressing last weekend’s mass shootings has added to a continuing debate over how news organizations cover his administration.
Times editors were concerned that the initial headline — “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism” — did not contextualize Mr. Trump’s message on Monday and decided to change it for later editions to “Assailing Hate but Not Guns.”"
This strikes me as an open acknowledgement that negative spin is a hard requirement when reporting on Donald Trump at the New York Times.
This editorial stance is a historical bias the NYT has had since at least the 1960s. You always had to read past it, if you chose to read at all. Some very good content wrapped in editorial offal. Made for a few good laughs if you were in on it.
It came out harder (to the point of abuse) on Trump because Trump is from NYC (big plus), major player in revitalization of Manhattan (big plus), big in pop media industry (umm, sort of plus) but was everything the UWS wasn’t (how dare that Republican Queens lowlife). If there ever was a use case for the word “intersectionality”, it would be the NYT view of Donald. And the NYT didn’t navigate those choppy seas well.
It is very difficult to be pro Trump while also trying to tell the truth. And the idea behind a reputable media outlet like NYT is that they tell the truth. Trump lies almost constantly, especially to his supporters. How do you report positively on something like that?
It is difficult to think of many businesses that have benefited more from Donald Trump’s presidency — aside from the Trump-family empire — than the Times. After Trump’s election, in 2016, subscriptions grew at ten times their usual rate, and they have never looked back. The Times has gone from just over three million subscribers at the beginning of the Trump presidency to its record of more than 7 million last month. It has hired hundreds of journalists to staff a newsroom that is now 1,700 people strong — bigger than ever. Its stock has risen fourfold since Trump took office, and the Times has consolidated its Trump bump into a business that includes Serial Productions, the podcast juggernaut; Audm, the audio-translation business; and a TV show based on the Times series “Modern Love” that was filming its second season this summer, until a COVID-19 false positive on-set forced it to halt shooting.
I think this is key. The journalist Matt Taibbi has been chronicling this and writing detailed analysis of the trend that these 'center-left' publications became suddenly 'far left' (culturally, not economically, if you ask me), very hyperpartisan coastal establishment DNC. Most importantly, the incentive structures within these organizations have found ways to 'weed out' those who don't toe the line: Trump out at any cost.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not lamenting Trump being out. I'm lamenting journalistic integrity being out. It's now fully acceptable to wage a war with a newspaper, something we criticized Fox and the Murdoch papers for doing. But the real loss here is the independent spirit; an independent mind holds opinion even if everyone in the room downvotes them, if they think that opinion is correct and supported with reason. Instead, what we have is a sort of herd mentality where the group decides what's good and bad.
That tech people were hired in droves and this is the result, I find quite scary given how influential young tech companies have become.
Most recently the Times wrote an article that asks the question, on the topic of the beheading in France of the teacher, did France do it to themselves? In reference to the Mohammed cartoons and its secular tradition. Additionally the Times seemed to support suppressing The NY Post's account based on their Biden article.
^^ Both of these examples would never be tolerated by the ethical journalists of yesteryear, when seeking the truth, no matter how ugly took precedence over hyper-partisan The End Justifies the Means attitude being seen here.
But it really comes down to money, doesn't it. As Taibbi documents, the Fox News model has spread to MSNBC and CNN, and of course the Times and Washington Post. Cater to your base is more profitable an idea. That's the real reason the Cotton thing was removed and an editor fired; they feared they'd upset their reader base - their clients.
When Trump is gone, what will the NYT do when an African-American is killed in a police matter? How will they spin incidents of unrest?
The Times has gone way past the pale in terms of left/right. They are now in the same boat MSNBC/CNN/NBC/etc. are in (the opposite boat than the one occupied by Fox/Breitbart/etc.) They won't be considered 'news' much.
Will they try to tack more to center, or go whole-hog on the left side?
> When Trump is gone, what will the NYT do when an African-American is killed in a police matter?
I didn't do a thorough search, but a brief search didn't turn up much difference between how the Times covered such things in the two or three years before Trump (BLM started in mid-2013) and how they covered them after. I'd expect they will continue to cover them the same way after Trump.
Uh, like they did when Obama was president? The same as long as current president isn't encouraging violence? You cutely act like trump doesn't encourage this crap. Nonsense.
Comparing the times to breitbart shows how ignorant you are. Breitbart peddled conspiracy theories (seth rich, dem voter fraud etc) while the times reports... the news.
NYT's slant is currently ammo for "class reductionists"[1], but if they were to enage in some of the dirtbag left stuff of the sort that Putin likes to sponsor, they could make the MSNBC Moms uncomfortable from both sides of the political spectrum (!), and antipodal-ly restore some bipartisan credibility.
The article puts James Bennet in a kinda good light, but that is wrong as the Opinion section is trash trolling of boomers and he made it worse.
It would be bad business sense in the short term, but they should admit that "columns" from the same people until they are long past being out of ideas are superfluous in the internet age, and keep the opinionated stuff to the magazine long-form investigative piece (like the magazine).
Basically keep the emotions at a minimum by maintaining an attention-span-requiring vs outrage-unleashing trade-off.
Huge job cuts. Many journalists are now doing work of multiple positions in many places especially online media. New York Times has reduced the number of their total editors in the last 10 years for example. Every major online media had layoffs comparable to 10% of their total workforce in the last 5 years. It affects mid level journalists the most so there are more interns now.
Most of the jobs have been concentrated geographically. Whatever people say, environment changes how they act and what they believe in the most, likely to report.
There isn't enough exclusive content. Any big announcement or what rich people say can be read on social media by directly following their account. Why buy a NYT subscription for that?
There are thousands of big YouTubers reading the latest news from NYT to their subscribers and taking NYT's cut if they actually do something exclusive and costly.
News has become an entertainment commodity for people. The vast explosion of content means fewer people are willing to pay for less but greatly researched content compared to more content and noise.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/20/u-s-newsroo...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...