You can make the argument that MSNBC is a mirror of Fox News in terms of coddling its viewers, but if you're calling NPR or the New York Times "fact-free," you're only betraying your own ignorance of journalism standards.
Investigating facts and reporting them clearly is a solved problem. There are people who go to universities to study how to do this well, then go to work for institutions committed to doing this well. Their words should be treated differently than the words of some idiot with a Twitter account or a personality on an infotainment TV show.
FWIW, there is bias in NPR/PBS/NYT/etc, but it is not in the content of the reports, but rather in what is reported.
Any news org can only cover so much, there is an (editorial) call on what to cover and what not to cover. And in that (I've seen studies years go, so not handy) there is a detectable bias.
IMO this is fine. I understand that story selection has editorial bias, even in news reporting. I compensate by reading several different sources that have different editorial slants, but still fact based reporting.
In general, business focused subscription publications (WSG, FT, Economist) tend to be more factually accurate. People subscribe because they want facts and good / impartial analysis. People who watch Fox want to be lied to.
Investigating facts and reporting them clearly is a solved problem.
Do tell. What is a fact? Is it an assertion that is truthful? If something is not asserted is it still a fact? Is gravity a fact or an assertion without evidence? Was Ptolemy wrong or just complicated?
Who are these people who go to universities and study how to investigate facts and report them clearly? Are they the in journalism or normal schools? Are they philosophers? Are they physics majors?
How much of a fact is bound in the frame of reference or context in which it is asserted? Can two nominally opposed assertions both be true? Does that make them both facts? Can all facts be recorded someplace?
We can go down philosophical rabbit holes and end up in absurd places where we argue over the definition of "truth," but I was obviously making a statement within the context of our discussion about reporting the news and events of the day.
If it's something you're interested in, nothing's stopping you from taking a journalism class or two, and after doing so you'd probably look at certain media outlets differently.
In terms of reporting the news about establishing facts, where it domestic terrorists that stormed the building or protestors? What word are being used? Where it people spontaneously instigated by the speech made by Trump, or radicals who had organized the attack much earlier and who traveled to the demonstration. What is the narrative and story being told and why does one journalist chose one kind and the other a completely different one despite both using the same facts for it?
People sometimes say we live in a post-truth society. I would say that we live in a world where the narrative is more important than the truth, and part of the reason for that is that journalist are so well trained in creating narratives out of the crumbs of a few facts. I can even see the journalist students be given a handful of facts and asked to write a long article, each being graded on how well the narrative story end up.
Mr. Pilate once asked "What is truth?". Even though there are various definitions and approaches, I credit Pierce and pragmatists with the best one - truth is what we know at the end of inquiry/investigation. So, the "end of inquiry" being flexible, the truth can change as well, and I think, last decade and especially last year can attest to that. Something reported as a fact today - may not be a fact once we get more information in.
Was the new york times factful in its reporting on iraq in 2003?
And if they later investigated themselves and found that they published information that was not true, would that cancel the war pushed on us by the military industrial complex across all of our media and bring 500,000 dead Iraqis back to life?
Yes, this is a well-rehashed example where the NYT seems to have erred. But, poignant as it is, it is also increasingly further in the past - people born after some of those stories were written are adults now!
I think that giving more recent examples would strengthen your argument.
Given 18 years and 500,000 dead, the NYT has killed roughly 28,000 people per year for the past 18 years. Next year this number will drop to around 26,000 people per year, and the following year 25,000 people per year. In 2043, assuming no more flubs like the one that lead to the war in iraq, they will have killed 12,500 people per year.
There has been no incident as bad as the reporting that lead to the war in Iraq because the US had recognized that entering the war was a huge mistake and became somewhat resistant to the type of propaganda that lead to it.
Yes I was afraid you were going to re-emphasize the horrors of the Iraq war. But the thread is about whether the NYT can reasonably be called 'fact-free' or not. And if all you can come up with are inaccuracies from 17-18 years ago then I am (sorry to say that I am) simply not convinced - horrific as the consequences of those inaccuracies may have been.
So if the new york times comes out tomorrow and says it has found evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iran and the country goes to war, will you believe them?
It does not matter if the nyt is usually factful. If they can be subverted by powerful interests to push an agenda, they are not trustworthy.
OP also contains:
"Investigating facts and reporting them clearly is a solved problem."
You are absolutely correct, and no news organization is correct all the time - you should strive to consume a diversity of sources.
NYT remains one of the more reliably correct news sources in the US but they all make mistakes - sometimes accidentally sometimes maliciously. Since there are humans involved you need to understand the biases the news sources have and compensate for that yourself.
This is very a reasonable stance, consuming many sources is necessary to understand what sides of an issue may exist. And news organizations may accidentally report incorrect information (hopefully they swiftly retract it when they learn differently).
But shouldn't we not continue to consume sources that have made malicious mistakes? Even if the maliciousness was a bad outside actor feeding incorrect information to ethical reporters, isn't it likely that such a source will make a malicious mistake again? When the consequences are on the scale of directing the country into a fraudulent war, how can we ever trust their reporting on anything of consequence again?
What we're striving for is to consume media sources that produce the least number of mistakes when we're reading them - the number of past mistakes may be an indicator on the likelihood of future mistakes or it may not. I think trying to make any strong statements leaning on historical data should be carefully weighed.
I can't really answer what the best tactic for weighing news sources is since I think that the true measure would need to involve observing the reporters and editors behind each specific article which isn't really feasible. I don't think it's wrong for you to be hesitant about trusting NYT, and feel free to never trust an article written by Miller - I personally think she's shown a lack of care for discovering the truth - but... Eh, balance in all things.
> There are people who go to universities to study how to do this well, then go to work for institutions committed to doing this well.
And a lot of these people have lost their minds. I’m trying to explain to my college educated friends right now why using “whiteness” as a pejorative is a bad thing. As an engineer I’ve always been skeptical of liberal arts education. But I didn’t think it would destroy America.
"Whiteness" kind of is a problematic term. Italians, Slavs, and Irish people don't actually share all that much culture, do they? The term really is mostly about solidarity against Black people (Black being in fact a real culture, one we managed to create by kidnapping people and stripping them of their original cultures). The meaning of the term has even fluctuated over time, as different European ethnic groups were admitted.
Maybe it's OK if that term gradually goes away?
There's a difference between acknowledging that the term "white" is bad, and suggesting that Poles need to apologize and live lives of penance for what English slaveholders did in the 1800s.
Building a multi-ethnic Democracy is hard, and rhetoric like this threatens to blow up the whole thing. As a brown guy with mixed kids, I’m not eager to participate in this little experiment. So I’m not exaggerating when I said I think this will destroy the country.
Imagine we’re not talking about America. Imagine we’re talking about Hindu treatment of Muslims in India. And India is on track to become majority Muslim. But people decide to remediate past imbalances by attaching negative characteristics to “Hinduness.” A small minority of Hindus, who control the media and universities, pipe this message to to Hindu households. “The challenges we face dealing with our Muslim immigrants are due to our Hinduness.” What happens? Like millions of people die in a civil war. Obviously. Americans can’t see how obviously wrong this approach is because they’re the fish inside the fishbowl.
The use of “whiteness” as a pejorative is rooted in an odd psychological phenomenon of liberal whites: https://us-central1-spirit-fish-function.cloudfunctions.net/.... They are the only demographic group to express an out-group ethnic bias. Black, Hispanic, and Asian people, along with non-liberal whites all display a moderate (and about equal) in-group preference for people of the same ethnicity. So attaching negative connotations to “whiteness” doesn’t bother them. They view white people as the out-group. They understand that you can be white but not “white” and have a range of other identities: liberal, Democrat, New Yorker, etc. But for non-liberal whites, the same rhetoric serves to reinforce the moderate in-group bias.
Put differently: if you draw a circle on the floor and call it “whiteness” and say it’s bad, liberal whites will happily step out of the circle. But for non-liberal whites (the majority) they will feel attacked on the basis of their skin color, exactly the same as if you did the same thing with “Blackness” or “Asianness.”
To get people to disassociate from something bad, you need to attach it to an identity they can reject, while embracing some other, shared identity. When you say “this is not how we do things in America” people can all come together around that shared identity and reject the bad thing. If you attach it to some characteristic they think they can’t change, you force them to double down on it.
A great example of this is George W. Bush versus versus Macron. When Muslim terrorists hit the twin towers, Bush gave a speech where he said brought Muslims into the fold: https://qz.com/1074258/911-video-and-text-of-george-w-bushs-.... He said we all watched the planes crash into the towers and we Muslims condemned it all around the world. (Which of course wasn’t strictly true.) It worked. If you were a Muslim and you heard that speech, you had no reason to feel attacked. You were being invited into a group where you could condemn this bad thing while doubling down on your identity. As someone with a Muslim last name during that time, I’m eternally grateful for that. I wasn’t thankful then, because at the time, I just assumed this was how America did things. I didn’t realize appeal to universal values would one day be on the chopping block.
Contrast what’s happening in France with Charlie Hebdo and subsequent events. Macron responded by making Islam the issue. He’s giving speeches about radicalization of Islam, etc. He’s not strictly wrong. Almost 1 in 5 French Muslims polled said the didn’t condemn the killings. But the other 80% now feel attacked and forced to maintain group solidarity.
This is happening right now in America and it’s bad. When my aunt in law (who is a sweet woman but a Trump supporter) reads on Breitbart the New York Times tweets blaming the Capitol insurrection on “whiteness” how does she react? “Yes, I condemn the lawlessness and I will strive to be less white!” She doesn’t even think of herself as “white” but she knows she is white as a factual matter, and she doesn’t have a college degree and doesn’t understand how we can “get rid of whiteness” without getting rid of white people. She would absolutely condemn what happened. She votes Republican because she doesn’t believe in abortion. But now she feels attacked based on her skin color. And what other identity would she latch onto anyway? She’s not a New York lawyer who has a plethora of other identity groups to fall back on, and the media shits on those too. She lives in rural Oregon, she’s white and so is almost everyone around her (except her grandkids and us, which include a range of brown and Black), and she works a service job.
White people who aren’t privileged don’t feel privileged. Liberals do not understand this and it’s a dangerous misconception about our reality. Normal white people don’t believe in this “punch up versus punch down stuff.” Those are ideas that exist in books, not in peoples’ heads. All you’re doing when you use “whiteness” is attacking people for something they can’t control and creating a white identity that didn’t exist before. And that’s a recipe for disaster.
If you seriously think that was why Partition happened (elite Hindu messages about Hinduness) I have a bridge to sell you in London. Gandhi who undertook to criticize all sorts of things about Hinduness didn’t deserve assassination for it nor did he cause Partition. How about separate drinking glasses all over the country for separate religions in railway stations, how about Hindus handing out water in Lahore supposedly to Brahmins but keeping a dirty nasty cup aside for any Muslims who happen to ask, how about my 8 year old grandfather in Karnataka being treated as if his touch defiled neighbor’s tin and brass pots like untouchable because he was Muslim. Those are very much issues with Hinduness and I suspect you need to have a little powwow with your parents.
If most of your argument is that the US is actually a lot better at racial inclusiveness than much of the rest of the world, I feel like it's easy to agree with that without signing on to the claim that "anti-whiteness" is going to destroy the country.
I don't think the idea is going to destroy the country sitting in a book. It's easy enough to understand when you parse through it and have a degree in parsing through tricky language.
What's going to destroy the country is respectable news outlets running headlines like "The Unbearable Whiteness of Storming the Capitol." It's language that's designed to make college-educated elite feel like they're in the in-group, while enraging normal people who don't see the term any differently than if you had inserted any other race in there.
I have tried to explain these academic terms to my dad. He eventually got it, but says "well if it stays in academia it's fine." My mom doesn't get it at all. She's got a graduate degree, but has a language gap. My in laws in exurban and rural America mostly think it's a racial attack on them. If they're somewhat right-leaning to begin with, to them it's as if respectable media has normalized overt racism against white people.
Normalizing this will provoke something very ugly for no reason. There are shared premises that exist when you use terminology like that among educated people. In particular, most people have internalized the idea that "you can't be racist against white people" and things like that (or at least won't complain about it too loudly). Those shared assumptions do not exist when you're talking to the public at large, in a context that's already adversarial and charged.
I sort of get where you're coming from, but while "the unbearable whiteness" of anything is a horrible headline, the racial component of the Capitol attack is pretty clear, isn't it? The US Attorney just a couple hours ago complained publicly that the Capitol Police didn't apprehend the attackers; peaceful racial justice protesters were arrested and beaten over the summer; T. Greg Doucette tracked and lost count of all the video evidence of it. There is an obvious double standard.
The problem I keep having with these arguments is that it's easy for me to accept that Kendi and DiAngelo are grifters, but the people pointing that out also want me to swallow a bunch of other less tenable stuff.
Ibram Kendi is a professor. I’ve read some of his work and I think the basic point is sound, and something I’ve agreed with for years. My concern is the degree to which these ideas have percolated through the the media, etc., which causes well meaning people to think and talk about these issues in a way that doesn’t make sense to people. There is a thought process that causes a bunch of people involved in an article to green light use of “whiteness” as a pejorative when they would never do so to refer to another racial category. Most of the public would call it racist.
This happened with the vaccine prioritization at the CDC. I understand the arguments for it. Most Americans do not believe that life saving vaccines should be allocated based on peoples’ skin color. They would call that unambiguously racist. Thankfully for the CDC, the media barely covered it. Imagine what would have happened if the CDC had prioritized vaccines to white people? All of these people are operating with assumptions that are not universally shared by the public.
Ditto the riots this summer. Most people in the media have internalized this notion that whether violent rioting is okay depends on context. Most Americans do not see it that way. That distorted their coverage of what happened this summer, and burned credibility when it came time to cover the Capitol Hill riot.
I think Biden handled it okay, though I don’t think this was the time to inject the issue. But what if we’d had a President Elizabeth Warren? I shudder to think. Folks like her have really internalized this “they need to hear it for their own good” approach and are apt to use language that ordinary people aren’t familiar with. My in laws in Oregon don’t understand what any of this stuff means, and scolding them won’t help. They don’t feel “privileged” and you’ll only make them feel attacked. Which is fine if your intent is to bring about some sort of reckoning where the bad people are vanquished and the good prevail, but I don’t think that’s a great way to run a country.
My wife's grandma just posted a screed on FB that I think is telling. She's an average non-college educated white lady in her 80s. She's always voted Republican because of abortion. She's pretty smart, tech-savvy, maintains a household by her self in a rural area. She's probably less prejudiced than your average 80-year old American--insofar as she still thinks its okay to make the occasional off-color joke but doesn't object to the mixed relationships that led to her mostly mixed 9 great-grandkids. She doesn't believe in QAnon or whatever. She probably reads too much Breitbart, which gives her a skewed belief of what the Democrat policy agenda really is, but a lot of the material these days are just tweets from progressives.
The stuff she complained about really highlighted for me how the media isn't speaking language she understands anymore. For example:
> Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.
> Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.
> $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.
> If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
> killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.
These complaints all rest on completely conventional beliefs and assumptions. Increasingly, folks in news media and liberal policy circles not only don't hold any of these beliefs, but can't even talk to someone who does. For them, these things are axiomatic, and they can't explain their beliefs by reference to universal principles my wife's grandma shares. And when she reads a steady stream of their tweets, its alarming for her. When people don't share a basic framework of how to see the world, they can't trust each other or have meaningful policy discussions.
> > Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.
There is a pretty fundamental divergence between most people and the left about how to define "discrimination" (a critical thing in a multi-ethnic society). To most people, the absence of "discrimination" means race-neutrality. Most people on the left have embraced the idea that discrimination between groups can be justified to achieve more equal outcomes.
> Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.
This is how my wife's grandmother perceives a lot of the discussion of "white privilege" and "whiteness."
> $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.
I think there is an increasing number of people on the left don't care about defending the border. They may not be fully "open borders" but within their intellectual framework, they really can't articulate what the legitimate purpose of controlling the border would be and thus aren't willing to spend money on it.
> If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
There is a major push to offer tuition-discounted or tuition-free community college to undocumented immigrants, including in Oregon. A number of states that offer tuition-free community college are extending those programs to undocumented immigrants.
Traditionally, the view was that welfare benefits should be for those here legally. There is a great discomfort about the idea of extending those benefits to people here illegally. On the left, and in much of the liberal media circle, the prevailing view is opposed to distinguishing between Americans and non-Americans in provision of welfare benefits.
> killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.
There is again been a real shift in how abortion is conceptualized. Roe was justified on universal principles of bodily autonomy. Today, the right to an abortion is treated as axiomatic. And increasingly, there is a push to conceptualize it as "healthcare."
My point is that we're seeing quite a major divergence in basic assumptions about society, which has become particularly acute because most in the media have embraced these new axioms while most of the rest of the country have not. Whatever logical framework causes some people to view the term "unbearable whiteness" as not a racist term is just one example of that divergence.
Moreover, because, for the left these things are increasingly axiomatic, there is no way for them to talk to my wife's grandma about these issues. If you view abortion as a balance between bodily autonomy and the developmental advancement of a fetus, you can have a discussion between someone who supports abortion and someone who doesn't. If you view abortion as "healthcare" you can't have that conversation.
Or, if you have a diluted concept of "citizenship," you can't formulate a response to why anyone would oppose free college tuition for undocumented immigrants other than "bigotry."
RBG was a fan of reopening the privileges and immunities clause (NB: in the 14th Am) jurisprudence and justifying the right to abortion via gender equality. In that light she saw Roe as a stopgap.
Last thing first: Abortions are at their lowest rates since Roe. Abortions are health care. Frankly, the idea that people should be alarmed by a supposed reframing of abortions as health care is incoherent. People who oppose abortion should be happy that's how it's seen. I come from a very large, very Catholic family, I went to 12 years of Catholic school, my godmother aunt who has made multiple pilgrimages to Međugorje and pickets hospitals still gives me presents every year, and I will relate to you the previous conception pro-life culture had of abortion: a cosmetic convenience.
If our outlook on abortion has changed, it has empirically gotten more conservative. I agree that conservative white people are alarmed by change no matter what form it takes. But we can't reasonably discuss that here while suggesting that destabilizing conservative shifts are somehow attributable to elite left discourse.
(Also, next time you think about how people casually look at abortion as "health care", I'd ask you also to consider that Catholic organizations control huge chunks of the health care infrastructure in this country, and they deny routine medically necessary procedures and medications to women because the church has deemed them abortifacient. I'm a parent and a Catholic and I've seen this firsthand; it's a real problem in Chicago. There is more going on with the "reproductive health care" thing than you're acknowledging here.)
Moving along:
The tuition programs you're talking about build on the DACA framework. They don't reward adults who cross the border with free tuition. Instead, they seek to acknowledge that people brought here as children, a huge portion of whom have known no other life but that of an American, are for all intents and purposes American. This notion is wildly popular in the US; it gets something like 3/4 in favor in surveys. (Would it be more popular if it hadn't been set in motion by executive order? Sure. But that supports my point, which is that the concern you have about destabilization has more to do with partisan politics than it does with ideas).
One of the problems with our discourse on immigration --- surprised if you disagree --- is that we used to be proud of our inclusiveness. People don't pay enough attention to how strict European countries are about immigration. We have birthright citizenship! The left spends too much time rhetorically tearing down American institutions, and the right spends too much time tacitly conceding and expanding on the left's criticisms. That's a shift rightward.
I just don't see what health care costs have to do with border security costs. The problem with $5B for border security is that it's a joke; you can't physically secure the border with that much money. It's a grift, a jobs program for cronies and a monument for Trump. If immigration hawks were serious, their next move would have been nationwide mandatory E-Verify. But more to the point: I have trouble believing that your grandmother-in-law is really tallying up the Trump Wall against health care in the first place.
Nobody is being held responsible for things that happened before they were born. When your grandmother-in-law says that, do you ask her what, specifically, she means?
> White people who aren’t privileged don’t feel privileged. Liberals do not understand this and it’s a dangerous misconception about our reality.
It’s not that they don’t understand it, it’s that they insist there is no such thing. They’re all in on Critical Race Theory fairy tales, and it’s career suicide at these companies to even question this.
I think some people are in on it. Others are just afraid to say anything, or think it’s harmless.
I’m extremely liberal about social justice, I am. But this critical theory stuff is a powder keg. Building a multi-racial democracy that hasn’t descended into civil war is hard. Look at what’s happening in France right now. Trying to make these untested academic theory into what governs relationships between races in this country is a recipe for disaster.
And at the end of the day, most non-white people don’t want it. The majority of every minority racial demographic doesn’t even want to use race as a factor, even a small one, in college admissions. The recent California affirmative action ban failed miserably. It’s a boutique ideology.
But it’s a boutique ideology with a massive platform. Tomorrow a bunch of people will wake up and see the New York Times and CNN talking about how you can blame the Capitol breach on “whiteness.” And most will brush it off because Americans are good people. But for some it will make them feel attacked based on skin color harden their hearts against condemning something we should be able to condemn universally.
You say it’s a powder keg. Let me bring my perspective here. My background is not dissimilar to yours but my family came to the US in the 1920s before Partition and married both blacks and whites. In India modern Hinduness is defined by bhakti movement and opposition to Muslims whereas before caste was prevalent. With the official removal of caste by Indian constitution yet implementation of reservations the use of Muslims as an enemy to coalesce against has increased. Even Ambedkar conceded this might be an issue which is why he wanted to give Pakistan 10 years trial period. What you are denying is the obvious parallel with the construction of legal whiteness in America from several European ethnic groups (like castes in India but not occupational based) as opposed to free and chattel slave blacks.
This doesn’t seem like an obvious parallel, it seems like projection. Why do you think it’s obvious to you but not to someone else? Why are you certain that you are uniquely capable of seeing it?
I'm saying it should be more obvious to him. I'm not claiming unique insight or authority here. It could be projection, but it seems like parallel phenomena to me.
I agree with some of this, but out of all the things that are definitely destroying America, the mindless opinions and think pieces in the NYT are one of the least harmful.
"Whiteness" is a term I don't use and don't really like, but it just plain was white Republican activists[1] who were rioting to stop the election and intimidate representatives two days ago. The Confederate symbols, presence of neo-Nazis, and the bizarre American Viking guy gave it away.
I live in southern Oregon and was born in Missouri, and I don't really understand what you're point is, below, about these areas culturally. The best parts of the culture in Missouri were sports, music, literature, food, river life, and fireworks. The worse parts included the notorious white racism. The "whiteness" discourse in Missouri was already asinine well before the NYT lost its mind. My grandparents had to elope out of state because their marriage was illegal, and when they came back the scandal of what they had done was featured in about a dozen papers.
And Oregon is an entirely different story. For someone who lived in St. Louis and then the Bay Area most of my life, the uniformity here is astonishing. It was officially a no-blacks state by constitutional amendment. My county today is < 1% black, and just got around to renaming "Negro Ben Mountain" in November.[2] Not having to think of yourself as white here is helped along a lot by the demographic homogeneity.
I think that the blame for your aunt feeling attacked for being white lies more truly on Breitbart. If you show non-liberal whites the NYT tweet/article, and also the Breitbart piece quoting the same NYT language, my bet is that "I feel attacked by the media for being white" is a more common and more intense response among those who read only the latter.
My parents were Democrats, and I am a Democrat, but one of my brothers is a Republican. We're both from the same place, the same upbringing, and are the same race (whatever it is). He watches Fox News personalities religiously, and categorically refuses to click on a link to the NYT. I read a local paper, the NYT, and wherever else the news comes from. I'm annoyed every day at the presentation of facts and looses writing standards, but I make my way through it. But this idea that the whites are under attack really connects with my brother in a way that it doesn't for me -- even though I'm the one supposedly encountering the brunt of the media's attack on white people, since I read main stream news and opinions and he doesn't.
Could he simply identify as more white than I do, and so feel more attacked? It's possible but I doubt it. I think it has more to do with this feeling of insecurity being one that the right wing media is nurturing for him.
[1] I mean "white activists" here not just in the sense that they were white people.
[2] Renaming it for the second time. :(
As far as I know, NYT will not report information from sources where they cannot establish some kind of authenticity. If you don't believe it, try reporting a completely anonymous tip to them and see how far you get. I will bet you they come back asking you provide some kind of further evidence to establish your identity or at least that your knowledge is authoritative.
If the NYT was fabricating their anonymous tips, like parent suggested, why would they publish outside anonymous tips? The fact that they don't publish every anonymous source doesn't mean that all of their anonymous sources have to be real.
I didn't read their comment as claiming they fabricate the sources altogether. However, if you really reduce it to that level you have essentially established an unverifiable theory that is no different to a conspiracy theory. On that basis, the allegation that NYT routinely fabricates sources should not be believed either (since its from an anonymous source with no way to verify it).
I agree, neither the allegation that the nyt fabricates its anonymous sources nor the allegations made through those anonymous sources should be believed (nor should they be believed to be absolutely false). Alternatively, anonymous sources are not evidence and cannot be the basis of stories that must be trusted, and since the times relies often on anonymous sources we can consider them to possibly publish rumors without evidence.
You're equating fabrication with NYT incorporating anonymous sources into its reporting. Those are worlds apart. It is completely fine to use anonymous sources if you can authenticate their material.
Some sort of myth seems to have been created that news reporting can't use anonymous sources. It's not only wrong, but not disclosing sources is an absolutely foundational accepted element of journalism.
All I was arguing is that it is reasonable to be skeptical of articles posted in the new york times that are only confirmed by anonymous sources. As such a story is unverifiable/there is no chain of trust, believing the story involves trusting the newspaper.
It depends what level of skepticism you are applying there. In the sense of "do I have the full story", "is there another side to this I am not hearing", etc. I think its absolutely reasonable.
But if you're skeptical about whether they completely made it up, published a rumour without any confirmation or are deliberately substantially altering it in how they portray it - that's an extremely serious allegation for a reputable news organisation. For example, I think that would stretch beyond "reasonable" in most cases for NYT based on my observation of their practices over time.
How would a reasonable person, unaffiliated with the newspaper, differentiate the two types of inaccuracy?
There is no way to tell if a lie originated with two anonymous sources or with a reporter with an agenda. The "trust but verify" approach only works if something can be verified. IMO the nyt damages its reputation when it posts rumors which cannot be verified.
They would look at the newspaper's track record and research its reputation more generally. The same way you would establish trustworthiness of any entity you don't know more generally.
This is just a more general case of having a trusted broker. How do you trust your bank? How do you trust airlines to be safe? How do you know your doctor is competent? You don't demand first hand evidence for all of these. You trust a regulator to oversee them and the regulator may absolutely rely on evidence that is not made publicly available. A lot of society ceases to operate if you throw out reputational trust.
If my bank steals my money, I have my own documentation about my account and can take them to court.
Airline crashes are regularly in the news when they occur and are easily verifiable.
My doctor has a licensing board and such to report to.
What recourse do I have if the new york times posts something not truthful that can't be verified? How would I even know? I am not the only person to not trust the new york times, they do not have near the level of public support as the Medical/Airline industries. Given the fundamental lack of accountability inherent to anonymously sourced articles, why wouldn't they be abused?
Ok, many of these sources have later found to have little or no authenticity at all. Sources revealing second or third-hand information on the Trump administration. Mostly based on hearsay. Some imaginary. It has been journalism of the lowest possible standard. I trust NYT only on stuff completely unrelated to politics.
a good example would be Trump' alleged 'suckers and losers' comment regarding fallen soldiers.
This was a rumor started by The Atlantic article citing 'anonymous sources' which spread and re-broadcasted by all news networks and NYT, some of these third-hand versions of the rumor claimed additional verification by, guess what, another group of 'high-ranked anonymous sources', completely ignoring rejection of these allegations by everyone who actually attended that particular event with the President.
This is the definition of slander which is somehow acceptable if you (and your reader base) hate a particular person or ideology.
NYT and NPR are both extremely biased now. I say that as a 20 year long NPR listener. This is no secret, especially at NYT, where the newsroom is no longer firewalled from opinion. They chase even moderate left folks out for not being woke enough. The 1619 project fiasco, Bari Weiss, etc. They have fallen far since Trump got elected.
They're undoubtedly intersectional when it comes to social issues, but they're globalist on international affairs, and relatively centrist when it comes to the economy.
All? C'mon.
You can make the argument that MSNBC is a mirror of Fox News in terms of coddling its viewers, but if you're calling NPR or the New York Times "fact-free," you're only betraying your own ignorance of journalism standards.
Investigating facts and reporting them clearly is a solved problem. There are people who go to universities to study how to do this well, then go to work for institutions committed to doing this well. Their words should be treated differently than the words of some idiot with a Twitter account or a personality on an infotainment TV show.