I’ve seen a lot of criticism for the NYT as of late, and, sadly, it’s almost all been warranted upon inspection.
I’m not sure if it’s a case of the top dog getting all the scrutiny, but it’s crazy to me how a company with so many good journalists can seem to have so many bad.
Much criticism is not even new (Manufactured Consent, Judith Miller).
FWIW the publisher/top editor of NYTimes changed in 2017 and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger's [1] stepped down letting his son AG Sulzberger take over [2]. This is around the time it started becoming really clickbaity and 24/7 news channel level intentionally misrepresenting or spinning stories for reactions.
I believe his father took on a more old school approach to keeping the news as neutral as possible, while still having a bit of your usual slant.
I read NYTimes daily for a decade and it's sad to see it decline as it has. I understand now just how much effort that must take, especially in the age of social media. I respect any news org that avoids the pull and pushes back on that sort of thing. But they are increasingly rare.
I mean, the NYT during the Clinton and Bush years was hardly some golden age of journalism. Off the top of my head, there was Whitewater, Wen Ho Lee, the Jayson Blair thing, and the Judith Miller / Curveball / Iraq war stuff.
You didn’t even mention their piece de resistance - killing a story on a nationwide illegal mass surveillance program, then being scooped by their own reporter years later as he’s publishing his story on how the NYT is complicit in keeping the program out of view of the public. I’ve personally lost faith in the NYT and prefer other papers of record in the US.
William T Sherman complained intensely about the new York Times in his autobiography about how they misrepresented him, (he took some time off because of burnout and they said he went insane). The problem is quite old
> he took some time off because of burnout and they said he went insane
I actually kind of assume, in my prejudice about the past, that if there had been a DSM in the 19th century, "being tired of work" would have been in it.
Was not investigative journalism. Ellsberg provided the content to the NYT. They did show some balls in rejecting the advice of external counsel (and in accepting that of internal counsel) but they were a conduit.
As was the Washington Post, which started publishing soon after the NYT (and managed to fight off the injuction NYT did not). It's possible that the Post only started publishing because the NYT had started, but the value of the NYT itself in the scheme was… limited.
This is why the NYT is going to blink. If they doxx this guy, then this becomes a huge grassroots story about how they are "fake news media" that doesn't uphold journalism ethics standards. (Even more so if the article is a negative hit piece w/ politicized overtones, as some people are - rightly or wrongly - speculating here. People _will_ stand up for him over his views, however controversial in some places.) He made the right call here; shutting the blog down and stating his concerns so clearly was the way to get everyone involved to face the issue.
Lets be honest here. This will be a big story here in Hacker News for a few days, then we will get on with our lives. It will not spread out from that.
This is ironically how the News works. It's new - novel, interesting, unique, temporary.
We will stand up for Scott - but it won't really change anything, and it will be temporary. It's naive to think that what we find important for a bit will have any impact on the real world and real lives. Especially as this is literally what the News does and has done for a hundred or so years.
I don't know what "Standing up for Scott" means. His concerns are that he could lose his job, his patients might not want or be able to connect with him after reading his blog or about it, and dangerous people both online and in his real life would have an easier time finding him in person.
Given these concerns, I have no clue what benefit a supportive forum like this would be. We might all be cheering him on and thinking highly of him, but that wouldn't change any of his concerns.
It means: Pressure the NYT. Write a polite but firm email that this is not an acceptable attitude. If you happen to be subscribed, unsubscribe, and point to this as the reason.
People are cancelling their NYT subscriptions over this. I don't know how many, but a campaign to mass un-subscribe could be successful.
I also imagine that if he was doxxed and wasn't able to make a living as a psychiatrist anymore, many people here would probably fund him through patreon, or purchasing books or whatever.
Sometimes it's really interesting to go back and see what happened with stories that the NYT was absolutely freaking out about a year ago. Remember RussiaGate for example? Daily stories on the NYT for 2 years from anonymous sources amounting to nothing.
Or the Tom Cotton op-ed just two weeks ago. The highest hourly spike in NYT subscription cancellations, James Bennett resigning, employees in disarray, employees threatening to resign, and now we've mostly forgotten about the whole case. I doubt the NYT has incentives to really unpack why it was possible for their paper to publish pro-fascist content in the first place.
Perhaps. But this is also the kind of story that can go far beyond the HN niche, especially given how it can align with current political views. It depends whether they do publish the article, and what it's like.
They need only write something like "Scott has been called alt-right and anti feminist online" (as I'm sure somewhere they have, once) and then any public defense of the character can be labelled as being racist and toxic.
there are other simple strategies that can be put into place to make any defence of a person harder and most people will look at the surface representation and move on to the next story. Eventually the story about the story will itself fade away.
> 'Scott has been called alt-right and anti feminist online'
Who hasn't? I mean, I see your point and it would be correct in many cases but if people can use this so easily to score points against the NYT, they aren't going to be deterred by that. The online culture that likes to label anything and everything as "racist and toxic" would only make their point stronger.
I think you misunderstood. The NYT could use it to silence support for Scott Alexander because anyone saying "no, he's a reasonable person that writes about the beliefs of people without holding it themselves" will hang next to him as somebody that is supporting Scott Alexander "who many say is prominent alt-right figure and who has lead a hate campaign against feminists on his blog".
Newspapers are bankrupt, specially the NYT,that earns more money in real state(newspapers own properties in the center of cities that are very expensive) than with journalism.
Newspapers gold days are long gone.
So when someone buys it, it is not for making good journalism but for buying a propaganda channel for the owner's own interest.
The good journalist do not matter, if they say anything that the owner does not approve they are instantly fired. So they auto censor themselves.
Journalist are people too, they have families that need shelter and food. Being independent usually means almost starving. Young idealistic single people usually do that until they pick the comfortable alternative.
> specially the NYT,that earns more money in real state
This is verifiably untrue. As a public company, their balance sheets are public, and almost 90% of their revenue is accounted for by subscriptions and advertising.
That’s true now because they sold their headquarters. But in fact they earned more from that sale than they had in many prior years of operations combined. So the essence of the comment was spot on in the case of the NYT.
Wouldn't that be kind of like saying that I'm a real estate baron instead of a Software Developer, because I own a house that is worth many years of my salary as a software developer combined?
I haven't looked at the NYT balance sheets at all recently, so it's possible that I'm off the mark here, but a one time sale of a headquarters does not make them a real-estate company in my mind. To do that, you would need to demonstrate to me that they are regularly engaging in the transaction of property and buildings, instead of a one time sale.
I'm not convinced that this is a new problem. Newspapers used to make money, but they have always been owned by someone rich enough to buy a printing press.
What's different now is that people have more access to primary sources. The story says that the boy was 11, because kids in that grade are usually 11 and the reporter was lazy, but the boy was really 12.
In the world where only one organization in the city has a printing press, the boy is now officially 11 years old because nobody who knows any better has the means to contradict it. In the world where your cat can get more hits on YouTube than there are people in New York City, the inaccuracies get publicized left and right, and then, rightly or wrongly, people lose faith in the news media.
This is kind of what we asked for. Give everyone a chance to speak to the world instead of only a privileged few and you get all the stories instead of only the rich man's story.
The problem now is instead of one party telling you a lie you didn't know was a lie, you have two parties saying contrary things and you know they can't both be right but the average person has no way to know who to believe and also doesn't have the capacity to verify everything personally.
So we end up with camps who are absolutely convinced that the other camp is nothing but angry malicious idiots who can't see the truth, even though that's what they think about you.
The NYT is mostly benefiting from its reputation from 20+ years ago. It's a shitshow nowadays of extreme opinion pieces and bought articles. Other news papers that didn't have such a stellar reputation already surrendered to the digital age.
I still vividly remember the shit they pulled before the Iraq war. In large part because I happened to talk to a former NYT reporter (in a Parisian café of all places) who spent an hour detailing how disgusted he was by them.
I’m not sure if it’s a case of the top dog getting all the scrutiny, but it’s crazy to me how a company with so many good journalists can seem to have so many bad.
Much criticism is not even new (Manufactured Consent, Judith Miller).