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Comment by aub3bhat | Hacker News Reader

This is an unbelievably biased story. Reading the title you might assume as if there were widespread protests e.g. the term "begins to bite". In fact on the contrary banks have noticed a decline in use of digital payments due to remonetized currency notes. It appears that NYTimes really wanted a story about large scale panic/riots but not having found any it is now left with bunch of anecdotes while keeping a ridiculously click bait headline.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.livemint.com/Politics/uJnq2fp...

Edit: Also the image used clearly shows Indian Congress party supporters (identified by numerous flags with the hand symbol) yet they are termed as generic "activists" rather than supporters of a specific political party.

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I think you read a bit too much into that title, it's just saying that the cash shortage is having an impact. It quite often mentions that it's nothing crazy within it, but uses the anecdotes to humanize a story; otherwise, it pretty clearly mentions that 'the pain is hidden for the most part' and underlines that the projected growth only dropped around ~1%.

It certainly opens by pulling on the heartstrings. "This man lost his job and his marriage because of the cash shortage."

Also, I will point out that the NYT never, and I do mean never, has a story on India that is anything but negative. I didn't realise this at first, but now I can't help but notice that every article they have on my country is just how we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

If you think the NYT is bad, read the BBC coverage on India :)

I'd rather not, seeing as they couldn't even manage to find a photo of the correct country's currency to air on TV. :)

Photo taken by a viewer: https://i.redd.it/sxd9if9qimwx.jpg

Nepali note: http://www.banknotes.com/NP43.JPG

Hilarious

It also seems to be confused as to the difference between the Indian and the Libyan flag.

"Live from Tripoli." [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_-lzI8I0_0

I doubt that given that the world service is considered less biased - Mark Tully the BBC India Correspondent for decades was considered one of the most reliable news sources by Indians

Based on my experience, the world service and some other BBC programs seem to be managed differently than some of their online news, which far too often has basic typographical errors, and especially their social media accounts, which often post Reddit-style clickbait articles. Nothing wrong with that, but I would limit myself to the world service (though I have grown to enjoy NPR as well).

Most stories in a good news source are negative, otherwise they aren't really news. "Nothing happened today" can only work once.

Compare their take on China.

China is one of those countries where any non-Chinese-based news about them, even just a dry reporting of facts and figures, is considered bias and "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people." They cry bias so much that it just seems like whining.

There was one guy, Gordon Chang, who keeps predicting a complete collapse (not simply a crash, which is expected to happen from time to time) of the Chinese economy. Because his articles get published, the Chinese have now declared that western media has predicted a collapse of the China is imminent, when...if you search for China economic collapse, you only get Gordon Chang's articles, as well as the Chinese articles saying the western media has homogeneously predicted that. I don't know, perhaps they think western media speaks with one voice like Chinese media does, and fail to see the possibility that several viewpoints and opinions could exist.

Likewise, there are many things about China, like air pollution and internet censorship, that the western media fails to convey the full negative effects of. This is mostly a technical limitation, for sure, but people still come to Beijing and are surprised how bad the air really is along with the fact that they really can't use Facebook there.

That's a very bold claim.

I agree with you that the NYT's coverage of India is heavily negative, though I think you could reasonably go far less specific and argue that broad focused American media in general tends towards negative coverage period (part of my major problem with it, "If it bleeds it leads" is not a new saying), particularly about international matters (because international matters are often shortchanged anyway, foreign desks have been reduced/eliminated, etc.). With that said, be careful of absolutes. I just went to the NYT's page for the topic of India, and yeah, it's massively negative, but just glancing through the last few months I saw:

1. "A Photographer’s Homage to an Architect’s Modernist City": http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/11/03/t-magazine/art/m...

2. "Mark Morris’s Love Letter to India, Through Music and Dance": https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/arts/dance/mark-morris-so...

3. "How Do You Hail a Tractor in India? All It Takes Is a Few Taps on Your Phone": https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/world/what-in-the-world/t...

That's just a quick look at recent news, and given that the NYT has to be feeling pretty down about the overall state of politics worldwide right now I doubt that's even a fair slice.

Honestly some of those are actually pretty nice/interesting pieces, which does bring up a point: I've long given up on making media more positive generally, negativity sadly seems to sell pretty well, so you have to go to alternates/aggregators that are better (including HN). But I really do wish there was at least a filter for "positive stories", a simple binary the NYT or WSJ or WP or whomever would use to broadly categorize stuff that was about /disaster/war/death/crime/terrorism/fights/eldritch horrors from beyond space time/ vs anything else. If you just go making a list of other stuff from a lot of media you might be surprised about the kind of interesting pieces that tend to get lost in the noise, and the important perspective on progress in the world it brings. Broad categorization seems perfectly doable there, doesn't need to be perfect to be highly useful in raising s/n, and I'd love if outlets would just do it themselves and see how their readers react to having a choice. I guess at some point ML/AI assistants might be able to do a helpful job based on word stats, but it'd be best if whomever wrote the article just tagged it at the start.

Well... it's usually economic news, and the old saw is "economic news is always bad". The US doesn't have the history and cultural ties you see in the UK.

And to be fair, almost everything the NYT says about the US is negative, too.

> And to be fair, almost everything the NYT says about the US is negative, too.

Not the same way that the NYT portrays India. They repeatedly reuse racist stereotypes in their coverage - even in their headlines. I've never seen anything quite so appalling in their coverage on the US. It's a whole new level. It's gotten a lot worse since 2013/2014, which is when Barry and Baquet took over.

And sometimes they can't even be bothered to do the most basic fact-checking or even issue corrections to online articles about India, the way they almost always do for US coverage or coverage of other regions. It's really awful.

>And sometimes they can't even be bothered to do the most basic fact-checking or even issue corrections to online articles about India, the way they almost always do for US coverage or coverage of other regions.

I don't know about that. Every time I read an article related to something I know about personally, there are multiple problems. You won't see an NYT article about guns, for instance, that isn't riddled with errors.

> You won't see an NYT article about guns, for instance, that isn't riddled with errors.

Left-leaning media (like the Times) is generally pretty bad when covering guns, yes. But it's nowhere near the level of blatant disregard for facts that the Times has when covering India.

I'd like to read more about this. Do you have references describing the NYT behavior in this case? Or examples?

The coverage of China is very distinct too, this despite all the other propaganda ops they have going on.

The dislike for India is quite old, and entirely of a distinct kind... and India for shame is only too willing to be a plaything of the WASPs. The hatred that runs deep in the culture appears far more visceral IMO... not surprising that Humanities depts in the US would reflect this more markedly.

I'm reminded often of the picture of the देव-असुर binary; more amusing considering the ancient shared origins of IE people.

> Also, I will point out that the NYT never, and I do mean never, has a story on India that is anything but negative. I didn't realise this at first, but now I can't help but notice that every article they have on my country is just how we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

Ellen Barry has been the South Asia Bureau Chief since 2013, and for some reason, she really has a personal vendetta against India. Some of her stories seem somewhat reasonable if you read them by themselves, but if you look at her articles on India all together, it's clear what her bias is.

And some of them are just utterly absurd even by themselves. It's pretty disgusting.

Examples with links ?

Reducing growth by 1% is huge. The projected growth rate was 7.6% but was revised to 6.6%. That 1% is a percentage of the economy, not a percentage of overall growth.

My mistake, I didn't mean to marginalize the 1% decrease, but I don't think even its biggest proponents expected demonetization to help short-term.

"Begins to bite" where English is spoken has never implied "widespread protests" or "large scale panic/riots".

yeah, it's meant to imply everyday people are starting to feel the negative impact

Yes.

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