Money quote: "A Times spokesperson said the paper doesn’t view his assertion as a falsehood, and won’t be issuing a correction."
Really? Completely given up, have they?
Really? Completely given up, have they?
Comments like this mean that editors likely knew Manjoo wasn’t offline, but allowed the piece because somehow they thought that 15 tweets/day was offline.
So they are either liars who misled, or even more worrisome, aren’t able to discern reality enough that saying “I unplugged from Twitter” is compatible with daily tweeting.
It would have been so easy to add some editorial note on what the author meant by unplugging so users weren’t misled.
It is frustrating because as a consumer, I would like an objective source of news. Not to pick the best worldview I like and let them filter reality for me.
It’s also annoying because the fake news people will constantly point out these frequent inaccuracies in even reputable papers.
This story has the headline, "The Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the internet. Except he didn’t".
But that's not what Manjoo claimed at all. He never said he was offline. The title of the Times article is "For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned." The story isn't about being disconnected from the internet, it is about getting the news the next day, in print, instead of from nytimes.com, news alerts, twitter posts, etc.
It's not a question of whether he tweeted, it is a question of where he got his news.
I would suspect that they ruled “unplugged” as a fundamentally subjective term and stopped deliberating right there and then.
Bigger the error, the more difficult it gets (for anyone including media) to admit it.