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Comment by hkhanna | Hacker News Reader

> Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness.

This is unnecessarily harsh. The New York Times is a massive company with hundreds of journalists and editors.

If every once in a while a journalistic organization makes a mistake, I think it's reasonable to point it out, have them publicly correct the record, and then let it go.

Harping on every honest (if sloppy) mistake as if it is evidence that an organization is totally incompetent or dishonest is something autocrats do to de-legitimize journalism itself. So long as 99% of the time, they don't make mistakes, and so long as they promptly acknowledge and correct the mistakes when they are called out, I think journalism done in good faith (like the work done at The Times) deserves our benefit of the doubt in an era when it is under unprecedented attack by leaders worldwide.

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A random mistake yes, I would agree.

However, this mistake was a piece of information that even the Washington Post said was the reason they did not report on it [1]. To confound it, this was a piece seemingly to drum up interest for the books that the writers of the story also wrote.

Those facts don't make this seem to be an honest mistake. Those facts makes it look to be two authors promoting a book and hoping a bombshell article will drum up sales for their books. It's awfully convenient that the editors took out a couple of details that make it a non-story.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-book-on-kav...

As a former NYTimes employee, I can assure you that 99% of the work is not done in good faith. It's all activism now, top to bottom. There's a few good eggs granted, but the newspaper has an agenda and uses their pseudo-objectivity/newspaper of record as cover and concealment.

Newspapers have always had an agenda. Op-eds particularly have always been a cesspool of political nonsense.

The difference now is the agenda is obvious because more viewpoints are available online, and in the past the agenda would - sometimes - be supported with hard journalism from real sources, including field reporters.

Now there's a lot more newswire and PR copy pasta and Google searching.

"Newspapers have always had an agenda"

I'm fine with this, so long as they don't insist on their objectivity. Otherwise everything they say must be filtered through an undefined lens that readers either a) don't have time for and are thus victimized by the 'untruth' or b) believe and desire the confirmation bias and are thus victimized by misinformation.

"activist with an agenda" or "defender of truth", you can't be both at the same time, yet many journalists think their role should be both.

I've seen some Twitter discussions between journalists about how they consider it important to be "activist journalists" in the modern era.

It seems bias is becoming encouraged, quite disappointing.

But journalists have not been making mistakes "every once in a while". They have been making mistakes constantly. Nor do they "promptly acknowledge and correct the mistakes when they are called out"; they almost never correct them, and often they double down instead. So by your own criteria, journalism no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

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