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Block The New York Times

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89 pointsdocdeek95 comments

I was just reading this article about how a long-time NYT worker was fired, because, when he was acting as a guide/chaperone for a student field trip, one of the students asked him a question about someone else hypothetically saying a racial slur, the NYT employee pronounced the slur in question - and for this, he was fired.

That seems outrageous to me. Even more outrageous that some/most of the other employees seem to support and advocate for the firing. I'm glad people are blocking the NYT. I hope it fails or changes.

https://freebeacon.com/issues/inside-the-grey-ladys-meltdown...

As a non-American, the intellectual infantilization around bad words is completely insane to me.

Please don't add nationalistic flamewar on top of ideological flamewar. That's going the wrong way down a one-way street.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm an European and i strongly feel like this cultural issue is coming from the anglosphere.

I'm totally in for discussing this, if you dont like it about nationality, then make it about culture/language?

In Germany, Sweden, and Norway it certainly exists as well. These countries even have laws enforcing such taboos. Good call @dang

No, at least in Germany the laws depend on the context. You can't use a racial slur to insult someone, but pronouncing it to talk about the word with students would be perfectly allowed (and how else could you explain to them that they shouldn't use a word, if you can't even pronounce it? Wait till they hear it somewhere else and repeat it?).

The question here is not what's "allowed" - saying nigger is allowed in the US if you're talking about the law. The question here is about the most extreme social reactions.

I guess an equivalent might be what'd happen if a well known persona started wearing a toothbrush moustache. It's not illegal (presumably!). Would it create retaliation, sure.

That's not true. You can use any racial slur in Germany to describe said slur. The laws only ever apply to insults, which have to be directed at someone. There's no "N-word" equivalent where people talk about a specific word but then somehow don't say it.

You are making the same mistake like the people i was lamenting about - equating the 'bad' word with its use as insult.

The words are not regulated by law as you suggest, but insults are.

Regional flamewar isn't any good either :) But there are ways of talking about these things that don't involve flamebait and name-calling. If one reads the site guidelines and takes the intended spirit of curious conversation to heart, that goes a long way. Note this one:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

and this one:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Times is very purposeful in which stories they select to cover, and how they cover them. E.g. they removed race references from title after a story turned out to be a hoax:

A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim...

Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim...

In addition to how they chose to write the titles, would they be covering something as minor as a schoolyard scuffle if victim and perpetrator were reversed?

The NYTimes has amazing journalists doing great journalism... however their editorial team, executives and publisher are the worst. Out of touch, insane and convinced of their own intellect and righteousness. It’s absolutely maddening to see. This interview Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times is a good example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/podcasts/the-daily/2020-e...

The NYT has a reckoning coming. They went all in on neoliberal culture war - and it worked, it gained them subscribers. People still treat them like a serious institution, but if they continue down this path, that's over.

First time I’ve seen the culture war described as “neoliberal.” It seems like everyday that word becomes less and less meaningful. There seems to be a large set of people who use it as a general descriptor of things they don’t like.

I couldn't agree more ! "Neoliberal" doesn't mean anything precise anymore, even in France where I live

To me it just sounds like “progressive”

neoliberalism has a fairly specific meaning in academic contexts.

There absolutely was a "culture war", or war of ideas, that was waged to sell deregulation and privatization to the masses. Ironically, these included some fairly generous handouts, e.g. earned income credits or the welfare programs in the UK funded by the oil windfall.

Ultimately, we wouldn't have ended up were we are today without a continuous campaign selling neoliberalism. It's how the Democrats became the party of wall street, and new labour in the UK is more conservative than the tories 50 years ago.

Mark Blyth gives a great primer called "A brief history of how we got here and why": https://youtu.be/tJoe_daP0DE

I agree with you in the context of this thread, which exemplifies a very recent re-appropriation of the term (see below). That being said, neoliberalism is a fairly well-defined descendant from classical right-wing liberalism that arose during the 80s. It's characterized by laissez-fair market economy, less taxes for the rich, and no support for welfare programs.

That it is now re-appropriated by the "alt-right" (a term coined by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer) to mean some kind of swear word against left leaning "liberals" just goes to show how uneducated and confused the US public is about politics.

Over the years I've come to believe that there is a method behind this dumbing down and distortion of political views in the US, that it's the result of the two-party system that allows elites to keep voters aligned and in check, even though they'd all have reasons to vote for a third party. In a nutshell, it seems that many people in the US are unaware of the following facts:

- Libertarianism in original form, propagated e.g. by the Friedmans, is a form of classical liberalism that arose against neo-Liberalism, which was too federal and corporate-friendly for them. It's a radical attempt to reform liberalism and bring it nearer to individual anarchism. (But individual anarchism was explicitly targetted against communism and classical liberalism, so in the end "anarcho-capitalism" is not a form of anarchism at all and really just liberalism.)

- neo-Liberalism is a right-wing form of classical liberalism

- There are many left-wing liberal traditions, but these are barely represented by the two big US parties. (Some Democrats may count as left-wing liberals but not too many of them.)

- Conservatives and liberals are principally opposed to each other. That doesn't mean they cannot be somehow combined, but for a liberal the individual freedom always overrules conservative values.

Especially the latter point has been distorted beyond recognition by Republicans who traditionally hold Christian-conservative values and communitarian/racist ideas about closed, homogeneous societies but felt a need to incorporate (neo-)liberal doctrines in economics. Obviously, this integration can only work to some extent before the views become plain incoherent. Liberalism does not allow the restriction or suppression of anyone's freedoms, let alone those of minorities.

Basically, parties in the US just grab whatever elements they need from political traditions and ignore the rest.

> That being said, neoliberalism is a fairly well-defined descendant from classical right-wing liberalism that arose during the 80s. It's characterized by laissez-fair market economy, less taxes for the rich, and no support for welfare programs.

And yet, your characterization doesn't gel very well with self-identified neoliberals!

https://i.redd.it/ydvihji477a31.png

Why? That represents exactly what I've said. Neoliberals are right-wing classical liberals. The points on the pamphlet you link are typical positions of classical liberals. They are right-wing because there is no worker's protection and social welfare on the list. Right-wing and left-wing liberals gave different answers to the "Social Question" that arose during 19th Century Manchester Capitalism. It concerned child labour, inherited debt, and the crippling of workers in factories.

Left-wing liberals considered it a task of the state to protect workers and children because only with a certain level of protection they would be able to exercise their individual freedom. You're not free in this view if you have inherited debts from your grandparents, for instance. Right-wing liberals instead took these issues to be self-regulatory and did not want the state to interfere. Neoliberals stand in the second tradition.

You: “no support for welfare programs”, “no worker’s protection and social welfare on the list”

Self-described neoliberals: “a robust social safety net”

But, sure okay, represents exactly what you’ve said.

Upvoted because the term “neo-liberalism” is quite well-defined and I agree with all your points but one: “Libertarianism in original form, propagated e.g. by the Friedmans”.

In Europe (the word comes from French), Libertarianism has been a synonym for Anarchism (anti-authoritarian socialism) since at least the late 19th century, long pre-dating the Chicago school. The concept of anarcho-capitalism is a much more recent phenomenon and not one that ever had the same degree of popular support as traditional, left-wing anarchism, e.g., in the 1930s, the CNT¹ had a 1½ million members.

I’d suggest modifying the above phrase to say something like “right-libertarianism in its American form, propagated, e.g., by the Friedmans”.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederaci%C3%B3n_Nacional_de...

Thanks a lot! I was aware of anarcho-syndicalism but didn't know that they also used the term "libertarian"! I will read up on it (because this topic comes up again and again nowadays).

Unfortunately having discussions about such ideologies that get ambiguated into uselessness often become often impossible to discuss even from a purely historical / intellectual standpoint.

It’s already over

I remember clearly when I a few years ago read NYT article about how rumours of increasing violent crime in my country (SWE) was a myth. If they were this wrong about something I knew personally, as this was the same summer gangs had a shoot out outside my Gothenburg flat, and they burned cars outside of my friends house, they were probably also incorrect about topics I don’t know personally.

I don't know the article you're talking about and I haven't looked up violent crime statistics for Sweden - but a couple of anecdotes from you and your friends does not necessarily mean that violent crime across the country is increasing, right?

But, if you believe the person reporting from personal experience, and the newspaper reports something diametrically opposite, that should raise a question.

It should raise questions such as "am I living in a bad neighborhood" or "am I living in a city with more crime than the average" with added caveats such as "just this year", before you jump to asking "is the government and/or mainstream media lying", is what I want to get at.

"Crime has not significantly increased country-wide" and "two severe criminal incidents happened to me or my close friends recently" are in fact not mutually exclusive statements.

I lived in Guldheden which is a pretty nice area, but my friend was living on Hisingen where Swedes are minority, at least from my ocular estimation on the street

There is evidence that crime in Sweden is increasing and not just anecdotes. In the simplest form we can just look at offences per 100k population as published by Sweden's National Council for Crime Prevention. If you download and open the excel sheet for 2019 here[1] column C shows offenses per 100k of the population.

The increase in this column is extreme compared to 1950, but that is probably because of a broadening of what is classified as an offense rather than the population becoming ~7.5 times more likely to commit crime.

If you look at a more recent stretch of time, e.g. 1990 to 2019, you can plot the numbers of total offenses and add a trend line if it isn't obvious by looking at the column. We can also just look at what we might call "murder" in the US, or column I which shows "Completed murder, manslaughter, and assault resulting in death". The figure here shows that 2019 has a rate of 4 murders per 100k population which is an upward trend, you can look back at this column to confirm this for yourself.

Sweden also publishes an annual crime survey where a nationally representative sample of Swedes are asked if they've been the victim of a crime in the past year [2]. This is actually not quite the same thing as the number of crimes because respondents just answer yes or no, so a respondent who has been repeatedly victimized will simply say yes, but their multiple victimizations will not be represented. This is a bit worse than you might think if crime tends to be localized to certain areas, which would make the people living in those areas more likely to be affected multiple times (and that probably is true in my opinion but I don't have a handy source for that).

What the victimization survey shows is an upward bend in the lines that describe percentages of the population that have been the victim of different types of crime starting in 2015. I think it's worth pointing out that the graph is an objective scale, so a change from 2% to 2.5% may look small, but another way to think about it would be an increase of 25% of a certain type of crime. The text of this page[2] describes more detail about the survey results, but here is a quote that I think is representative -

"Almost half (47%) of the population (aged 16–84) have great concern about crime in society, which is a significant increase compared to 2019 (43%) and the highest level measured since 2007."

I think this is representative for two reasons. First, it shows that people in Sweden are concerned about crime and becoming moreso, which would fit given what we've seen in the survey and offense record data. Second, it shows that this is not some never-before seen problem in Sweden. Crime is increasing (as is concern about crime) but it is increasing on the scales of things that have happened before, as opposed to how an alarmist might describe it.

Sweden also has an epidemic of "bombings". As near as I can tell it is the number one country for "bombings" in the world. Wikipedia has a good summary[3] and illustrative graph in the upper right hand corner. You can see in the graph that the problem explodes, as it were, in 2015 and later. Similar trend to what we saw in the crime data.

Here is a quote from the wikipedia page -

"According to police in Gothenburg and Malmö in 2016, the use of hand grenades by criminals in Sweden is a phenomenon which is unusual for all comparable countries both inside and outside the EU. According to criminologists Manne Gerell and Amir Rostami, the only other country that keeps track of hand grenade explosions is Mexico. While Mexico has a murder rate 20 times that of Sweden, on the specific category of grenade explosions per capita the two countries were comparable at the time"

Earlier, I put "bombing" in scare quotes. This is because the word bombing to my mind conjures something like the Oklahoma City Bombing but in Sweden it is usually hand grenades, which do explode, but not nearly as much. Relatively few people are killed in Sweden's bombings - this news article explains a bit more [4] and there is an interesting report from the National Council for Crime Prevention [5] which is actually about shootings among Sweden's criminal element where investigators interview violent Swedish criminals and try to figure out why they committed these crimes. Though the focus is shootings, I expect bombings have similar motiviations (and the news article I linked shares the same sentiments).

Basically, the bombings happen to intimidate rival gangs, scare away customers from enemy drug dealers, intimidate store owners into paying "protection" money, things like that. The police are fairly frequent targets of grenade attacks in Sweden too. I have a graph illustrating this somewhere, but for now, just look at Wikipedia's (incomplete) list of grenade attacks in Sweden [6] and ctrl-f for the word "police" and scroll through the page. You'll get an idea for the proportion of attacks which target the police (either police vehicles or buildings).

There are also what I'll call "sensational" changes to crime. I don't mean that the changes are super huge or something, but rather I mean that some kinds of crime may have disproportionate impact on public perception because of their nature. I believe, though I can't easily demonstrate this as we can with the statistics above, that there are certain types of crime or behavior which are different from earlier behaviors. Bombings may fall into this category too.

This category can be relatively mild, e.g. here[7] is a news story about a small town where a woman is complaining that she is now constantly harassed and afraid to work alone at her bakery because of men harassing her and making her feel unsafe. Other examples are things like mass car burnings, the NYT reported on an incident in 2018[8] where 100 cars were burned in one attack.

Other examples of this type of thing are like this incident where two men were attacked, tortured, raped, and buried alive[9]. There are other examples of things like this were victims are beaten up, mutiliated, urinated on, taped, etc. But I hardly think a list of news articles detailing bad things that happened in Sweden would be very productive. The point is, there are sensational crimes in the media too. Maybe things like these are always happening, and maybe Swedish men always harassed small town bakers and waitresses to the point where they feel unsafe in their shops, but that's my intuition or impression from reading about it.

Finally, I'll wrap up with a mention of gang rape, which I feel is also part of the sensational category in that it is such a dramatic and horrible crime that it causes an outsize impact on the public consciousness. The Swedish news organization Expressen investigated gang rapes where the gang rapists were convicted between 2016 and 2017. In an article [10] on their investigation they write:

"The convicted perpetrators in the investigation are to a very large extent of foreign origin.

32 of them were born abroad. A total of 40 of the 43 convicted perpetrators are either foreign-born or born in Sweden with two immigrant parents."

1 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/...

2 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/...

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombings_in_Sweden

4 - https://www.euronews.com/2018/04/10/sweden-has-a-problem-wit...

5 - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/...

6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...

7 - https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/malin-28-larmade-man-ville-...

8 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/world/europe/sweden-car-f...

9 - https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/unga-solnabor-ra...

10 - https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/brottscentralen/qs/de-ar-ma...

I'm not really seeing the increase you're talking about[1]. A source would be very much appreciated as this comment chain barely has any sources.

[1] https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/...

I've added my sources and more details to the comment. For what it's worth you're looking at a graph of total offenses per 100k (which does show an upward trend but it's hard to see in that graph, I link the excel sheet that data comes from in my parent comment). Thee chart I was referencing earlier was the victimization survey (also linked in my comment).

> I can come back with links if you're interested.

I'd like to see those links, thanks.

Sure, I've added some detail, links, and sources to what I wrote above. Please let me know if you think I'm missing something or saying something unsupported. Happy to add more detail, clarify, or correct if I have anything wrong.

The dissonance between the article about us, and what I clearly see all around me, made me realise that the reporting is not aligned with the truth I know. My point is that if this is the case for topics I know, it’s likely also true for reporting about things foreign to me. Thus I take media with a rock of salt.

Have you had the experience of reading in the newspaper about topics which you personally know?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/533790/sweden-rate-of-cr...

There doesn't seem to be an increase in crime.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/535630/sweden-change-in-...

The rate of crimes against people also didn't change.

So where do you get your data?

It may be that number of crimes is not increasing, but it’s a different kind than in previous decades. Shootouts in public, violent and humiliation-robberies, and gang rapes.

Yes, pre-covid, while the crime rates was going down across all european countries, violent crimes seemed to be going up. However, said violent crimes are a lot more restricted in both location and target than it was in the 80s and 90s and look a lot like crime pre-WW1, without the anarchists and socials justifications behind (or maybe people are not as well politically educated than they were in the 1900s).

I'm pretty sure gang rape however should just be about media not knowing what to talk about, violent sexual crimes on strangers only decreased in decades pre-covid.

15 crimes per 100 people is a lot higher than I'd have expected for that stat. Probably it contains a large number of crimes that are minor or petty so don't attract notice.

The surge in crime people mean when referring to Sweden is this sort of thing:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50339977

NYT is the DN of the US. I wonder who their Wolodarski is.

Dagens Nyheter absolutely aims to be the NYT of Sweden.

Many people, although not enough, have had similar experiences. I feel fortunate that it happened to me when I was still a kid. The local newspaper reported a story about the adventures me and some neighbor kids had during a flood in our little town. It was exaggerated and bogus. That made an impression on me. Several times later in life I saw the same thing happen. My assumption these days is that most news stories range from being somewhat inaccurate to totally bogus.

Yeah. 100% with you on this. The world can be divided in 2 groups. The ones that are aware of this and a large part which actually isn't. However, even as someone who has, like you, been part of a few stories, and thereby rather early realized they are never correct, even then it's easy to forget this and read the daily news too naively. Especially in uncontroversial subjects.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. We are all subject to it. Requires constant vigilance to avoid it.

I came to a similar conclusion after hearing their "The Daily" report on phishing attacks pre-election. They described the phishing attempt as "looking exactly like a Facebook login form" and then said that this level of sophistication could only be accomplished by a state actor — obviously Russia in this case.

I was blown away and had that same thought: if they got this so wrong, and I can tell because I know about the topic, what don't I know about that they're also getting so wrong?

Who are behind this? I sense a political slant.

What am I missing? Why do people hate the new york times?

You missed the entire page, I believe.

Someone else could explain this particular case, but maybe because it's a biased propaganda machine?

Bari Weiss writes about a general set of issues she saw: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

I’m not certain this website isn’t itself interesting for plenty of other reasons, though.

Well, this goes back a ways but there's https://text.npr.org/319233332 (why Snowden didn't go to them), many of us are angry they hired climate-denier Bret Stephens, and of course there are people on the right who feel their coverage is unfair to their concerns.

They're also a pain to cancel (calling them??? this is what temporary card numbers were made for) and their data handling is poor https://twitter.com/rharter/status/1358809000905736194/photo...

They also may have fired a freelancer for a tweet mildly revealing their political affiliations https://www.vox.com/2021/1/24/22247390/lauren-wolfe-new-york...

And yet I subscribe. I read their articles fairly often and journalism is worth paying for.

They also lead the “But her emails” charge against Clinton .

One recent action of the Times I think is "Hate inspiring" is how they handle Senator Tom Cotton's op ed where he argued for sending in military or national guard to help with law and order during the BLM protests/riots.

Cotton's essay didn't call for murdering the protesters or anything illegal, and I believe a significant percentage of the public supported the move, but the Times claimed it was so offensive that it shouldn't have been published and fired the head of the editorial section for allowing it.

To me, it seems outrageous that a senator making arguments with some significant amount of public support are too offensive to be published in the NYT op ed section. It makes me feel like the whole paper has a very ideological bent such that they don't want to discuss things so much as tell their audience what to think. Incidents like this make me regard the NYT as a kind of mind-poison because they're showing you they want to manipulate and control what you think by preventing you from seeing different opinions.

Just a recent example, from yesterday:

One of their columnists made a big stink about not being allowed in a particular Clubhouse chat, and how it was incredibly dangerous for people to be talking without allowing the media in.

She then signed up with a fake name, joined a chat and immediately (wrongly) accused Marc Andreesen of "using the r-slur."

And then, when it was pointed out that Marc Andreesen didn't say that, said that all those white males looked alike to her.

As a foreigner who has only occasionally read articles in the NYT when following links to them, I think the issue is more like extreme disappointment than hate.

It's clear from reading comments by Americans (not just on HN) that the New York Times was considered something of a cultural institution, a pillar of society, a bit like how the BBC used to be perceived in the UK. Perception: If the NYT published something then it was almost certainly true, it was high quality, it cared about journalistic standards, was respected around the world, a unifying force, etc.

Then at some point the NYT changed. A lot of news institutions changed. Or maybe we just got the tools to understand their true nature, who knows. Whatever happened, that perception is now fatally damaged amongst very large numbers of people, in fact majorities of people in both the USA and the UK are now telling pollsters they no longer trust the NYT or the BBC. Those people are angry about it. They want to be able to trust these institutions - it makes life simpler if you can read the news and believe it. But they're realising that they cannot. This anger mixed with disappointment can sometimes look like hate, and in some cases it perhaps becomes that, because these institutions are still vigorously manipulating the large minority that still trusts them and it's natural that this could cause resentment.

No, the NYT really changed. They once had an editor (I forget his name) who, recognizing that his reporters leaned a little left, deliberately had an editorial policy a little right, trying to keep the paper leaning neither way. His tombstone literally says "He kept the paper straight."

But he's gone, and those days are over.

geez, where is this coming from? the NYT is a national treasure

maybe a design problem? user interface issue?

differentiation of editorial content vs. the newsroom?

I'm genuinely curious

Genuinely curious. For those who hate the NYT. Where do you get your news from?

Personally, all over. You have to know the biases of the particular source you're consuming, and take that into account with every article. It's possible to read NYT and get some good info from it, but you need to know when to look elsewhere for more information.

Some places I find myself frequenting more than others though: Democracy Now, Popular Front, Antiwar.com, Harper's. I also like Glenn Greenwald a lot — in my mind if you genuinely risked your life for one of the most important stories ever, I give you a lot of benefit-of-the-doubt.

Places I avoid completely: Fox News, CNN, Breitbart (do I even need to mention that?), Vox.

Reuters, the Associated Press.

I get most of my news from NewsNationNow and the Reuters direct feed.

I am a long time current subscriber to the NY Times. I hate what they have become, but still subscribe as they have have a handful of professional reporters. Anything US political from the NY Times is untrusted by me, but their foreign reporters are still trustworthy and doing good work.

I maintain paid subscriptions to other newspapers including NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Las Vega Sun, Houston Chronicle, St. Louis Post Dispatch and Cincinnati Enquirer among others. I believe in supporting news publishing as there is importance ensuring it continues.

Where do you get your news from?

WaPo, Daily Wire, The Telegraph.

I got a subscription to the NYT for a special price, but I don’t think I’ll renew it at the end of the year. Compared to the Washington Post it seems oddly bereft of any real editorial identity anymore. They are trying to be all things to all people and so it winds up being a contradictory mess that just makes everybody angry.

A generation ago a newspaper could still claim to be impartial and to be a neutral forum for people from both sides of the political spectrum. But the partisan divide is so strong now but to except the ideas of one side necessarily means you have to believe the other side is crazy, evil or both; the ideologies are to diametrically opposed for it to be logically possible to see “good points“ on both sides now.

So they are just sheets in the wind. They publish an op Ed written by Tom cotton about using the army on protesters, get backlash, fire whoever green lit that idea. Then some freelance editor dares to say Joe Biden‘s inauguration was emotional for her and they immediately fire her for not being “neutral“ or some bullshit.

These decisions pissed off conservatives, pissed off liberals and made nobody in the middle any happier. They need to just pick a side and run with it.

>>> They need to just pick a side and run with it. So you don't care about objective journalism?

I’m talking about their editorial content. There’s nothing about “objective journalism“ that obligates them to run an opinion piece defending China‘s actions in Hong Kong, for example.

No, but if there are opinion articles for both sides, it will create a more informed reader. Newspapers should provide enough information for readers to be able to make their position on the information alone

Right, that’s the classic neutral source model: report what the person on the left thinks, report what the person on the right thinks, and expect the informed reader to make their own decision, which will probably be somewhere in the middle.

That model worked fine when people had things in common other than their views on policies, and could politely agree to disagree on many things. But it’s another matter altogether when both sides literally think the other side is trying to destroy America. If you have a paper that tries to show “both sides“ of issues that illicit opinions from OAN, Newsmax, Fox and literal Chinese state propaganda and put it next to commentary by people like Ezra Klein you just wind up with a publication that is intellectually incoherent.

The “both sides“ model of reporting assumes that both sides exist on the same planet and share a basic understanding of the axioms of reality. And they don’t anymore. Any publication that attempts to do this is just going to elicit outrage from both sides on a routine basis. And the NYT frequently does now. Nobody who supports BLM he’s going to feel “informed“ by an editorial by Tom Cotton about how troops should be called in on protesters, and vice versa.

Do you think the polarisation is driven by media drifting further apart, rather than the media drifting further apart due to polarisation?

Awesome

NYT is glaringly inaccurate if you're closer to the source of the news. Not merely a bias or a cherry picking of the data, but just really shallow research.

From a distance though, most articles will seem well-researched (even if opinionated) - and in the majority of cases we're not connected to the subject at hand. I will still keep my subscription, because the half-truths are almost always well-written; better than everyone else.

I will not recognize NYT as a newspaper of record until it deals with the Walter Duranty issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

It says there

> In 1990, The New York Times, which had submitted his works for the prize in 1932, wrote that his later articles denying the famine constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper".

What do you mean, dealing with it? It seems like they did.

I'll be happy to read the citations from the source.

Go to the wikipedia page you linked, either read it or CTRL F for the citation, then look to the closest number inside brackets following the citation (it look like this: [10], but in blue and like an exponent with the default theme). Click on it and voila, you can read the citation from the source!

This should be flagged. There is nothing wrong in particular with NYT and this is clearly a political slant. This HN story is an orchestrated attempt of promoting the page.

Ask the people who want to block it what they read and where they get their information from and you'll be in for a nasty surprise...

I think it should be blocked. I don't exactly read specific publications so much as articles that get attention on Twitter, hackernews, or are relevant to my personal or professional interests. I think I read from a wide variety of reputable and official sources as well as more general sources. e.g. my browser history for today shows I read the Free Beacon, an article on CNBC, a couple substack posts by mainstream news figures. What is the nasty surprise?

The nasty surprise is that your sources make you less informed than if you'd read the NYT.

How do you know that?

Because "Free Beacon" is a political site funded by an American billionaire hedge fund manager and conservative activist that only aggregates news from other sources and is openly biased in their own mission statement (so they don't even attempt to be fair), Twitter and social media are major sources of disinformation and do not employ journalists at all, and CNBC is specialized in financial news and otherwise draw their news from the same Press Agencies as the NYT, of course.

I don't think the NYT even attempts to be fair. The NYT is also owned by an American billionaire and left wing political activist. I don't see how reading a collection of sources with different perspectives, even if some are unfair or specialized, would be a worse information strategy than focusing on one unfair source.

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