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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

As a life-long liberal, I am fed-up with the NYT. Yellow cake bogus story to get us to invade Iraq. Bogus story of Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan (has been refuted by US intelligence agencies). They ran with the story that Officer Brian Sicknick died from being attacked by the January 6 mob, even when the officer's family almost immediately disputed the NYT stories.

Does the NYT just not care that they keep getting called out for bogus stories? I just looked at the NYT, and I saw no retraction from their previously incorrect stories on Officer Sicknick.

Free advice, so obviously feel free to ignore it: Democracy Now has a liberal and honest (as far as I can tell) approach to the news. BBC News and The Guardian are good also. Don't waste your time with NYT, MSNBC, and Fox - unless you enjoy living in a little fake bubble and like having your own biases just reflected back at you.

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Greenwald covers the full evolution of this story here[1].

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a...

I used to be a huge fan of Greenwald, but it seems lately his fixation on being critical of other media often leads him to ignore the obvious.

Law enforcement were the ones who initially said the officer died after engaging with protesters and video showed protestors physically engaged with officers in multiple videos so it's not like it's an unbelievable claim. The media didn’t invent that narrative.

If the basis of his argument starts with an obvious falsehood, then how reliable is the rest of it? Throw it all away I guess, Greenwald too.

> Law enforcement were the ones who initially said the officer died

And does anyone know the names of those law enforcement officials? Because as far as I know they never said who it was.

Greenwald is rightfully fixated on criticism of media, because there is a lot to be critical of.

> it's not like it's an unbelievable claim. The media didn’t invent that narrative.

They were recklessly uncritical of an anonymous law enforcement source, while ignoring opposing evidence. From the 3rd paragraph of the article:

Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick's own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media's claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.

The media does not show this level of credulity in unnamed law enforcement sources when told, for example, that an officer acted in self-defense when shooting a Black suspect. Their naivete comes and goes as convenient.

I feel it's a strange consumption pattern to rely on a single news source, when Google News or Apple News is a much easier way to follow a story.

It makes more sense to follow the stories you care about rather than simply the sources you trust. Even if you trusted the NYT, many of their articles aren't going to be relevance to you. It's like going back to the old school RSS model where you scroll past a bunch of articles.

I would also point out Axios, which has been praised by Sarah Sanders when she was the WH press secretary, and has an interesting way of summarizing news as digestible bullet points.

What I use to do as read through the newspaper to learn about issues and events that may not effect me personally.

Then I'd look up another source to get a counter point.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm older and more jaded, or news sources are becoming less information baring and more position pushing, but I am just cutting off my news now.

News aggregators can also just as well inform you as to whether something is bubbling into a major story. I think about any news source and whether they miss something that I want from aggregators, and the answer is often yes.

Libertarian/AnCap here, and I agree with you 100%

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