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Comment by arthur_sav | Hacker News Reader

I've made a pledge to never read another NYT article. They've been writing absolute dogpoop for the last decade and have lost any credibility they once had.

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News is completely different from how it was a decade ago, and NYT has hired most of the best writers from every other company. They even have the Buzzfeed guy doing his strange media reporting beat where he reports on things inside the NYT as if he didn't work there.

It's really not worth ignoring them even if their politics reporting is still so terrible to the point they let Peter Baker work for them.

Whats wrong with Peter Baker?

He's a hack who was going to leave and cover Israel, but was called back to cover Trump because he has a lot of Republican sources… aka he just publishes whatever they tell him and claims it's true because they said it was true.

This is one of the reasons so many people think Trump-Russia was a hoax even though he obviously actually did it and both the Mueller report and the Republican Senate investigation said he did it.

He's also part of the NYT's gang of terminal both-sides/horse race political reporters, I believe to the point of not voting because he doesn't want to take a side.

In your judgement, which comparable organization has done better overall than NYT? They do cover a broad range of topics.

WaPo is similar audience and not nearly as bad. Foreign news organizations are probably better though.

The few times I was able to read something without the annoying paywall jumping in my face, I was disappointed and disgusted with the quality of what I read and the asinine opinions offered. I too abhor the NYT.

> News is completely different from how it was a decade ago

The article in question is very, VERY clearly not news.

It's opinion. It's a flow of thoughts. It's conjecture.

It's a bunch of things to keep our eyeballs glued, but it is most definitely NOT news.

>They've been writing absolute dogpoop for the last decade and have lost any credibility they once had.

That's pretty harsh! I'm sure you don't really mean that every article in every issue is dogpoop for 10 years. What is your real complaint?

They worded the teacher decapitation by an islamist in France as "French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street". They chose their side (hating on my country), I chose mine, which involve not reading nor trusting what they write.

You can flip through the evolution of the NYT article[1] and see that when the story was first published there were hardly any details available. Even the earliest archived version of the story was from 5:30pm and it had already been updated once. Since most headlines are written by an editor (and not the reporter) it’s exceedingly unlikely this was a malicious attempt to downplay what had happened and instead was a matter of a delay between the reporting on the ground and an editor getting a chance to review and change the headline in light of the new reporting. I can’t find the original story that was filed but I would be willing to bet the reporting on the decapitation wasn’t yet solidly confirmed when the original headline was written.

Most people would consider that a good thing - showing restraint and avoiding the temptation to sensationalize headlines before having all of the facts.

[1]http://web.archive.org/web/20201016193107/https://www.nytime...

The article is now titled "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police" [1], but there is at least one link to it using the title you give [2], and the Jerusalem Post supports the idea that it was changed later. I wouldn't call it "hating on [your] country", but it is not the appropriate framing (and it was changed, to be fair).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/world/europe/france-decap...

[2] https://www.15minutenews.com/article/190276644/french-police...

[3] https://www.jpost.com/international/french-teachers-murder-b...

I think this is all too common. NYTimes has lost its moral compass just like every other news source. Absolutely inexcusable and completely intentional. Publishing headlines is not something you do on a whim, it’s after careful thought and consideration.

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