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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

The best sign of click bait is posting obviously false, inflammatory articles and then silently putting out a retraction days later after the clicks have come in.

The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.

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I think we have different notions of "clickbait". Personally I think NYT's particular brand of dishonesty is a bit more subtle than what I normally think of as "clickbait", but I won't argue the point. They are certainly and frequently guilty of publishing overt falsehoods and then quietly retracting (or even stealth-editing) days or weeks later.

Did they publish falsehoods knowingly? Every news source is going to make mistakes and retracting the story is normal.

Yes. The example that springs to mind (and I get downvoted without explanation every time I mention this, so goodbye Internet Points) was the Covington Catholic affair--the still photo of the kid in a MAGA hat apparently smugly smirking at a Native American elder (the media reported that he was a Vietnam veteran which was an outright falsehood). The whole of the media developed the same narrative around the still photo which was directly contradicted by a widely-circulated, publicly available 2 hour video. The narrative was that some racist white kids disrespected a Native American elder while the 2 hour video makes it clear that kids had been subjected to a lengthy racist and homophobic tirade.

I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:

>Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial.

and then a link to an article from the very next day[2] explaining what happened in fuller detail after more videos came out.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-hig... [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...

I'm not sure what point you're making. Your observations are all consistent with the "overt falsehood followed by quiet retraction" claim. Are you quibbling about "days later" versus "day later" with respect to the retraction?

> I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:

That was added later, hence the italics.

Perhaps the avid reader would say that they are most disappointed in papers like the NYT. You cannot really be disappointed by FOX or CNN. Different medium, but I think it still applies.

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