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Comment by Grim-444 | Hacker News Reader

"I work at Google and they've told me to work 125 hours weeks". In that statement I provided just as much evidence for my claim as the article does their claim. In fact, there's more proof for my claim since it has a username tied to it, whereas the article just cites anonymous "according to internal sources".

And yet, this is an article that how many thousands of people will read, and internalize into their model of reality? How much more hate will such an article foster?

Shouldn't we at least require some SHRED of proof for articles such as these?

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Especially when you look at how much journalists have gotten wrong the past few days.

Ligma and Johnson ("They are visibly shaken"), mass layoffs before Nov 1st (nope), unbanned accounts would be back on by Monday (nope), Elon restored Ye's account (it was restored before the acquisition), Saudi Arabia bought into Twitter (they already were shareholders), etc...

NYT said they’ll have mass layoffs by Nov 1 because of stock compensation expiration. It didn’t happen and Musk refuted it outright.

https://twitter.com/austen/status/1587458237414068224

My generous take on this: Media is incompetent and they need to do more due diligence.

My cynical take on this: Media is losing its power and influence, this is the last ditch effort to smear opponents.

Media organizations are distraught over losing control of the gated institutional narrative. The disintermediation process is continuing and many "news" media outlets have debased themselves to the point that they now write low-effort articles about what's trending on Twitter.

To their credit, the New York Times still does a little bit of real investigative journalism. But their standards are low and they tend to uncritically accept anything that matches their editorial bias.

I completely and totally agree. They have been replaced as the gatekeepers for public "information" and are now seen as a sloppy middleman with a penchant for lying and pushing absurd narratives people with common sense wouldn't buy in a heartbeat. Its why trust in these sad institutions are near a record low:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re...

hey, i didn't know that guy started a new boot camp. what happened to lambda school?

My take is that the person screen-shotted a pretty carefully chosen part of the actual article.

The actual article contextualizes the event as "Elon Musk planned to begin laying off workers at Twitter as soon as Saturday, four people with knowledge of the matter said, with some managers being asked to draw up lists of employees to cut."

So of course this screenshot this person tweeted takes a paragraph from the middle, out of context, which makes it seem like a blanket, unqualified assertion.

This is how reporting works. I know Business Insider and believe it is pretty above board. Business Insider is basically citing CNBC, which is pretty above board. These are two of the shrinking list of organizations that actually practice journalism. CNBC, meanwhile, is citing multiple employees who feared to put their names on record for fear of retaliation. CNBC, on top of that, says in the article that they were able to review internal communications.

If that kind of reporting is below the bar for evidence, then a lot of abuses will never see the light of day.

I also suspect Musk is intentionally trolling the press at this point.

He'll say random flippant things in meetings he know will get leaked. Those things don't happen. He trains his employees not to trust the news and gets to make a point about news trying to find an axe to grind.

This seems highly likely.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-has-turn...

If only that article came with a blue check mark :/

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