Comment by Uhrheber

Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it.

I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course agree there are many kinds of people who call themselves journalists many of which don't improve our society. We must fight this battle, as we must fight every battle, because that's the only way things change for the better. Do not let cynicism win.

I think unfortunately journalists are trained to take phrases out of context so that they sound "sensational" / trigger emotional responses in the readers. You quickly find that out if give out interviews - you need to be very mindful how things may sound if taken out of context.

E.g. a while ago a newspaper here took me an interview/ they were building a story about people that had somewhat remarkable results in school & ample opportunities to leave (e.g. I participated in IOI and had 2 medals), and still chose to stay in the country - what were their motives, how it turned out for them. During the interview, I mentioned something along the lines that "I earn well enough to afford everything that I want, and my friends/family is here, I'm used to the local culture, etc". As a result, "I can afford everything" became basically the headline.

The father of one of my neighbours recently died in a house fire. It was a tragic accident, nothing sinister. The whole family could be described as boringly average with nothing of note about them. The family refused all requests for interviews from the media.

That didn't stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family photos (both old and more recent ones) and published pictures of the whole family. The family could deal with the headlines, but that someone leaked family photos to the paper really hit them hard.

The story was so sensationalised and gory and completely off the scale. A few column inches would have sufficed, instead it was double page spread implying the family was in turmoil. The paper turned an already painful family situation in to an absolute nightmare.

Many, many years ago, I was the foreman on a murder trial in our little town. In the jury selection process, the public defender -- a good, respected, local attorney -- asked the first candidate pool if they had read about the murder in the local paper. Almost everyone had. Then he asked if any of them had ever had a story written about them, or, say, their business, in this local paper. Three or four people raised their hand. Then he simply asked, "Did they get it right?" Everyone shook their head. Everyone laughed, and he moved on. Point made. That was my eye-opener.

I had a similar experience with reporters. I worked on a commercial product, on release someone just opening store had a sale, some reporter interpreted that sale as dumping a failing product and wrote that story. No amount of proof to the contrary would get them to retract. Whether or not it effected sales I have no idea but I learned some reporters are scum

There is also the phenomenon of reading articles about topics I know well and haven them be completely wrong which leads to to at least entertain the idea that the same is true for topics i don't know about. No idea what the solution is.

Some things to keep in mind when doing any interview.

First, know what message you want to get across, and focus on that.

Second, avoid almost all "what if" type hypothetical questions.

Third, make your own recording of any interview, and make sure the reporter is aware that you are doing so.

I was fortunate enough to be part of some media training early in my career, where the trainer (an ex-TV reporter) recorded an interview with one of the participants. The next day they played for us the video they had put together splicing different questions into the interview and editing down the responses. The resulting "interview" was a real hit piece, and the editing was done smoothly enough that it presented as a single continuous take (even with the switching camera angles). It would have been very damaging if it had been broadcast like that, and without proof that it was faked the PR effort to counteract it would have been challenging.

Many years ago, a close family friend, who was a police officer in a small town, committed suicide. The local television news kept trying to find the man's children and wife in the days immediately following his suicide to ask them questions. Because there's no informative news value to the general public in his family's reactions -- of course they're heartbroken and grieving, their beloved husband/father took his own life -- it was clear that the media just wanted to air emotional people to appeal to viewers.

I stopped watching television news -- because the vast majority of 'news' programs are just entertainment with a veneer of news.

First and foremost, I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired. NYT is a reputable journal and shouldn't tolerate such unprofessional and potentially dangerous behavior. The person breached a few lines of ethical journalism, and for no justified reason:

First, purposefully using an incorrect name (and Scott Alexander's online identity is Scott Alexander). In many other cases, even if the name is known publicly, and it is (or was) a legal anme, a journalist does not need to write it.

Second, for everyone having vocal opinions, it puts them in real danger. If revealing someone's identity (or a threat of such) makes someone close their blog, the journalist have already made their damage.

Third, it erodes trust in journalists. Such journalists make any other journalism harder, as people have justified reasons not to talk. Not every person wants to increase their risk.

I hope that until the journalist gets fired, no activist, whistleblower, a person who wants to speak about professional malpractice, controversial artist etc. won't talk to NYT. For their own safety.

It baffles me when people trust the "news", _especially_ if they only consume news within their own little bubble. I was interviewed a couple of times on technological topics (once by a NYT journalist), and was once in the middle of events that were reported on, so I knew what actually happened. In all three cases what was printed was total clickbait horseshit that had nothing to do with reality. So if a journalist wants to talk to me now, I will only do it if it generates clickbait horseshit that's good for me somehow.

I had a similar experience in Iraq. I had saw an attack happen and then heard the CNN report about it a few hours later and it wasn't even in the realm of what happened. It was surreal.

After getting in trouble with the law and getting the story in the paper as a kid, I realized people like a simple narrative which matches with their expectations. Reality is complicated and people just don't have time for it. Not the cops, not the media, and not the readers.

Having seen the inside of a few events and the reporting produced in response, I'd say a healthy dose of scepticism is usually warranted when reading about something you have no personal involvement in.

In fact one of the worst experience for me in terms of trust for the media was working at a startup. The willingness of journalists to produce puff pieces, or print press releases virtually verbatim, on the basis of 5 minutes of SQL queries cobbled together and cherry picked to produce the desired result was frightening.

News organisations pander to their audience, so I think it's really important to understand what that audience is. If you happen to be in that target audience, then of course there's a real risk you'll end up in an echo chamber that becomes increasingly far away from anything resembling a consensus reality.

I've come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different target audiences. I occasionally read the Daily Mail (my mother gets it, don't judge) and the Guardian. My main source of general news is the BBC news site, but I also regularly read The Economist. From time to time I pop on to the Fox News site, partly to remind myself that the Daily Mail could actually be a lot worse. I listen to LBC in the car (A London based politics and current affairs talk radio show).

Genuine question - I'd be interested in how others approach this. Is my set of sources too skewed one way or another? Am I missing a decent balanced source, or should I add a credible source on any particular political leaning?

Reminds me of when I was in elementary and one day I was sick and all my classmates met the governor. The media was obviously there and one classmate was asked to write something to say to the governor. The media claimed he was 11 but his age was 12. The teacher taught us that the media isnt always necessarily telling you the truth. There is way more bias in the media these past few years than I have ever seen so confirming sources is more important than anything. I dont usually trust "anonymous sources" unless there is accompanying hard evidence.

I learned this in college. I was head of an organization that supported a lot of activities around sports and I was interviewed by the school paper.

Had a nice conversation and then the story came out. He used 2 sentences from a 30 minute conversation to insert out of context in a piece totally unrelated to what we were talking about.

I’ve been on guard ever since.

This is a pretty easy conclusion to come to theoretically, too. Any position of power is going to tend towards abuse and incompetence if there's not some sort of filter in hiring for or sustaining the institution. Newspapers live or die by clicks and subscribers: There's no incentive towards any notion of "journalistic integrity", there's no filter ensuring that journalists are especially intelligent or honest, and there's no reason to believe that the typical journalist is any less likely to abuse their position than the typical police officer.

Just as there are individual dedicated, ethical police who believe deeply in fulfilling their mission the right way, there are good journalists out there who make the world better. But for every Ronan Farrow, there are a thousand Farhad Manjoos and Cade Metzes; for every Foreign Affairs, there are a hundred New York Times or Fox News. The net effect is the same as with police: understand that we've got a horridly imperfect system chock full of dishonest actors and engage with it on those terms. Don't talk to cops without a lawyer; don't talk to a journalist without a PR person and/or a specific plan for what you're getting out of the exchange and how to protect yourself from exploitation[1].

The Internet has greatly accelerated this trend. Pre-Internet, if by some miracle you managed to get enough honest, intelligent people together in a single paper, you could establish a culture of journalistic ethics under the aegis of the slack afforded by your local monopoly on distribution. But in the Internet era, you need to be fully competitive on the terms defined by the market, which, as described above, don't point towards honest, ethical reporting at all.

The tragedy with journalism is that government is usually a useful tool to address this problem: well-crafted regulation can shape incentives such that you don't need to rely on wishing for good cops, which is the direction that police reform discussions are taking. A heavy government hand, however, is anathema to the role that journalists are supposed to play in modern society, so this tool is off the table.

I've thought about this for a very long time, and I don't know how to solve this.

[1] This obviously doesn't apply in narrow cases like "observation from man on the street"

The Times wrote a story about a play written about my life (long story) and there was a mistake in every line - most trivial and inexplicable, like guessing an age for people and getting it wrong, and some mistakes actively annoying.

Also, I once appeared in the Post and the Times in the same day when my friend and I got blown up in a steam pipe explosion (we were covered in mud but undamaged). The Times made us seem suave and hip (they mentioned my natty tie covered by mud) and the Post made us seem like victims of a tragedy. Such different pictures!

All very educational.

In underprivileged communities in the UK, kids are raised from a young age not to trust a "journo".

> I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago

This. Sometimes we joke that "all news is fake news"; but it is actually true!

Just by luck I've been interviewed on camera a few times, and each time Im astounded, how im not really beeing interviewed, im rather beeing asked questions phrased a certain way, so they have a certain response that fits a narrative.

In 2005, The Australian newspaper published an article claiming that Macquarie University IT Services was going to make redundant 50-60 staff. (I can't find the text of the article online, but I can find a citation for it [1].)

I remember being amused by this article, because I actually worked there at the time, and we didn't actually have 50-60 staff to make redundant. If they'd let go of 50-60 staff from our department, we would have had a negative number of employees remaining (the actual number of employees was a bit over 40). It also reinforced my tendency to distrust journalists, who often fail to get even basic facts right.

(There was an element of truth behind the story – they did plan a significant round of job cuts, 15 years later I can't recall exactly how big, but it could have been a third of the department – it was just the numbers in the article had been impossibly inflated. And the plan was never to lay off the entire department, just a significant chunk of it.)

[1] https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/121830411

That was bad journalism. Would you also stop trusting all doctors after meeting a bad one?

My wife and I have a combined >20 years experience in microbiology and medical research, so we’re feeling the pain of “this journalist has no idea what they’re talking about” more than usual these days.

The coverage of COVID has been more distressing than the actual disease. (Hint: epidemiologists specialize in studying the spread of diseases after the fact; asking them about an ongoing epidemic is like asking an expert on Roman architecture to build an office building.)

Here’s some example nonsense in the news. I regularly see the same story argue both points in each bullet:

- Sweden has had too many cases (deaths), and too few cases (people with antibodies).

- Last week 5% of 1000 confirmed cases died; this week 0.5% of 10,000 estimated cases died. “Experts” “baffled” but we are winning and can reopen (the same publication will flip the numbers and conclusion tomorrow)

- Antibodies might not lead to immunity, but the vaccine (which does nothing but cause your body to create antibodies) will be a panacea.

Bonus gem from yesterday:

New study shows kids don’t spread COVID. The numbers are based on studies of areas where schools and daycares were closed, and the kids were quarantined. Adults were more likely to catch COVID at work than from their quarantined kids. There was one (just one) school where the kids spread COVID amongst themselves, but that was probably an outlier. No one really understands how it happened.

Note that the high-level conclusion of this last article was probably right: kids usually don’t get symptoms, and asymptomatic people are less likely to cough / spread it. A stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess.

Even if the reporter was half decent (let's assume he/she was), it would most likely be the Editor that have twisted the story around, for whatever reason or excuse. It happens in all kinds of business. Go talk to an auditor (ANY) auditor and they will have plenty of horror stories where the reviewer rewrote a paragraph "to better reflect the message", in which rewrite the message was changed.

Genuine question, how do you (or others) check the facts? Where do you get facts from?

I would like to caution anyone reading the comments to be skeptical of posts that push to erode your faith in journalism. There has been an alarming trend of people pushing a narrative that news organizations cannot be trusted. It is a toxic attack on one of the most important components in a functional democratic republic.

I don’t know if I’ll really be able to add to this conversation, but two cents anyway:

I became a journalist more than 10 years ago because of a similar sentiment - I thought “mainstream media” was pretty terrible, and yet influential in society, and I wanted to know how it could be better.

I was a reporter for several years, an editor for a few, and now I teach journalism.

1. News angles are the fundamental part of news writing - probably the source of most of these problems, of overselling (or “beating up”) a story. It’s basically an effort to get straight to the point, a point as sharp as the facts will allow. You’ll go to the same press conference as a room full of journalists, and you’d better come out with the strongest piece of news. When you’re new, you’ll miss the most interesting or important piece of information, or you’ll bury it halfway down your story, and your competitor will make you look like you can’t do your job. Sooner or later you’re all thinking the same way and picking the same angles.

(This process seems to happen quite organically - the problems of social media look similar. But I’ll stick to personal experience, since that’s probably all I have to add.)

2. My least favorite aspect of the stereotypical personality of a journalist is a sense of self-importance. You start to believe you’re important because you talk to important people and write about important things. And some of it is a defense mechanism and hard to live without. Frequently, you need to challenge people - ask hard questions of the government, say. And that’s one of the most important things you can do as a journalist. A bit of bravado as armor really helps, because you will get attacked all the time. This feeling of “it’s us against the world” just crops when you’re doing accountability journalism. You need to be willing to piss anyone off, especially because everyone will be trying to manipulate you and spin their story, even in an innocent way, and you’ve got to try to stay independent. And when you get it wrong, you’re just acting like a sociopath.

3. A big part of journalism is “for the record.” You call people up and write it down - it doesn’t need to be this great investigation - and then other people can form opinions and bigger analyses out of it. There’s a lot this, and it’s pretty helpful.

That’s long enough, and I won’t add any conclusions, just leave an impression of what you deal with when you’re in it.

Unfortunately every single media outlet has a narrative to propagate. Being that an imposed one or from their own convictions. Can't find a single source of information being totally objective.

May as well ask here, I pretty much only read the weekly Economist to get my news at this point. I think I have their slight biases dialed in at this point. Anyone want to make a case for a different primary news source/argue that The Economist is bad?

For context, I like The Economist because it's mostly unemotional, information-dense, and the magazine comes in a single weekly thing to read.

Well, I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter WASN'T at the scene, and yet I later read what she had written about it in the newspaper as if she had been present.

It was a really nice review of a show that... was cancelled.

How do you get the news? Who do you trust?

How do you stay informed?

Same here to some degree. Those who wield actual power will never be criticized or exposed, which means that journalists are inherently useless or closer to being a corpse.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, Tim Pool, Andy Ngo are some who are constantly attacked both verbally and physically and thus I have bit more faith in them than I do for others "journalists".

Always keep Reverse Gell-Man Amnesia in mind.

The Economist is actually pretty good. They have their own political bias (see at wikipedia entry) but both, their news and technology reporting is top notch.

I woke up to the fact that most newspapers are like that in the last 2-3 years. That resulted in me eliminating one publication after the other.

Today only one has remained, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a german-language publication from Switzerland. Lets see how long it holds up.

> "I don't trust anything they write without checking the facts."

I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever.

How do you "check the facts" if you don't trust professional journalists?

What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector?

The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases.

The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - "I don't trust journalists" translates in most cases to "I don't trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint."

This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information.

Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn't mean you should distrust all apples.

You know what's even more sad? Journalists on average, are more intelligent than an average human being.

An average journalist distorts the truth knowingly and is a scumbag. An average person parrots lies and is convinced of them, and if you point it out, he/she'll be upset with you.

This is how religions continue even in the face of the best thinkers for centuries, coming up with the most considerate, foolproof arguments for why it's bullshit. At some point we have to ask: do people even want to be able to tell truth apart from bullshit, or do they just want to be led and told what to do by someone they like?