Comment by somenameforme
3 years ago
Why do so many news articles do this? It references a deposition, describes it becoming publicly available, and even quotes from it, and then chooses not to link to it or otherwise provide access to it. And search engines absolutely suck for finding useful things like this.
Has anybody managed to find the deposition? The search engine fail is made even better by the fact there was another deposition involving the same individual. Ugh!
There is a decent discussion at https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th... which contains quotes from the deposition, as well as a link to a pdf of the deposition at https://wetransfer.com/downloads/8b24e0528e23c45d543f4d4182b... (I know, but that's the only link there).
In this case it's surprisingly hard to find a link to the deposition via search engines. Just out of curiosity, I tried googling and binging (?) several phrases from the pdf; nothing comes up. Adding the case number doesn't help much either. It's 19CV346663, if anyone wants to try.
The deposition is from June 2022 btw.
I'd agree with your characterization. But after downloading the PDF from your WeTransfer link, I was able to find a link on Google by searching for the quoted opening sentence of the deposition. Oddly, the resulting Google page has a header at the top that says something to the effect of "No results found", but then it has a link to the page that contains it.
The full deposition is embedded on this page: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559294/tesla-autopilot-...
A direct link to download the deposition is here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23574198/elluswamy-de...
Nicely done!
> Why do so many news articles do this?
Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.
If they cared about serving ads, they could rehost the document. Then they'd get more clicks, from the folks interested in reading the primary source material. (Court filings are public domain, so there are no copyright concerns with doing so.)
But then you may form an opinion of your own (that differs from theirs) by reading the source material. Or you may notice that those trusty journalists weren’t accurately representing the content of source material in their articles.
That would be bad (for the media company).
They don't want to host a document with very little engagement. They want to serve articles that are short and lead to more page views.
As a rule of thumb, I find court documents generally far better reading material than news articles covering them, especially court decisions.
A lot of legal writers are actually pretty good, even from the perspective of a layperson, especially judges/clerks writing for judges at the appellate and Supreme Court level.
I learned at school that the things I state as fact should be verifiable. It keeps amusing (baffling) me how journalists seem to be taught the opposite.
I find it baffling they are called journalists. It's just generating controversy based on events, with no actual thought put into actual "news" part.
I was frustrated by this back in covid when data was almost never linked. I resolved that it was probably a weird market effect where the data collectors have to be funded by those willing to buy access to it (i.e. news publishers not readers), and editors were in place to ensure integrity in its reporting. And maybe readers can still make phone calls and go to libraries to find the data instead of finding it on the internet for free.
On a very separate case, I was also very annoyed by this on one of the recent-ish mass shooters, I think the Buffalo guy.
I saw a million articles talking about his manifesto calling him a radical socialist and picking out some quotes and then others calling him a radical conservative and picking out some quotes. All while not providing links to said manifesto with a kind of proclamation of "we don't want to share his ideas" (except they already did with the quotes). Really it just sounded like they didn't trust me not to kill a bunch of people if I read such a "dangerous" document because it was so compelling.
When I eventually found it, all it really turned out to be was the ramblings of a clearly not well adjusted mind. It seemed to me like the motivation for not linking it was more likely that they didn't want me to realize that whatever conclusions they decided to draw were totally unfounded because the document was complete nonsense.
They don't want you to click away.
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