Comment by stocksinsmocks

2 days ago

5% wrong is an extremely charitable take on the NYT.

I once went to a school that had complementary subscriptions. The first time I sat down to read one there was an article excoriating President Bush about hurricane Katrina. The entire article was a glib expansion of an expert opinion who was just some history teacher who said that it was “worse than the battle of Antietam” for America. No expertise in climate. No expertise in disaster response. No discussion of facts. “Area man says Bush sucks!” would have been just as intellectually rigorous. I put the paper back on the shelf and have never looked at one since.

Don’t get emotionally attached to content farms.

6 comments

stocksinsmocks

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jfengel  2 days ago

That sounds like something from the opinion page rather than the news. That is ok, as long as it's clearly labeled. It doesn't sound particularly high quality; perhaps they were a local giving their view from the community.

Regardless, clearly labeled opinions are standard practice in journalism. They're just not on the front page. If you saw that on the front page, then I'd need more context, because that is not common practice at NYT.

  • stocksinsmocks  2 days ago

    It was on the front page, and, no, it wasn’t a labeled editorial. If you feel the need to research this to defend their honor, it would have been around fall 2005. I don’t assume their journalism has improved in the past 20 years, and I’m OK with not knowing.

wannadingo  2 days ago

So since incorporating in 1851, let's say they put out 60,000 issues. 1 issue would represent about 0.002% of their output. How do you get to over 5% wrong?

  • saulpw  2 days ago

    It's a spot check. They checked one article from one of those issues and they spotted an error, so odds of >5% wrongness are high in their view. (They need a larger sample size and some statistics to make such a claim, but certainly your numbers are way off, but in the other direction.)