Uhhh no, I don’t trust them, and consider trusting them to be a pretty intense mistake. I’m friends with some very well-known people, where respected journal institutions (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) report about their lives. So I get to know them up close, and I get to directly see how the reporting misconstrues them. I’ve come away from this with intense distrust, to the degree that, similarly to Eliezer, I just don’t bother reading stuff they write about people anymore (unless it’s simply to track what news outlets are saying about people).
I’ll grant that fancy news outlets are more careful about being technically correct about facts (I’ve been interviewed by both high and low profile news outlets, and have in fact found the high profile ones are more dutiful in doublechecking concrete facts I tell them), but they are not trustworthy in terms of trying to present an accurate picture. It’s trivially easy to say only technically true things in a manner that leads people to a misleading conclusion.
My understanding from those links is that NYT’s actions here is a significant outlier in journalistic/editorial ethics, enough that both Kelsey and Matt thought it was relevant to comment on in those terms.
Kelsey:
I’d never heard anything like it[...]
For the record, Vox has never told me that my coverage of something must be ‘hard-hitting’ or must be critical or must be positive, and if they did, I would quit. Internal culture can happen in more subtle ways but the thing the NYT did is not normal.
Matt:
But what happened is that a few years ago the New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage.
Uhhh no, I don’t trust them, and consider trusting them to be a pretty intense mistake. I’m friends with some very well-known people, where respected journal institutions (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) report about their lives. So I get to know them up close, and I get to directly see how the reporting misconstrues them. I’ve come away from this with intense distrust, to the degree that, similarly to Eliezer, I just don’t bother reading stuff they write about people anymore (unless it’s simply to track what news outlets are saying about people).
I’ll grant that fancy news outlets are more careful about being technically correct about facts (I’ve been interviewed by both high and low profile news outlets, and have in fact found the high profile ones are more dutiful in doublechecking concrete facts I tell them), but they are not trustworthy in terms of trying to present an accurate picture. It’s trivially easy to say only technically true things in a manner that leads people to a misleading conclusion.
One example is how the New York Times decided that they wouldn’t cover tech positively: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
(Matt’s original tweet thread is saved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104004538/https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553 )
My understanding from those links is that NYT’s actions here is a significant outlier in journalistic/editorial ethics, enough that both Kelsey and Matt thought it was relevant to comment on in those terms.
Kelsey:
Matt:
The NYT may be an outlier among papers, but this instance is not an outlier of the NYT approach.
Yeah I’ve heard elsewhere that NYT is pretty unusual here, would trust them less than other media.