There is no truth in "The Truth" and there are no news in "The News".
Update: Added links to wikipedia
To borrow a phrase that usually makes me think of a milennial with a punchable face, "This^100."
I always held those news organizations skeptically in the back of my mind as Every Educated Person Ought To, but this is just...unbelievable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/world/rise-of-saudi-prince...
I could be as much skeptic as you and I can draw my own conclusions for why this particular story might have been published now and not before, and for what purpose, but this doesn't stop me from enjoying reading it and absorbing its juicy details and knowledge.
I'm still thankful for NYT for dedicating time and effort to expose this person as a fraud and hypocrite and I'm looking forward to reading more of these in the future for other despicable figures.
Maybe none. But one way the times could re establish credibility with me is to be transparent about how much the writer engaged with pr reps or communications teams in each story. It doesn't have to be exhaustive.
By the way- Part of my journey to this level of skepticism was "Trust me, I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulato...
That would be the worst PR piece you could ask for, unless you mean that you suspect that his political foes were the ones behind this story which is not unlikely but again not a deal-breaker and what's only important to me is the question, were the details listed in the piece factual or not?
Nothing more.
For a long time now, all forms of traditional media have had a bent. It's just gotten very monied and politicized as of late.
That's what's really depressing about this: it is absurdly easy to get to the bottom of whether a fricking blender is worth buying, but important events happening in the world? Get your researchin' shoes on.
By the way, thank you very much for your input - your experience in that arena is unique and very valuable to the discussion.
Given my position, I think it's useful to state what would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism. It's actually really simple: if it persistently reports incidents for which there is no proof, or if it reports incidents in such a way that obscures the facts themselves (spin). Any institution that regularly confuses editorializing for journalism losses its credibility. By these rules there are many institutions that are not trustworthy (e.g. Fox) but there are many institutions that are (the NYT).
I just can't understand how this does not scare people. How is this different from the state run media in third-world countries we used to laugh at as kids?
It may be working out for your team _this_time_, but the same behavior will almost certainly be used against you in the future.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWKwEBIkYhI [2] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/5205
In fact, I think they were going on in the 15 years before that as well, though they were less pronounced, less obvious and less extreme. The media has probably always been a bit of a propaganda organ... it's just that the voices were a lot more diverse.
The really alarming thing we've seen this year is Google, Facebook and Reddit starting to use algorithms to suppress some voices and amplify others. Combine that with "Correct The Record" (the army of paid hillary shills who have taken over at least reddit) and the internet is no longer the alternative where you can have a reasonable discussion.
Why participate when your opponent is most likely a hired troll?
Your <s>'tinfoil hat conspiracy theory'</s> is anything but. Balanced, objective reporting in the US died in 1987, the very day it was no longer required by law:
The NYT frequently publishes articles critical of Hillary Clinton. Here are several hundred: https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Athe_donald+site%...
I'm using this example as an internet community that curates information critical to Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party campaigns. In that list are several that discuss content within the email leaks in a fashion critical to Hillary Clinton.
Publications should be permitted to publish stories critical of both major political parties.
The paper has also declined to collaborate with Assange to release stories about many other leaks. The NYT is America's Pravda.
By the establishment and for the establishment... the definition of conservative.
To think of all those who undertook personal risk over the years to build a great news organization! Too much competition from buzzfeed seems to have left the paper toothless and officious.
Historians will likely view the gutting of the adversarial, investigative press as the factor that accelerated our civilization's return to authoritarianism.
The Post has three stories based on emails in the last 48 hours:
- State pressuring FBI: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/docum...
- Goldman Transcripts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/17/...
- Foreign Government Donations (story originated on Reuters): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hacked-emails-show-e...
It's disingenuous to pretend the mainstream media is not covering the email leaks.
Inter-agency conflict and negotiation happens all the time within the federal government. It's not corruption because both sides are career civil service. For there to be a serious story here, the Post would need to have some evidence that Clinton asked Kennedy to do this, which they don't.
The NYT has not run any stories about the content of the emails on its front page in the last ten days. The stories people have linked are buried deep behind the paywall.
Where's the story about the machinations to deliberately harm the Sanders campaign? Where's the interview with Sanders asking what he'd have done if the emails had been leaked a few weeks earlier? Where is the headline "DNC corruption widespread", etc.
The purpose of an adversarial press (and press freedom in general) is to ask the very tough questions. The NYT has been derelict in its failure to do this when it comes to the leaked emails.
Yes, we all knew the likely content of the Goldman speeches. But the story has to do with how the HRC campaign went to great lengths to please Wall Street while also dealing with the Sanders left which was pretty strongly anti-Wall Street. Is there historical precedent for a politician to speak out of both sides of their mouth to this degree on a fairly important issue (highly likely laws will be passed pertaining to wall street reforms (or lack thereof) during her term in office, in contrast to many other wedge issues where the probability of laws being passed is next to nil)?
There has been a tremendous need for top-tier reporting on the leaked emails. You point out three stories, but there have been stories on less than 30% of the newsworthy items, vs 10-20 stories on the single incident of Trump's lewd remarks. Incidentally, the remarks speak for themselves and there is little a "journalist" can do other than quote them and let people be (appropriately) horrified.
Perhaps with respect to the lewd comments, an interactive timeline of each accuser and a status of any legal action pertaining to the claims would be helpful, but is it seriously deserving of 3-4 front page slots on the NYT every day for the past week?
Also, there has been no serious coverage of the third party candidates' positions on key issues. Frankly in spite of the few awkward aspects of each, both of them are far more impressive (and seem significantly more intelligent) making ad-hoc comments about nearly any issue.
There is nothing wrong with a news organization presenting its political opinions -- on the opinion page! The rest should be old fashioned factual reporting intended to enrich the discussion not color it or focus it on a subset of issues.
I brought up Buzzfeed simply because I fear that too much of the NYT focus has become about the number of online views/clicks a story gets, to the point where this has impacted page layout, headline copy, etc.
You assume they are newsworthy. Most of what I've seen, from a running tally Politico is doing as they go through them, doesn't seem overly newsworthy. The ones that have been reported seem to be mostly explainable, and look much worse when you assume context rather than put it in context, or allow the Podesta to put it in context.
> vs 10-20 stories on the single incident of Trump's lewd remarks.
Many people are very upset about those "lewd remarks". Possibly because they admit to real actions of misconduct. I think there's a false equivalence going on here. One situation is about a staffer for the Clinton campaign with lots of emails that sometimes seem to allege something, but are generally somewhat informal and it's hard to pin down specifics, and the other is about Trump himself admitting to sexual assault on tape, and then saying it was just words and he never would do something like that, and then people coming forward saying he specifically did it to them. For many people, a single true instance of this is enough to immediately discount him as a possible candidate they could vote for. That's a big story, and will get a lot of attention, as much as you might like it not to.
> Many of these are old and do not address the content of the emails. There are perhaps 100 significant stories that could have been written based on the information leaked in the past 10 days. We got zero.
I found this after 1 second of internet searching: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/10/us/politics/hillary-clinto....
> Too much competition from buzzfeed seems to have left the paper toothless and officious.
Buzzfeed has a substantial investigative reporting arm; its depth has been lauded frequently on HN: https://www.buzzfeed.com/news
For someone ragging on the lack of investigation the press are doing, you're doing a poor job of it yourself. Simply googling 'nyt clinton email' comes up with a handful of stories from the past 10 days (there's also a lot of stories older than 10 days in the search).
I'm no fan of Trump and would never vote for him, but the free and adversarial press is a crucial aspect of democracy which is not doing its job.
The fact that the emails were LEAKED OMG is not the newsworthy part. It is what is in them. And largely speaking, there's not much news in them.
IMO a major problem in the U.S. today is that not many people understand how political campaigns or the federal government actually work. So a lot of people can be led to believe that boringly standard practices like revising talking points over email, and getting updates on court hearings, are actually proof of corruption. But they're not.
I've not heard anywhere that they were leaked, which suggests a disgruntled insider. The US government claims that they were hacked, and apparently that information was communicate to both Trump and Clinton in their national security briefings.
Assange has not been forthcoming about the source of the emails.
Is a conspiracy by top officials at the DNC to harm a party candidate during the primary a minor deal? To me this is corruption at close to the highest level. Yes, it's a private org, but one that is critical to the functioning of our democracy.
Is a candidate making promises to wall street that directly contradict her campaign promises a minor deal? Well, we can cynically assume all pols are dishonest, or the press can help us simply hold all pols accountable for their promises. I'd like to see fewer promises made and more promises kept. It was frankly a bit shady that HRC refused to release the transcripts, and I think there is a newsworthy story detailing the interest groups she was courting and why they are so influential in American politics.
I've looked through the Goldman transcripts, and maybe I'm stupid, but I didn't see her making any promises. If you've got a direct quote, lay it on me.
I'm not holding my breath, though, since so far you only seem interested in vague concern-trolling.
Yes, followed by the person who was forced to step down being immediately re-hired by the HRC campaign. What is troubling about it is what it suggests about HRC -- that she got cronies into powerful positions in the DNC, that they helped subvert the primary process in her favor, and that she re-hired the disgraced DNC leader, signaling to any other cronies that she'd have their back if they got caught, too.
The issue is institutional corruption, and it should be the main story out of the leaked emails. Politics can get ugly, but the purpose of the primary is to vet the candidates that have pledged allegiance to the party by letting party members vote in the primary election.
In my opinion, HRC should have been put on the spot to answer for why the corruption that benefitted her happened, and why she re-hired DWS the next day.
I'm not aligned with either party so I don't care so much who the candidate is, but I do care about the quality of the institutions that are part of our democratic system. We should all care, because the institutions (and their lack of corruption) is more important than who wins any single election (primary or secondary).
When you think about all the idealistic Sanders supporters who donated money and time only to have their trusted DNC leaders try to sabotage their preferred candidate, the amount of harm done to our democracy by this was substantial. Think of the cynicism and frustration it created, all so that HRC would be a few percent more likely to win the nomination, and win it in an unfair way.
Politics is a long term game. Partisans like to tell us it's urgent and that we must act immediately (regardless of the costs) to impact the most important election in history. This fake urgency is the technique GWB used to sell the Iraq war. It's an effective but embarrassingly dishonest propaganda technique.
Even when I do agree with their positions, it is disconcerting to feel like I am being spoonfed political ideology.
https://medium.com/@Starkweather/new-york-times-edited-berni...
EDIT: for context, if you go read the actual emails, what you see are totally bog-standard comments of a PR team reacting to a story once it posted, and again when the NYT updated it, as the NYT (and other papers) often do.
Edit: for context "We were able to keep him from including more on the JVF, it has a mention in there, but between us and a conversation he had with Marc Elias he finally backed off from focusing too much on that."
This email chain is a total non-story. The NYTimes called the DNC for comment, and the DNC attempted to shape the story. That is basic PR 101.
We know the Sanders campaign did the same thing, because the story includes confidential information from his campaign, and comments from his surrogates. We just don't have Wikileaks access to the emails from his campaign (thank goodness).
That being said, I read the Goldman transcripts and other things that were supposed to be so damaging, and they really weren't that bad, beyond any other typical politician. Is she corrupt, absolutely. Is there a giant media conspiracy (now including SNL) against Trump? Ridiculous. He makes his own wounds.
In addition, even Mike Pence has now admitted Russia is disseminating information to Wikileaks. So we have a clear connection between Russia / Putin and Trump. I don't believe it's as far as many think with them working together, but clearly someone as thin skinned and easily manipulated as Trump would be a total win for Putin. We can talk about Hillary's collusion, Clinton Foundation corruptness and such, but how the Putin pro Trump position is not as relevant is beyond me, if not the deal breaker considering the state of Russia / American current affairs.
Wikileaks' current agenda appears to be to disrupt Western governments through leaking damaging information. I don't see a clear preference for political parties; the Manning leaks were damaging to the Republican Bush administration.
I believe that the most probable source of the DNC leaks is Russian government units, but not for the purposes of election manipulation. Here is an article that most credibly posits this theory: https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russian-spycraft-how-kre....
I had mixed feeling about Wikileaks before (as I think anyone should, since it's a very complex topic), but any thoughts I had as to him be impartial in any way (as a good journalist should be) are now out the window.
Honestly, Assange shouldn't have been the face behind the leaks. It should've been the agency's "face", and it should've been dumped all at once, like most of their past releases.
Also, think of the political dynamic. There isn't much difference between one huge scandal and ten - there's still only so much airtime. Anything leaked as a unit can be responded to as a unit.
Anyone could anonymously create a torrent and paste it in some related thread, the important thing, and why people go to Wikileaks, is getting it read faster than "they" can delete it.
One look at Assange's Twitter is all it takes to see the obvious anti-Hillary bias. The shrill "Hillary's got an earpiece!" post is one of the most glaring examples.
Perhaps you can provide more info on exactly what documents you think Putin is not happy about?
There are multiple access points, some within Federal Government.
Also there's no real need to take anti-Trump info to Wikileaks. The NYT was willing to publish one of Trump's tax returns from the 90s and those are legally protected. You can take anti-trump documents to any major newspaper.
The current angle is that Trump is a bad guy, and you just have to look at the photos of him to get the angle - 99% of him making a weird face.
It does not make the story false, but there is an angle.
And then some of the women show up on TV with their lawyer, Gloria Allred, who is in close connection with HRCs campaign(as attested by the Podesta wikileaks) and has vowed her support for HRC to win. And then there is strange behavior from some of the accusers, like begging Trump to visit their restaurant/business, which would be a strange thing to do to someone who sexually assaulted you(not impossible behavior, but all of these things add up)
My counterpoint: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/technology/yahoo-data-b...
Anonymous quotes. Unsourced claims. Revisionist history designed to tear down one individual (Mayer) to protect another (Stamos)
If you are not one of those 1-2%, how would you know about it?
You missed out the most important thing which would undermine the credibility of an institution of journalism. And it is the the most common one which is the most heavily engaged in. And that is choosing not to report certain stories and facts, even though they are of great significance.
Is anyone else doing this?
it is similar to reading financial news or watching CNBC with the mindset of reading between the lines, wondering who and why is interested in propagating such stories.
Why would you trust them? You think they would go through all that shit to give you information and work for you for a few pennies or for free? When they could be working for the rich and powerful to become one of them... all while getting your pennies?
The trust I have had in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ABC/NBC/CBS, Democratic and Republican parties has been irreparably damaged.
I've been a cord cutter for over a decade. This year I graduated to pitying people who repeat the latest front page story as naive fear-junkies. Everything is suspect. Why burn processing cycles reading stories that on their face are actually stupid with conclusions that are unsupported by verifiable facts? (http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cia-prepping-possible-cy...)
Between the Sponsored Content, Native Ads and all of the investigative journalists who (according to DNC emails) are labeled as "friends," I have no choice but to say "I quit." They are pretty lies that don't nourish!